Cofounder of Obsidian here. We're excited to announce Obsidian 1.0 is live!<p>Obsidian 1.0 introduces two big changes: a UI overhaul and an new tabbed interface. We've put a lot of care into making the app more approachable and more accessible. We've also prioritized using more native OS features for menus, windows, and many details.<p>We got our first private beta users from a comment under a HN thread about org-roam [1], and our waiting list was an innocent Google Form. Good times!<p>Our initial launch on HN was over two years ago [2], when terms like "second brain" and "tools for thought" were still in their infancy. Since then, the landscape has continued to evolve and new ideas are sprouting in the space every day. Obsidian has always embraced its "hacker" nature and thrives off its community of tinkerers. We now have over 670 plugins that push the envelope of what's possible in the app.<p>We want to continue to foster that same hacker spirit, but at the same time, we want to provide a polished product that can stand on its own. In the last several months, we've expanded the team and refocused ourselves on providing a product that's polished and easy to use.<p>We have big plans to continue making Obsidian the best and most refined thought-processing app for decades to come. Obsidian 1.0 is just the start!<p>Special credits go to Stephan Ango (@kepano) for the redesign and Liam Cain for tirelessly polishing this release.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658</a>
[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598</a>
Love love love obsidian. The tool is aesthetically pleasing, built-in vim mode surprisingly well (a few minor glitches with the cursor blinking) — but above all else, the plug-in community takes the cake.<p>Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "second brain." Previous note taking applications I've tried in the past (e.g. Zettlr, Bear) lacked the vibrant developer community that Obsidian has cultivated.<p>Hats off to the founder and the Obsidian team!<p>[0] - <a href="https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkasten-literature-notes" rel="nofollow">https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkas...</a>
Between Obsidian, Roam, Amplenote, and Reflect it has certainly been a golden age for note taking over the last few years. It's hard to remember that it was only 5 years ago that second generation note apps like Evernote, Notion and Bear were the only viable options unless you wanted a 1st gen app like OneNote or Workflowy.<p>What might be most interesting about the new set of fast moving note apps is that all seem to be built by teams of 3 or less people. Obsidian seems to have ascended to the top of the heap with a team of three and no apparent VC funding. Anyone that roots for small companies and passionate programmers should appreciate Obsidian proving that the best tools don't have to be built by the biggest teams. More the opposite.
Congratulations, and also: holy fucking shit!! no app has changed my day-to-day life to this degree in many, many years.<p>I use Obsidian every morning on my roof deck for my journal (automated with the plugin, of course) and then at my desk all day long for my daily WTF blah blah info-capturing tool.<p>Sure I wish it had more features (persist collapsed/expanded state, even in a best-effort, might-not-last-forever kind of way! build in git support because apple makes it too hard for plugin guys to do on mobile!) but the fact that it is all just "standard" markdown and image files washes away all almost my complaints.<p>I use the paid Sync plugin, too (even though it's standard files and folders; could totally do it myself! could totally just use SyncThing! etc!) so that it is on all my machines and virtual machines. Perfect for sysadmin logs of things you touch only annually, e.g. Dad's iMac.<p>To HN readers who haven't tried it: it's the millennials' VisiCalc, basically, except for words.
A few tips for those new to Obsidian:<p>- Don't rush to install a bunch of plugins. Start with the defaults, learn Obisidian and add only what you need. It is easy for some to spend more time tweaking Obsidian than actually using it.<p>- If you're a macOS user, check out the Minimal theme, which will make Obsidian feel more native. -> <a href="https://minimal.guide/Home" rel="nofollow">https://minimal.guide/Home</a><p>- When you are ready for plugins, you may want Omnisearch[1] to be one of your first.<p>I used to organize stuff into folders, now I pretty much just create a note at the vault's root level and use tagging and good semantics and use Omnisearch to pull up notes.<p>1. <a href="https://github.com/scambier/obsidian-omnisearch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/scambier/obsidian-omnisearch</a>
I was an early user of Obsidian in May 2020, and have been absolutely blown away by how fast this tiny team of 2 people was able to build such a life-changing app. Using Obsidian fundamentally changed the way I think.<p>It's also been fun to see how rapidly the plugin ecosystem has grown. The community is so friendly and creative.<p>I have contributed a few things of my own, notably Minimal theme[0]. When I was asked to help lead the new UI for 1.0 it was a dream come true. I am really proud of how it turned out. We were able to make a lot of the app feel more native across platforms. I'm also excited to see what new themes pop up that use the new theme system which is much simpler and more flexible.<p>1.0 is an amazing milestone, and one you don't get to celebrate often. It's so much fun to see all the love in the comments.<p>[0]: <a href="https://minimal.guide" rel="nofollow">https://minimal.guide</a>
Obsidian is my favorite app, and my only missing feature is to enable better PDF support, similar to Logseq.<p>Logseq allows me to embed the PDFs inside the app and annotate them with all the bells and whistles enabled by markdown. Area highlights, math notation, all these things are not possible with classical PDF readers, and I think Obsidian would fit well here.
Love Obsidian. My main problem with it and similar markdown apps for notes is the way they store images and attachments. I find it very confusing to maintain multiple files per note and IMO the only app that nailed it is FSNotes[1] using the textbundle[2] format (with a custom implementation for encrypted notes too). I think it's elegant and future-proof.<p>But FSNotes is for the Apple ecosystem only and I can't tie myself to a single platform for something so important (I don't need another artificial reason to make OS switching so difficult).<p>I hope the textbundle feature request[3] gets some love soon. It would be great for Excalidraw files integration too[4].<p>[1] <a href="https://fsnot.es/" rel="nofollow">https://fsnot.es/</a>
[2] <a href="http://textbundle.org/" rel="nofollow">http://textbundle.org/</a>
[3] <a href="https://forum.obsidian.md/t/textbundle-support/3585" rel="nofollow">https://forum.obsidian.md/t/textbundle-support/3585</a>
[4] <a href="https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin</a>
Have been using Obsidian for organizing and running a tabletop RPG session for a while and and it is fantastic. I have whole folders of monsters, encounters, player backstory, world notes, and state blocks. Being able to drop them inline for ‘today’s session’ and then viewing it all together has been monumentally useful.<p>It’s also been good enough to replace Sublime + directory for my day to day development note taking. Its fast and just gets out of the way for writing and organizing - which is exactly what I want in a note taking app.
Congratulations! Starting to use Obsidian has made me much more productive at work. I never forget anything now, since Obsidian is my second brain. I use it for logging, tasks, study, spaced repetition (with Dataview and tags), learning new things and even blogging.<p>I sync manually using Git, using a Work-repo, a Home-repo, and a Shared repo that is a Git submodule of both Work and Home. I never edit notes on my phone, but I can read them on GitHub or Dropbox. I have more than 1200 notes in Work ∪ Shared, and some more in Home.<p>Some of my essential plugins are: Dataview (Like inline SQL for querying notes), Natural Language Dates (entering current date easily), Minimal theme (just looks better).<p>Some builtin stuff that I love: Frontmatter metadata, Mermaid charts (graphviz-ish), inline \LaTeX rendering, daily notes and syntax highlighting.
For anyone thinking that this "home page" is light on explanation, the <i>actual</i> home page is likely better for those who are new to this (excellent) product:<p><a href="https://obsidian.md" rel="nofollow">https://obsidian.md</a>
I have no idea what Obsidian is and their frontpage does nothing to tell me what it is.<p>All I can see is that it's been updated, but WTF is it?<p>edit: ahh, it wasn't the frontpage...
I installed Obsidian and did some initial testing, but two things completely threw me off:<p>1) Basic synchronization is a paid feature and you cannot (or at least could not) set up a private synchronization server.<p>2) Synchronization depends on the cloud. I simply cannot trust all important information of my life going to an unspecified location in the cloud for synchronization, even if it promises end-to-end encryption. The fact that the source is closed and it is a small company aggravates that immensely.<p>Which is why I'm using Trilium now. It's a bit more limited (no app) but has a web clipper extension and it is open source, so I can do changes or quick fixes if needed. I also synchronize with my own server, running behind a VPN.<p>For mobile, I'm pulling all tabs using adb and a couple of scripts, and it has been working nicely for my use case (mostly archival/planning).
Congrats on hitting 1.0! Props to the team for adding digraph support to published vaults early on.<p>Anyone can check out my public Obsidian vault here: <a href="https://notes.recursion.is" rel="nofollow">https://notes.recursion.is</a><p>And I made an introduction video for it here:
<a href="https://youtu.be/tTFK-V3hdAw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tTFK-V3hdAw</a>
Hi Erica and congrats to you and the whole team! Super excited for a 1.0 release. I hope this means we get some official API docs soon. ;)<p>In terms of your journey, what do you think the main challenges were? I'm sure a big one is adoption and another performance but curious to hear what the team's thoughts are.<p>For me personally, the community has been absolutely stellar. Lots of folks always willing to help out. Just a year and a half ago, I found dataview and after avoiding frontend for nearly a decade, I've finally begun my journey with React. The entire experience was kickstarted by my finding Obsidian and trying to contribute to plugins that I loved. A special thanks to everyone from the community: shabegom, joethei, koala, blacksmithgu, pseudometa, Eleanor, Fevol, aquaman, metruzan, and many many others whose name I'm blanking on right now but I promise I'm grateful!
Among other awesome plugins, there's obsidian-wielder [1] for using Clojure (via sci).<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/victorb/obsidian-wielder" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/victorb/obsidian-wielder</a>
I see this as "Joplin, just not nearly as free (speech or beer)." Why would I pay monthly for sync and have no control, when I can already sync to my own s3 buckets and only pay for AWS storage and transfer?<p>Is there a compelling reason to switch from Joplin to Obsidian? Honest question.
Love the respect for privacy that Obsidian brings. No tackers and no shit. It's beautiful to find such a great app with a respect for something so important.
Huge fan; Obsidian is at the center of my personal system for PKM / TFT (note-taking, todos, journaling, devnotes, bookmarks, sketches... ). It's like an OS for .md files. It's so powerful and extensible, via eg WYSIWYG editor, Excalidraw integ, Readwise Reader integ, home for my Remarkable2 notes and drawings, etc. Amazing community too.
I have nothing to add to the heap of praise here, apart from my own thank-you. I'm a fairly new user but exploring the tool gives me the childlike glee akin to coming home from school and continuing a video game or project.
I was using Obsidian pretty hard for a year but I eventually switched over to <a href="https://www.ticktick.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ticktick.com/</a><p>It turns out I prefer having lists as my primary interface, especially for the mobile side (insert text and press enter, instead of typing "- [x] item").<p>It does 3 things (all integrated together): lists, notes, and calendar. The "Notes" section is like a mini obsidian mixed in with the lists, but you can also add markdown notes to each individual 'task'. So I use it like a personal knowledge-base, not just for expendable lists.<p>The calendar integration is also nice. I've combined Obsidian, gCal, and Omnitasks/Todoist into one app.<p>That said, for pure note taking Obsidian was the best. Especially for coding/work.
Congratulations on the 1.0. Just installed it and everything works great.<p>Obsidian has been a core part of how I go about my day to day ever since I installed it a few months ago. Using it in conjunction with my Dropbox account has been a smooth operation too.<p>I tell everybody about it at this point. Keep up the good work.
The app experience is totally ruined now. It's insanity for me to see 1Password 7 to 8 transition level of nonsense again.<p>Block-quotes are no longer quotes, just text with a strip of light on the left with no option to make it more obvious.<p>File name is now H1 header at the top of the file with no option to hide it.<p>Performance sucks so much, and that is on an eight-core x64 mobile CPU running Windows 10 Pro. Everything is sluggish 15fps mess. Shame.<p>Markdown links are ruined too. The previous UI was light years ahead, using different colors for the text and the link. Now the color is the same.<p>Most extensions don't care and don't render properly. Fckn great, man.<p>The tabs are by far the only good thing in the update. Everything else is a downgrade.
I've been using Obsidian since last year, and it soon became my primary tool for taking notes, keeping up with projects, proposals, etc...To keep business and personal life separate, I utilize two separate vaults, which is really simple. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to create their so-called second brain.
Looks like the help docs [1] are an example of what Obsidian looks like when published?<p>I found it strange that what I would consider to be the help site's table of contents (on the left) is in alphabetical order, somewhat like an index, instead of being arranged in a logical outline like a book's table of contents.<p>Meanwhile, what's labelled as the "table of contents" on the right is actually just the headings in the current page.<p>[1] <a href="https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Index" rel="nofollow">https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Index</a>
I just can't keep up with all the note taking apps; I sometimes go through a Phase of "I need a means to organize my things", but invariably just go back to a folder with text documents. The note taking apps are fine, but they will either have a web/electron based interface that is too indirect, or their data storage is not open (like text documents), or they try and upsell you cloud storage / sync, or they offer no benefit over a plain text editor (with global search).
Love obsidian, thank you for building!<p>My only dream is blocked by Apple. Would to have the ability to switch the default notes client in iOS, similar to how you can with browsers and email.
The sync pricing is frustrating. You can choose between free (single device only), and surprisingly expensive for a low-volume file sync mechanism.<p>Of course I understand there are good reasons for it. It is so difficult to find a paying customer for anything, that it's impractical to price below a cost threshold. LTV > CAC.<p>Would love to see something like “$200 to enable the a peer-to-peer sync engine forever”, i.e. no ongoing hosting costs for Obsidian.
This tool is so expensive. I want to use it but for this to be an alternative to Notion you'd have to pay for Sync and Publish, which would come to $24/month. That is very pricey for many people.
Thank you for Obsidian! I really like it and I'm learning Zettelkasten with it! As a consequence I am leanrning things more deeply.<p>The only thing I miss is a more acessible price for brazilians in Obsidian Sync (1 USD ≈ 5.50 BRL, that is too much). I know I can sync it using other tools, but I feel the native tool would be the best of the scenarios).
Congratulations on the launch! I downloaded Obsidian for the first time last night and spent all morning customising it, so the timing for me couldn't be better.<p>Quick note, on the website the download button for MacOS is delegating to "<a href="https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/download/v0.15.9/Obsidian-0.15.9-universal.dmg" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/dow...</a>" despite the button saying "Version 1.0.0", I believe it should be "<a href="https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/download/v1.0.0/Obsidian-1.0.0-universal.dmg" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/dow...</a>" instead?
If I use obsidian to take personal work notes, do I need a commercial license? Right now I use a giant append-only markdown file but I'm curious about the linking.
Congrats! Been following Obsidian here and there and I'm finally giving it a spin.<p>Side Note: If you folks would like a portable version for Windows (non-installable version that can run from a cloud folder, portable drive, etc), let me know. PortableApps.com has a few Electron-based apps now.
Demo and HN reaction make this promising congratulation on the launch. The only thing that will drag me any my years of OneNote notes is Grammarly integration and support for using with Remarkable. For the last five years I have been on the look out for free form writing tool that I can use with any E-Ink tablet writers. My pesky OneNote + surface sort of works but code highlighting and typo corrections always drive me nuts. I have tried notion, OneNote and recently a direct graph note taking competitor anytype.io to no avail.
Just converted all my completely random unsaved (30+ permanently open) note taking tabs/windows from sublime into an obsidian document structure, synced to android with syncthing. Took about 10mins total. Love it.<p>If anyone's interested ... two very (very) minor things I've noticed in my 20mins of usage (apologies if these are solved - I haven't got to the literature yet):<p>- same-same appearance of sub-list markers (I prefer alternative icons for tiered lists)<p>- Headline / filename special characters conundrum. Many of my docs had headlines in them that weren't suitable as filenames, I found myself repeating the non-filesafe headline on the first line. I wonder if there's some kind of front-matter setup that could resolve this?
Out of curiosity, can you share more on your pricing strategy? What is actually paying for your development? It looks like you give away a lot for free, do you do that cause the server costs are nil without e.g. sync?<p>Can you share the rough number of users in each tier/service?
Love the 1.0 on iPad! The tabbed interface (and weird history behavior when working with splits) was one of my biggest hiccups with the old version. The new one interface has smoother animations and behaves better. Wish you added multiple window support on iPad, but that's super minor.<p>I know that Obsidian has roots as "database is a directory of markdown files", but I will say that the last remaining feature request I have for the app is about versioning: I want to browse my vault at a point in time, not look at old versions of files. Specifically, I want to delete a file, then do a text search in 6 months, find a match in the deleted file, and browse my notebook at the date before I deleted the file.
Out of curiosity, why is Obsidian closed source? It doesn't look like you charge for anything, and with the size and type of following you have, you'd probably see some really cool stuff get sent your way.
I recently switched <i>back</i> to Obsidian <i>(from nothing)</i>. It doesn't solve everything the way i want, but it's the closest. The biggest thing for me is it's very open to plugin development, so my goal is to heavily modify it myself (and a few community plugins) to do what i want in the short term. Saves me from forever yakshaving my home-rolled solution lol.<p>Also the fact that i can easily use syncing with E2E encryption <i>(though not sure if it's been reviewed yet.. would be nice)</i> is awesome.
I've been using this for a few months and it's great. The wiki-like connections, vim mode, and several different ways to look at how things relate make it my go to for notes
Congrats! Been using the insider builds, so I've used the overhauled UI for quite a while. What I've been waiting for is the mobile app, and as expected you folks delivered. Hands down the best note-taking experience in mobile platforms, and it's not even close.<p>I'm still using Logseq as my PKMS app by default, but seeing how active you've been with pushing genuinely new (and useful) changes, I might just reconsider this.
I stopped using it due to the fact that it is like Vim for Microsoft Word, it takes more time to use, has less features than the original and hurts your sanity
Obsidian is a tool like no other: a "second brain" that you have complete ownership over. Being able to link together knowledge or concepts across contexts is a superpower. A recent example: the AlphaTensor paper comes out with a new approach to optimizing matrix multiplication algorithms: as I jot down some thoughts, can I seamlessly refresh my memory on every paper or talk or offhand ML finding I've come across on "matrix multiplication", "deep RL", "Strassen’s algorithm", etc.?<p>I use it for every aspect of knowledge management, building a personal wiki, personal logging and writing, task tracking, reading notes, academic paper notes+metadata, planning, and more. Other tools offer similar features, but they all seem to have tradeoffs on data ownership or offline support or lack of extensibility or non-standard text format (i.e. not markdown). I wrote last year in another HN post that it's remarkable that the Obsidian team has delivered a superior product in a _very_ crowded note-taking / PKM space, and 18 months later it remains the single tool that I couldn't imagine abandoning.
I'll have to give 1.0 a try, I installed Obsidian last time it came up on HN but unfortunately it won't run on my phone.<p>E: Dang. Same thing. Installs and launches, but when I go to create a vault I get "Failed to create vault. Unable to create directory, unknown reason." Both on internal storage and the SD card.<p>I granted it permissions upon install, so who knows. My phone might just be too old and busted.
Is there a note taking app/knowledge database that auto-magically tags + adds metadata to everything and is searchable?<p>I've tried many different tools in the past and I find I can't stay organized. I don't want to sit there linking stuff together, I just want to jot down a quick note or thought and have it link up with enough stuff that I can find it easily later.<p>I was thinking of making a personal tool based on some kind of database like datalog. Where I can dump a bunch of facts and have the computer automatically tag and link items.<p>I'd love something that knows I'm currently in a meeting with X,Y,Z persons while I took a note and automatically links it with them and any keywords etc from my note to other notes and topics.<p>I saw a demo for outreach? I think that did some cool stuff for sales, listening to phone calls and making notes linking people etc. I want that but for _everything_ haha. Have it link in with JIRA, slack, GitHub, Gmail etc. One stop shop.
I love Obsidian because it puts everything in just a file that I can see live on my filesystem. Craft, Bear, Notion are all good tools, but I get uneasy knowing that so much of my knowledge base and documentation lives on their backend somewhere.<p>I happily pay for Obsidian Sync even though I could use iCloud or OneDrive to sync my vaults because I want to support them
Am I mistaken or are all the note taking systems optimized for isolated usage? Some allow some form of communication by publishing notes but the last time I checked, there was no public pool of notes that were open for discovery.<p>I would love to have a system where my notes are automatically linked with notes from other users who have the same ideas or goals.
I might give it another go. I tried switching from Evernote a while ago but was a bit underwhelmed. I don't really see the value of bidirectional links yet, the search feature in Evernote has been working fine for me. But will try it out again, and maybe give it a week this time.<p>EDIT: The Sync feature is far too expensive. I pay about $22/year for Evernote: <a href="https://evernote.com/compare-plans" rel="nofollow">https://evernote.com/compare-plans</a>
Syncing is a core feature, and I'm not going to use any notetaking tool if it can't sync my notes between mobile and desktop. I don't really want to switch to a tool that will cost $96/year. I'd be comfortable paying up to $25/year.<p>Even better if there was a self-hosted database that I could run on my own server, or a way sync via Dropbox or Google Drive (that also works on mobile.) Maybe iCloud is an option.
Questions for users - if we work in an environment where we cannot install applications (and no this wont be approved) are we able to use this still, or is it only going to be viable for a "personal" machine.<p>I ask as i can think of several times ive been stuck with just a work laptop or similar and it would suck to not at least have a browser version or something.<p>Thanks
I've been wanting to play with your software for a while, and I happened to have a moment this time, so I loaded it on my Android phone.<p>If the bracket notation is a commonality among note taking systems like this one, then I may just be too much of an outsider to jump in easily to this app. But I, as someone who was interested in using the app enough to press every button I could see, couldn't figure out how to link notes until I exhausted my possibilities in the app, looked at your Web page, scrolled through the comments here and finally found someone linking to the page I needed. I knew that linking is the main feature, but I couldn't find it.<p>Filtering out dumb users like me may be a design decision, but if not, I would encourage something upon app installation that offers to tell new users how to link notes, even if it's just a link to a YouTube video ("new to Obsidian? Watch this 1 (2?) minute video to get you started.")
What I want from a note taking app:<p>* Takes pages from my browser<p>* Uses github to sync across platforms<p>* Has offline reading on mobile<p>* Tagging and a todo list for triaging notes.<p>Haven't found one yet.
For people who use a personal notes tool like obsidian, how would you deal with notes that turned to work related later?
I always find myself end up with half-finished notes in multiple different places. First versions in personal notebook and refined ones in company's google doc/etc.
Thanks
1.0 broke making the cursor not blinking in Vim mode. Is it possible to fix it back?<p>Specifically this CSS snippet stopped working:<p><a href="https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-stop-the-blinking-cursor-in-vim-mode/9431/10" rel="nofollow">https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-stop-the-blinking-cursor-...</a>
I found that in my role I was task switching into different domains and have a lot of trouble remembering the details a various deep dives and at first tried OneNote, Evernote, etc but had issues with each, mostly the concern that the storage formats were incompatible and so I would be held hostage by whichever app I chose.<p>I went searching for something I could store in the cloud and locally and could understand markdown. Lo and behold Obsidian kept coming up in recommendations. I've been using it for 3 months now and I love that it uses simple filesystem heirarchies to store the .md files. I can put it into a git repo and fit it neatly into my existing workflow. It is basically the perfect note taking app for me. Well done and keep up the good work!
I love Obsidian's editor - it hides markup when you're not editing but shows you when your cursor is over some text. The fact that you can just drag an image into a note is great and something terminal note apps will never be able to do.<p>And then there's [[hypertext]]. Love it!
I used Obsidian for about 2 years. Unfortunately I found that I only ever used it as a database to store information. I didn't often use it productively, and when I did it felt like something was off. As to not appear like a product I will not share what I use as my main program instead, but will say it is much more "press check box, and you're done." I did move everything over to Org Mode using a convenient conversion script I found on GitHub, and find using Org Mode to be much snappier than Obsidian, which is one of the key things that led me away from Obsidian.
Obsidian has made so much of my PhD process easier and smoother, and I've increasingly depended on it in real life as well. Amazing team but absolutely stellar community of passionate and kind people. Bravo!
Woohoo! Kudos for building what is a pretty awesome application!<p>Use mine for Zettelkasten style knowledge tracking, Zotero and Vim plugins are awesome ... I guess I should donate some money because I am pretty happy with Obsidian!
Congrats!!<p>Honestly the beta version was already stable and feature rich enough to consider it it a v1 :)<p>If one of the key features is a new UI, can I advise to put a couple screenshots in the announcement?<p>Will this be retrocompatible with plugins on v.15?
Congratulations for the achievement! Been using obsidian for over a year as my daily driver. Found the graph view quite gimmicky for my workflow but the rest of the features are super polished.
>It means we're proud enough to drop the word "beta".<p>Huge milestone. Congratulations! I will be trying out the flatpak on my Linux build and keeping an eye out for your progress.
Well done!
Ive been a paying customer (off their Sync feature, the rest is free) for more than one year. I love this software and use it everyday. Congrats and keep up the great work :)
Newbie question:<p>Which tool would be the best for assembling distinct documents from a large of pre-written paragraphs/sentences. I frequently need to write a set of docs with extensive cross-referencing, however, (a) the exported output docs needs to have referenced paras/sentences 'inlined' into the final version, and, (b) 'locking' the exported output docs should lock all the paras used by that doc while leaving the remaining ones editable.<p>Thanks.
Awesome, I've been waiting for proper tab support.<p>A tip that people on HN will probably enjoy: add --disable-smooth-scrolling to your shortcut to make scrolling more responsive.
Also can try this All-In-One but still lightweight app: <a href="https://mdsilo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mdsilo.com/</a>
I use Obsidian for a very simple use case compared to everything it can do. Synced markdown across all platforms, simple lists in named files, share those files to other software to perform actions against those lists.<p>For this use case it is the absolute best of the bunch. I've used a lot of these sorts of complex second brain things and I've settled on a very minimal approach wherein Obsidian was the clear 'best in show' for what I needed.
I use Bear notes and have used notion, coda, notable and others in the past. Help me understand why I should switch. Is there something that’ll get me hooked?
Not having used any of the graph based note taking/knowledge tools like Obsidian, logseq, Athens Research or Roam -- I was wondering if anybody has tried them for collaborative knowledge management?<p>Obsidian seems to be single user based, Athens is "collaborative" and "for startup teams". But does anybody actually have any experience using a graph based knowledge tool for your teams knowledge management?
I started using Obsidian Sync and I’m quite impressed. The sync between my Windows laptop and my iPhone is almost real-time. Conflicts are handled nicely by merging changes from both sides and the user is notified about it. And of course, everything is still stored in a local folder of Markdown files. Would be interesting if someone from Obsidian could share some details on the implementation.
I'm sorry if I sound stupid, but this is an honest question.<p>What would I use Obsidian for? Is it just for writing stuff down? And if so; how would I access these notes on something like my phone? I tend to just write down things and store attachments in "Saved Messages" on Telegram. That way I can access it all via my phone, home computer, work computer or the web.<p>How would Obsidian be better?
Is there a way to toggle / collapse bullet list? I find that it’s one of the most useful features when organizing my thought as it allows me to explore one nested branch very deeply while still keeping the doc easy to deal with. You can hide the unnecessary details when you want to keep think a higher level.
I recently started using Reflect[^1] and I rather like it, especially after trying the task management feature, which is now in beta.<p>My usage of Reflect has made me very curious about other apps that do similar things (e.g. Obsidian)<p>Has anyone here tried Obsidian _and_ Reflect?<p>[^1]: <a href="https://reflect.app/" rel="nofollow">https://reflect.app/</a>
Wohoo! I've been using Obsidian for 2+ years and even wrote some personal plugins [0] to automatically backup my vault on GH, import all my Pocket.com highlights, etc. Highly recommend it :)<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/fanahova/fana-os" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fanahova/fana-os</a>
Good news. I wonder if it can deal with deeply nested folders and get metadata from standard Markdown frontmatter already?<p>(I have a fair amount of content already in plain Markdown, as you can see here: <a href="https://taoofmac.com/static/graph" rel="nofollow">https://taoofmac.com/static/graph</a>)
Can I store the data on my local windows machine on a google drive i.e in a folder that is synced to Google drive.<p>I ask because there was one other note taking app that couldn't cope with the semantics of Google drive's write activity (been a while and i've forgotten which one) and consequently I lost data
I love Obsidian and has been using it for about two years and I am a paying supporter. But at least on MacOS obsidian-1.0.0 is a forced update that automatically happens when you start (restart) obsidian. It broke my v0.15.9 setup and made it almost unusable. Really NOT nice at all.
I love Obsidian so much. It's the only note-taking/knowledge base type app that I've stuck with. It's so flexible, performant and nice looking. Everything I care to document or commit to long-term memory goes in my Obsidian vault and I push it all up to a private git repo.
I appreciate what Obsidian is and how it works, and congrats on 1.0!<p>On the personal side, I dislike aesthetics and wouldn't ever use it 'cause of Electron, tho. I'm spoiled by native note-taking apps like Bear and Noteplan on macOS which have much nicer UX and UI, especially on mobile.
I found some threads mentioning sync so just my 5 cents - it is possible to create a vault on iCloud drive and thus having a content synced across devices. I am not sure if the Sync feature provides more functionality, but I personally would not need anything else.
Obsidian is among the best note-taking apps out there today. Backlinks make it more useful than other note taking apps, and this helps me uncover connections even if I don’t use the graph feature that much.<p>One plugin I am wish will arrive soon is Google Calendar integration.
This is so exciting, congrats!<p>Obsidian has completely changed my notes workflow over the past year. It's so lightweight, and has just the right amount of structure for me. Thank you for building it! The new interface looks fantastic.<p>Does this include an update to the iOS app?
For anyone wanting to try something similar but with a better graph view, check Tangent:
<a href="http://tangentnotes.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tangentnotes.com/</a><p>Also more performant and less plugin-dependent.
I moved from Google Docs to Obsidian in a process of de-Googling my life. With Obsidian, my notes are only stored on my machine and my storage syncing service. Files are just text, so my notes can outlive Obsidian itself.
Fun! I just moved over to Obsidian because of the simplicity. I love that I can use the local folder just as easily as the full app.<p>Tip for anyone wondering: if you need encryption, gocryptfs works great.<p>Now I just need to wait for Flathub to update…
The description sounds interesting! Can anyone comment on how this compares to or integrates with Anki? I've found SRS to be really powerful, but I'd like to integrate it more with note-taking.
After years of trying around multiple markdown tools like Standard Notes, and loads of open source I finally landed on Obsidian. Still trying to wrap my head around it but it seems like such a powerful tool
I need to put [ and ] in text. Please don’t make the text inside them blue unless it’s actually a link.<p>Also I really want the file name to be independent of the heading, like it used to be.<p>Also it is great and I gave you my money.
I used obsidian for a long time. But the problem for me was that it's "granular" enough. The basic "atom" is a markdown file. There's nothing wrong with that of course. But I wanted to have the freedom of simply writing something, without worrying in which "file" it would go. After that I started working on my own "roam-like" app, I took inspirations from Spacemacs(The SPC key concent) and use HTML as the "final form" of things. if you want to look at it's at: <a href="https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook</a>
I just realised Obsidian is built by the same folks who built Dynalist wow. I enjoyed using Dynalist for a while (before discovering Notion) and even built a chrome extension for it (Dynalist Allstar).
Looks nice and based on my initial quick tests seems rather lean, and yet it is cross platform. Can I ask what the tech stack looks like? development language(s)? Cross platform UI library?
Not sure if this is for me. I use one large text file where I put all my notes. Organizing everything into folders and files with formatting seems to be just too high friction.
> over two years ago [2], when terms like "second brain" ... were still in their infancy.<p>Funny, that was the exact title of my personal wiki that I started in 2006 or so.
I tried Obsidian and just couldn’t use it.<p>After using Roam I can never go backwards to plain text, I need a block based editor with infinite nesting. I’ve recently switched to Tana.
I use Sublime Text as a simple note taking app (love the speed and tabs). Didn't know about Obsidian and was exited to try it after reading about it today, but the simple fact that Obsidian loads a fraction of a second slower than Sublime, may be a deal breaker for me.<p>Here I recorded a comparison <a href="https://imgur.com/a/6QzpwYw" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/6QzpwYw</a><p>Will give it a chance, looks so good and has several interesting features that I may didn't know that I needed. Kudos to the Obsidian team.
The sync feature is kinda overpriced. What about a family subscription and collaboration/sharing features?<p>Also, from what I can see, there is no 2FA, am I wrong?..
For those just getting started with personal knowledge management and/or Obsidian, check out my starter kit: <a href="https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit" rel="nofollow">https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit</a><p>It's both a pre-configured knowledge base (with a structure, plugins, templates, etc) and a detailed user guide with theory and practical how-to guides.<p>It's not free but might be a good investment if you want to spare time when diving in.
Anyone have any thoughts on Craft[1] and how it compares to Obsidian as a note-taking tool?
My primary work machine is a Mac (I also have an iPad and iPhone). I'm looking primarily for a note-taking app with support for images. I don't necessarily need the more "glamourous" publishing type features that craft has.<p>Things I like about the app:<p>* (Generally) good keyboard support<p>* Syncing (but I'm paying for it)<p>* Good native apps on mobile<p>Things that aren't so good<p>* Editing code blocks<p>[1] <a href="https://www.craft.do/" rel="nofollow">https://www.craft.do/</a>
Honestly surprised by how much support this is getting, despite the devs' absurd views on open source[1]. Why anyone would choose this instead of Logseq is beyond me.<p>[1]: <a href="https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/219" rel="nofollow">https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/2...</a>
For an explanation of what changed see this forum discussion [0]. I’m not a fan of the tab metaphor in general but the implementation could’ve been worse.<p>[0]: <a href="https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v1-0-0/44873" rel="nofollow">https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v1-0-0/44873</a>
hey! Don't have anything serious to add, but just want to say thanks! Obsidian is a great tool and I use it every day.<p>I don't even use half the features/capabilities but as a simple markdown editor w/ links it's fantastic.
Tried Obsidian, wanted to save a note that had an url in the title, can't do that, not able to have special characters in titles(am on Linux btw where there's little limitations on what chars you can use in file names).<p>Delete, good bye, auf wiedersehen!
I spend a lot of time in vscode. So I started keeping notes in vscode. I push my notes to github to access them from my phone. I change file extensions from .md to .old.md to hide old notes. What am I really missing here?!
Is it me or am I the only one who took a good 3 mins to figure what this app is for ?<p>Sorry I don't want to sound disrespectul but I didn't found an quick and easy parsable description. If I would show this my parents, I wouldn't be sure if they could guess. :/<p>"Obsidian is a powerful and extensible knowledge base" ?????