Regarding your visual editor experience, be sure your Obsidian settings use both "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode", which combination makes for fantastic WYSIWYG note-taking.

As for multi-user, the Relay plugin is amazing.

There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines.

Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.

Not defending some of the not that amazing Obsidian courses or similar out there, but it sounds like you already have a lot of pre-existing knowledge and an approach that works for you, so as I said in the post, keep using that!

You know about markdown syntax, about #tags, about [[linking]], but a lot of people who first hear of Obsidian don't.

Part of what inspired my post was to help people who don't need the extra complexity of a bottom-up note system, Zettelkasten, ever-green notes, atomic notes or other areas of Obsidian, but also to give direction to someone wants to explore these.

For example I'm very happy with my bottom-up approach for knowledge notes, I have been using it for multiple years now and I can still find the things I need, and it doesn't feel messy or anything.

Not sure if new but every tool has its coaches and influencers. Running entire businesses off some SaaS tool. Not long ago I felt like I was swarmed with posts from Notion coaches. Obsidian no different. Repeat for every other tool out there.

Relevant skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZK8Z8hulFg

I had a similar experience - and this was with zero mark down knowledge/experience. It is just a very comfy program.

It’s interesting eh, it’s a wonderfully straightforward tool to use, but it’s scary.

My theory is that those courses aren’t selling you on how to use obsidian, but are instead selling “how do I organise knowledge and information. Oh btw we’re using obsidian”

They aren’t marketed like that, but I think that is what they’re really doing

It’s like taking a course of office organisation. I mean filing cabinets are easy right, it’s just putting labels on folders and putting them places.

Except I would absolutely be terrible at that job and would pay nearly anything to be good at it.

I've embraced radical simplicity with Obsidian.

I have an inbox folder that is where all new docs go. Then daily notes. That's it. I tag lines with #thething #theotherthing.

Tagging acts as the organization, lowers the barrier of entry and keeps things discoverable.

> Like I know you can add plugins, tweak css to your liking, and basically turn obsidian into an all-encompassing monstrosity to match your particular software kink, but the 80/20 of it all is really pretty basic to anybody who has ever used a personal computer.

Probably org-mode envy ;-)

(To be clear, it's the same story - using simple plain org-mode is easy, but some people love to customize like crazy)

>The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world

/proceeds to write 10 steps

Tools like obsidian are text files, that you can increasingly connect and organize in different ways.

It's easy to start with the detail when users are looking for their story to match the software.

How people can grow into it can be different, sometimes it's good to just start, and then learn about implementing the other concepts.

> Add a #tag for better organization.

Honestly, you kind of lose me here. I want to spend exactly zero time organizing things like tags. Literally zero.

Honestly with LLMs you don't need an Obsidian anymore. You can just use neovim or emacs. Every feature you need, like search, or linking can be done via plugins or shell commands.

For folks interested, Obsidian also has a free sync option that just uses your cloud drive, you just have to set it up yourself.

It's pretty simple. Just get Google Drive Desktop to mount your Google Drive to your filesystem, then point obsidian to work within that mounted directory.

Joplin looks great, and is open source, but it appears to have one problem: the primary data store is SQLite, not files, and in this AI infected era having plain text files on the local filesystem is really important.

So if I am correct the "cloud drive as the storage" option is syncing with a the local SQLite db and to get local files one would need to be syncing the local db with both the cloud drive and the local filesystem.

With Obsidian I sync from local files direct to a cloud drive.

Does joplin cloud have a merge algorithm for multi-user edits or does it just punt and do conflict files?

Isn't it also missing nested folders? I tried Joplin, but no nested folders was a huge disappointment for me.

For me, Obsidian started to silently and (seemingly) randomly replace the whole content of a note with the content of another random note. This has been happening to other people as well for some time now [1].

What makes this issue really terrifying is its silent nature. I only noticed one of the notes having had its content replaced while casually exploring my library.

It took me an hour to restore the original content, which I only managed to do thanks to a (very obscure) macOS feature that keeps versions of most text files. It is only possible to see these versions when opening the file (in this case, the note) in TextEdit. I haven't found another place in the UI where these versions are exposed, which is yet another interesting thing I did not know about the OS I have been using for years now. I wonder why Apple does not expose this feature in the right click menu in Finder, for example.

In any case, as much as I love Obsidian I have been rarely and cautiously using it since this happened. File safety is the bare minimum requirement, so I cannot recommend Obsidian as it is right now.

[1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/content-of-a-note-totally-replac...

Almost all ways to sync Obsidian has a problem with multiple people editing the same file.

Although there are some tools for better collaboration, but if it's just for one particular file it might be a bit "overkill".

But to give them a mention: Relay and Screen Garden are two community plugins that do it, HedgeDoc is a different app but it is a collaborative markdown editor, then the core team of Obsidian is also working on the multiplayer update.

Dropping things in daily notes is my main use of obsidian too. I spent a lot of time exploring community plugins, organising my setup etc, everything but actually writing notes. When I reduced to the absolute basics, I just managed to write and retrieve notes consistently. In the end I need just: rendering, throwing in images easily, daily notes, and text search. The point is to minimise the effort/time to actually write a note. If I have to think about how to categorise my notes, what tags to put etc, I just end up not writing notes.

Moreover, with a basic setup, for the most part obsidian can be replaced by almost any text/markdown editor, so no lock in, nor security risks from using community plugins.

Apart from notetaking I also use obsidian to create slide presentations, which is probably one of the laziest ways to make presentations that look good enough.

What self-hosted sync approach are you using?

I’m thinking of doing the same thing, as I want everything on my home NAS and not iCloud/Google Drive

I also give the agent an mcp with combined FTS and vector based semantic search using sqlite-vec so it can search up things quickly.

I recommend using syncthing. It's very easy to self host but I actually use a SaaS for it: syncding.com. It gets me 100gb to 1tb of disk in which I can create folders and keep them synced with my 2 laptops, my phone, my server etc... I have an Obsidian vault with Meld Encrypt to encrypt some files, a keepassxc file I share across my devices and my todo.txt

It's simple to setup and will work forever instead of paying for different providers that might shut down or increase their prices.

At $4 per month, I don’t consider it expensive at all to have this whole category of problem solved for me. Mobile app, desktop, laptop synced flawlessly and quickly.

This might not work for everyone who reads this, but I put all my Obsidian files on my iCloud drive. Since they're just markdown, they sync up on all my (Apple) devices and I can see the notes on my Macbook, iPad and iPhone at any time. I'm already paying for iCloud storage anyway for other stuff so it's very cost effective for me. (Obviously this wouldn't work if you're not in the walled garden of Apple)

I know it's probably no help on iOS, but for people on android or no mobile requirement, just push and pull to a git repo. You can probably even set up a cron or something to sync regularly.

I just use github and have a nightly cron job to sync the vault repo

I personally just use git, there's even a plugin that automates pushing and pulling changes. Does that not cover your use case?

Have you tried the Import plugin in Obsidian? I used it the other day, and it seemed to do a good job with OneNote, though my ON notebooks are just simple text and images. I believe it automates an export from ON to HTML and then converts that to MD.

Once they're in MD format, you can always get your favorite agent to do more formatting and organization, which was one of the big reasons I moved away from ON.

https://obsidian.md/help/import/onenote

I had issues with images coming across not being correctly linked. Might be working better now.

You don't have to use _all_ the features. I don't.

Logseq, it's geared to daily notes and visualizing everything in a graph, and support KaTeX. It also supports org-mode. If it fits your workflow I'd recommend it. Personally I feel like Obsidian does too many things and none too well.

Vimwiki?

pandoc?

Bear

I mean, that kinda was the point of my post, you really don't have to use all of the features!

No person does actually.

It's the opposite for me, I use Obsidian on desktop but hate it on mobile, so I use Markor there.

Just curious, since I think they have the same focus, have you also tested SilverBullet?

https://silverbullet.md/

The first time I got into Emacs and vim I also spent way too much time on the editor customization spiral. Then in 2015 I just picked and settled on Spacemacs while strictly limiting how much time I spend on customizing my editor. I’ve had three jobs since then and I brought basically the same editor config to all three jobs.

Thank you for the kind words and that the post actually helped! It's exactly the kind of inspiration I wanted to achieve.

> It's difficult to keep personal / business / team separate

I have one vault for personal, one for work. I open each one in a different window. They are both separate and easy to switch between.

I have been having a similar need for some sheets data in Obsidian, I was gonna look into writing a plugin to represent a JSON file as a Obsidian Base, but didn't get to that yet.

Have you tried some of the plugins that allow you to open CSV / TSV files within Obsidian?

The Relay plugin is fantastic for multiplayer and/or nesting a "work" vault in a parent "personal" vault.

What stops you from running git at the root level and doing a "git commit --all "notes" & git push" command?

I second your suggestion to have a decent Spreadsheet tool in Obsidian.

I would also love better Git support, especially syncing content from my Android phone to a GitHub repository, so faar it never worked well, I tried a few solutions here but wasn't satisfied with any of them.

For me, it's a Wolfram Engine plugin. My notes now scatter between Obsidian vault and Wolfram notebooks. It would be nice if I can unify them.

But I understand that my use case is niche and I certainly don't want the Obsidian officially bloats itself into such feature creating.

What do you mean by "multiple vaults hardly work"?

If it helps Obsidian has a newish command called "Change vault..." that switches vaults without opening a new window.

I think separate vaults being in different window is probably intentional behavior to clearly show that they're separate vaults, not something that needs to be fixed.

If you want to sync only some of the things from a single vault and not other things, can't you just use different top-level folders? Have a "to-sync" folder and a "do-not-sync" folder, and only sync the to-sync one. I'm not sure if that's possible using Obsidian's paid sync, but it should be possible with other sync options.

Relay plugin lets you manage permissions at a granular folder level instead of all-or-nothing vault level.

The main problem I have with using different Vaults at the same time is that they all share the same taskbar icon. For syncing you can sync your files however you want.

I mostly use one Vault for my setup, then things like linking and search work the best: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault

I wouldn't call it unsuable though? I have one separate vault for just journaling and that works well.

The Raycast Obsidian plugin makes vaults pretty easy for me. Cmd+Space > "Open Vault" and then pick which one you want. You'll still have a window per vault but it makes it really fast to get to where you want.