So a friend of mine recommended Obsidian ages ago and I looked at it but thought I was happy using Joplin (another text-based note tool) which I still think is a great app. Took a brief look at it and thought it was just too complicated…
Then recently, I went down a youtube rabbit hole watching videos of how people use Obsidian… OMG 🤯
Now I have 2x Vaults, one for work and one personal. Dataview, templater, quickadd, periodic notes have just changed everything. Now I have documents for each person at work with their basic info and then when I make a meeting, I can just tag them which then updates a dataview table that shows what meetings I’ve been in with them.
Tasks allows me to just create a bunch of todos in random notes and then I can create a table to show all my undone tasks.
I mean, why did I wait so long? I’ve been using it for about 10 days now and it’s been such a game changer. Sorry Joplin.
Dude I had the exact same journey you did. Getting your Joplin notes moved over is pretty straight forward, just prepare to lose all the links to embedded images. You need to mess with the file names or something to get the images showing again. Moving Evernote notes over was more of a pain and again, issue with image links.
You’ve tried the Excalidraw plugin yeah? That shit changed my life. I’ve never used my s-pen so much.
Welcome to the PKM end game.
I’m so annoyed with myself for not giving Excalidraw more of a try. When I first installed Obsidian it was one of the plugins I tried out, but for some reason didn’t end up using it. I had a Galaxy Note, but I never thought to install the plugin on the phone, I just assumed that it’d be a little janky.
Recently however I was looking for a cross-platform handwritten notes app that would work with my iPad w/ Apple Pencil and Galaxy Note w/ S-Pen… low and behold after trying all these other apps I remembered Excalidraw and decided to see what it was like. Holy crap, how did I miss this? Under my nose the whole time.
I know right, the extensibility of Obsidian is jaw dropping. The fact that Excalidraw does what it does and saves those mofos as a JSON! I mean 😭
The Samsung s-pen app (note or whatever its called) is much smoother for drawing but they’re not vectors and its export options are truly pathetic. If Excalidraw could posses the smooth responsiveness of that app though, man I would do something drastic… like subscribe to Obsidian Sync lol
What theme you running friend?
Yeah the fact that it saves into JSON files is ridiculous. xD
I was using Minimal for the longest time, now I’m on a modified version of Tokyo Night. I just needed the contrast to look a bit punchier.
Kinda wish that Obsidian integrated handwriting into the canvas like Logseq has done with their whiteboard… it would be so cool
I haven’t, I’ll have to check it out. I have an iPad but need to figure out a good way to sync notes without paying $10/month. (The iPad doesn’t working with Syncthing or google drive :( )
I have a separate folder in my vault called “mobile-sync” and set up Resilio Sync on my NAS + iPhone to sync just that folder. 90% of the time I’m on my phone and want to interact with my vault it’s because I want to jot down thoughts, so I use 1Writer hooked up to the sync folder to write the note, then open Resilio Sync to sync it. Due to the iOS stuff it won’t sync in the background, but the “create note -> sync it” workflow is ok for my needs.
Nice, last night I self-hosted a couchdb server and setup https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync
So far it’s working well though I had forgot to set the encryption key on one device which caused it to try and sync the encrypted version so I had a bunch of conflicts to resolve. Once that was sorted though, it’s been working well and I can sync stuff to my iPad now. We’ll see long term how it works.
Have you tried the Mobius Sync app that uses Syncthing on iOS? It seems to have been recently updated so that it can reference folders from other apps (like Obsidian). I just created this workflow a couple days ago, and it seems to be syncing correctly. Because iOS isn’t great about letting third-party apps run indefinitely in the background, I used the built-in Shortcuts app to automatically open Mobius Sync every time that I close out of Obsidian in order to always sync my notes to all my other devices.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/möbius-sync/id1539203216
I did, I couldn’t seem to get it to work. Mobius just didn’t seem to be able to connect to the obsidian app folder. Maybe I’m just doing something wrong but this would be ideal for me because I already had syncthing syncing to my NAS as well. Maybe I’ll revisit it at some point.