I have been keeping a devlog in markdown for the past couple of months, just writing daily what I did, what I ran into, and how I solved those problems, as well as interesting URLs I found. Right now I can use grep/silver searcher/github search to find things, but it’s not too hard over time to make some tools to make searching even better.
After seeing a couple of people here talk about Obsidian I took a look at it… and I’m not convinced – what will it add to my workflow? So I would like to know what people think? What is the major advantage? How did it change your life ?
I’ve moved from taking regular notes in text files to obsidian some time ago for 2 reasons:
Graphs, as Mateusz stated, is useful for exploration of links between topics, but I also use it to mock architecture (Although this might not be the best way/tool for that). It is just easier to see the connections between the services and have the notes on each service available directly without switching between tabs with the graph and a large number of different wiki pages describing each part of the system.
Ease of use, it supports vim bindings (yes I am aware of plugins doing similar things inside vim) and also makes for a good distinction between note-taking environment and the rest of the system.
Other than that, note linking is useful not only via graph view, but also when reading about a topic, you can jump to and back from linked notes without greping the dir with for specific note.
Although if you don’t need graph view or any other of the bonus features, then I’d say that $EDITOR + grep are sufficient or maybe if you want to use plugins something like nvim/nerdtree/telescope and some king of md visualizer plugin would provide you with the exact same functionality.
Thanks! For my idea, does it make the graphs by itself, based on the links between notes? Or do you do that explicitly and does this get saved in some specialised format?
Graphs are made automatically for note hyperlinks(?) [[some_note]] and for tags within note #some_tag. You can rearrange/filter the graph, but I don’t think it remembers the arrangement.
For me it was a game changer in designing data processing pipelines and machine learning models. It is easier to show dependencies to devops on the one side and to business people on the other. The other nice thing is that it is easy to explain for every team member and we can develop living docs together.
One of the nicest features of Obsidian is that you don’t have to worry about where to put a note. Ok you can put them in folders, but you don’t have to create categories and make up a structure like in Notion.
The second cool thing is that when you change the name of a file, Obsidian automatically changes the links in all the notes that lead to that file.
@Leszek, actually your initial post on execute-code is what me got to look into Obsidian in the first place. I remember you saying that it was the best thing since sliced bread (or something). Just wondering, how do you use it? Do I understand correctly it kind of makes your obsidian like a Jupyter Notebook (but without the active kernel)?
I am moving all my personal-projects’ time management stuff to obsidian .md files. So far I’ve been using Trello (since circa 2017) for that purpose and now I’m growing tired of having two apps for roughly the same thing (I kept some of my knowledge and links in Trello cards). There are plugins that turn obsidian into a kanban board but I’m keeping it simple for the time being & want to see how satisfied will I be with a minimalistic approach.
So far I’ll have one file per month:
# January 2023
## daily log
### 2023-01-01:
- hungover AF all day
(...)
### 2023-01-29:
- [x] task 1
- [x] task 2
- [ ] task 3
Apart from that my primary vault is full o all sorts of things
I also have another small vault for my veeery personal diaries which I keep inside a veracrypt container (less than 10MB of size) placed near Android partition images just for obscurity Obsidian is great for both very structured, academic data and journaling/braindumping too.
You need to write a path to python in the plugin configuration, also the code executes in your environment. It is probably possible to make it execute a separate docker with python, for example.
Almost like a Jupyter Notebook. With this plugin what I use is that each block of code is executed separately and you don’t have access to variables from other blocks of code. But I know there is a plugin that executes code just like Jupyter Notebook. I haven’t used it yet.
So, what use cases are you using this for? I can imagine to show a quick calculation (like back-of-envelope) but if you want to show anything “real” usually a 5 line example doesn’t quite work, right? So I’m wondering how you use it
Code notes are just one part of what I use (or want to use) Obsidian for. Stuff about various personal projects, notes from books, courses, workshops, podcasts, interesting links, knowledge that I want to have saved so that it doesn’t get lost - all of that I’ve saved in Notion so far (before Notion in doc files, or in paper). It’s quite poor to view it for me. Especially when you have a note that could be in several places.
Now I’m taking off with Obsidian. I want to have everything in one place. We’ll see how it comes out. So far I am satisfied, although the beginnings were not so easy. Mainly because of the mass of plug-ins, which sometimes work differently than you think.
Good question: why take notes at all? For me, there are several reasons:
The knowledge I acquire - I want to be able to return to it quickly. I don’t want to forget it.
To organize thoughts, plans, solutions, interesting curious ideas, projects
It is also used for learning, by taking notes we learn better. When we connect it with space repetition (ANKI) it’s awesome. (I regret that when I went to school I didn’t know this method).
?
×1 (Claude)
Obsidian is great for both very structured, academic data and journaling/braindumping too.