Ya, I’ve been thinking about this kind of many-to-many relational diagramming for a while, in part due to process documentation responsibilities at work. Being able to not just link two things, but also describe that link itself, can be very helpful for better documenting things all around – and understanding, and sharing that understanding.
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This may have been mentioned before, but in case it hasn’t…
So is Obsidian justa Wiki?
There is a difference between a tool and a methodology.
A wiki is a tool enabling you to write and connect notes via `[[Wiki links]].
Obsidian is a tool enabling you to write and connect notes via `[[Wiki links]].
So looking at them as tools, yes. Obsidian can be used to build and manage a personal wiki, pretty easily.
However…
What you do with those notes is what changes things.
Methodologies such as Zettelkasten, LYT, and many others can be used with a variety of tools. Then it becomes a matter of how well the tool supports the methodology.
Obsidian arguably better supports these methodologies than a simple personal wiki tool. But you can implement these note taking frameworks within something like TiddlyWiki if you wanted to.
Just remember to separate the two and think of them as independent but complementary things.
Decide what methodology you want to use, then select the tool that best supports it.
If you are undecided on a methodology then you should select a tool that supports many methodologies quite well.
That describes Obsidian.
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And that the very least being able to name the link is the most basic description i can think of that allows to make sense as to why the connection exists and what it means. Without semantic the tool is like a website, links in all direction that look nice on a graph but can easily become a maze of noise, hard to navigate and hard to search (content search will always yield long lists of maching notes).
If links are the selling point of the software, the first class citizen experience, they need to be rich, useful, searchable, exploited to the full extend possible… That’s what the current internet misses and why it tries to add attributes that can express how a link relates to the resource being pointed.
As pointed above the ability to consider block level granularity (in a way that can’t break) and link block to block, note to block or block to note, or even tasks to block (supported in some competitors) could add a lot in my opinion.
Do not underestimate the power of Preview Pane in Page Preview (Core Plugin). And the theme ITS is the best I came across so far.
- You can open multiple Preview Windows, even open Youtube video (copy and paste embed code) to quickly preview
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So, so, so much this. Thanks for posting it; I want to print it out and keep it on my wall. I am moving to Obsidian from Evernote because it’s more stable, more reliable, uses storage I control, has cool features like easy inter-note links and transclusion, and is highly flexible. Markdown is not on the list of reasons. Give me rich text and a rich text editor. If you want to save the file in Markdown, or enhanced markdown, or some other human-comprehensible, open format, great! I do like the notion that if Obsidian dies, or if I want to move to another system, all of my data will just transfer.
Except, I mean, of course, it won’t. The text will be there, but the formatting? Will every other reader parse callouts successfully? How about Dataview? Or the various other plugins I use to get my notes to look like I want, and to replicate the functionality of Evernote?
And it is far from easier to write in Markdown than in a genuine WYSIWYG editor. I’m constantly having to look up how to do things, or downloading a plugin, in order to get my notes to look and act how I want. And in many cases, it’s to get Obsidian to do things that are just standard in any word processor. And don’t tell me that Live Preview is just as good as an actual WYSIWYG editor. It helps, certainly, but it’s just not in the same class.
I can already hear the responses: “Maybe Obsidian’s not for you then?” Well, maybe it’s not. But then, what is? What other app allows such easy linking of thoughts and ideas (down to the paragraph level!), uses a non-proprietary data format (like, I dunno, RTF?), and allows automatic syncing between all my devices using any means I like?
There’s no such thing. MacJournal does some of this, and if it had a decent iOS app, I might still be using it. I gave up on Evernote when it started eating my data. An actual word processor just leaves a lot of unrelated and difficult-to-organize files laying around.
I want to be clear that I’m not bitching. I’m not saying, “Obsidian should abandon (or at least hide) Markdown!” I mean, would I like that? Sure, but Obsidian is working for me, and I’m slowly building up the practices, plugins, and Shortcuts to make it work as I’d like. But it’s a long, slow process, and I’m spending more time learning about Obsidian than I am writing.
I’m just sick of hearing “Markdown is better than a word processor! It lets you focus on your writing, and not on formatting!” Because that’s not how it works for me. If the formatting looks wrong, that’s distracting. And I have to stop writing and go figure out how to make it look and work how I’d like.
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Well, it is. Many in the Legal World or in many other areas remember Word Perfect. It was an awesome word processor that the Legal folks and others became dependent on. Then one day, unannounced, it was gone. There are still Disks filled with Word Perfect docs than are inaccessible. Plain text files should be around for a long long time. Markdown makes plain text easier to manipulate and look at (no HTML code). Combine markdown (or HTML) with CSS (Consolidated Style Sheets) and you can do a LOT, and still have plain text if needed for future compatibility. I have lots of friends that have their theises only on paper because the digital originals can not be read any of today’s programs. If they were done in plain text/markdown/CSS they would still be readable.
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I could still read any version of a Word Perfect doc. Assuming I had a disk reader that could read the disk. In fact, the latest stable release of Word Perfect was in 2021.
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You’re not arguing that Markdown is better than rich text, you’re arguing that open formats are better than proprietary ones. And I agree! But the solution to that is to have an open-standard rich text format. RTF is one. Another could be developed. Or use plain text, but hide all the formatting and give me a standard word processing interface, so that I don’t see the formatting codes at all, and don’t need to.
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I avoid the use of all such syntax and plugins. I dislike reading files with symbols I need to parse before parsing normal written language. I don’t need the overhead and I’m well aware of the risks you describe, even though I know I am capable of amending that syntax if I ever needed to.
This is absolutely true. Visible syntax is a distraction unless it has been overlearned and used to the point of happening automatically. This many be true for programmers, but not for the general public. There’s a reason for the existence of a version of WYSIWYG in some markdown editors and why reading modes interpret and strip out all the otherwise visible formatting.
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Quite a few programs do this better than Obsidian.
Even Word has one way links.
Quite a number use open source database formats. They’re not proprietary.
But they are databases, not files.
Even Obsidian can’t manage that; mobile OSs in particular are very tied down.
Most databases have limited syncing options and most users of such programs want access from the web, so it’s not usually a development priority.
If you don’t have an account (or don’t sign in to it), Upnote is just a local database. You would then be free to sync that across devices however you wish. And it does have mobile apps.
I feel your pain, although I come at it from a slightly different direction.
I gradually moved away from using Obsidian regularly for my notes because there was always a lot of work involved in making it work as I wanted, it’s a poor fit for my muscle memory, interoperability with rich text programs is poor, and workflows are subject to change at any update.
I feel my angle differs from yours in that most of my initial writing has always been in txt. That works as designed by markdown editors and can also be read and edited in word processors. But Obsidian makes txt a second class citizen, links and graph etc wise, and converting txt to md means that word processors won’t open them (except for Word with the Writage add-on); deathau’s plugin helps but does not solve the friction. My next stage always involves colour; that can be added via HTML (as Highlightr does) or CSS but isn’t native markdown: nothing works as easily for this as a rich text editor.
In my case, I concluded that was true. I’m pretty good at using it, but it’s never a comfortable fit. I feel it is a best fit for programmers and/or students. Keybindings work as in code editors (true for traditional two pane markdown editors, but not the case for WYSIWYG editors or PKM programs). There’s a multitude of features and options and plugins to play with, so for the right users it’s a fun activity in and of itself.
I always stayed up-to-date with PKM competitors. As you observed interoperability or rich text functionality is problematic in this space. Wikilinks, which aren’t actually markdown anyway, are now common in many programs including those which are rich text rather than markdown. I don’t believe that there is a good rich text option yet, but some of the newer programs may offer this - but they all use databases and probably don’t tick all your boxes. I moved partly in this direction, I have to use docx etc, so I need workflows which make that as smooth as possible.
But for most of my writing, I have moved back towards an Obsidian variant markdown editor, which offers a much better writing workflow and feature set (for me, quite probably not for you) and an increased use of text oriented programs that function with a much wider range of formats. I’ve been files based for quite a while now, but I’m certainly keeping an eye on the database programs and weighing up how I could utilise them to improve my workflow.
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Hiding the formatting is what CSS is supposed to be all about. And HTML is much uglier than markdown :)
Most markdown processors including Obsidian have a mode that “hides” the bare markdown file.
Barry
And Markdown is much uglier than rich text. And I shouldn’t have to learn CSS to make my notes look like notes instead of code.
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I originally thought that, but even WordStar files can be recovered. The main problem would be extracting them from the antique hardware that they’d have to be on. Could even be CP/M.
And WordStar predates most of the personal computer age (WordPerfect became market leader sometime in the mid 1980s) so I doubted there would be many people with theses written with it. Though in that era it was quite common for theses to be written on university mainframes, and they probably would be hard to squeeze the data from now. And Atari and Amiga programs might be a struggle, but again ought to be possible.
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Fascinating Story. If CP/M had been adopted by IBM, computing would have been much different.
Wordstar (and the dot commands) for its day was very popular. I had an Osborne 2 aka a portable sewing machine.
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iirc WordStar files were plaintext. But not entirely ASCII.
Markdown has much in common with LaTeX. Just create a file using proper Latex commands and you are good to go. Beautiful documents from a Microsoft Notepad file.
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True, but not quite what I was referring to. I mean that, for instance, if my quote marks are straight instead of curly, or if I can’t use tabs to format paragraphs, it drives me up a wall. There are a bunch of things like this, things that word processors handle without thinking, but which require significant finagling to implement in Obsidian.