Post #3638277

Replies (1)

• @iris@neuromatch.social 2026-07-06 23:57

  @perlman@indieweb.social I don't think most people need it, as any consistent form of record-keeping becomes useful as it grows, but I have found it powerfully useful. I currently keep one vault for my research, one for German, and one for personal things, and they get varying amounts of use depending mainly on how much I use other systems, including pen and paper. I have files named methodically and deliberately planned hierarchical directory structures, as I had done with files before Obsidian, so the main things I've found useful are (1) everything in markdown, in one place, in one (tabbed) viewer, and (2) as much linking between files as I find useful (including linking to attachments). Point (1) keeps things clean and simple -- I don't get the visual overwhelm of a rich text editor with 17 icons splayed across a giant ribbon at the top, and the interface is exactly how I set it up, and won't change in an update unless I change it. I can hide anything I don't want and make near-infinite adjustments to the interface until I find it calming and unobtrusive. This massively increases my likelihood of using it. Point (2) means I can link between templates, aggregate lists, etc. and individual smaller files, drop in a PDF, reference an external directory full of audio files, and so on, so it's very hard to find anything that can't be fit at least moderately comfortably into the Obsidian system. This has made my tracking of German bureaucracy hells such as university travel authorization much easier. I have lists, they link to forms/websites/templates, my templates can be copied to new files with checkboxes and places to attach forms, etc. I could use dataview to automate some of the aggregate stuff like the list of exact dates and destinations for international travel in the time window the university needs me to report every time I request a new travel approval, but so far I just have a plain old table with links to each of the individual markdown files with all of the details of each trip. I can add another layer of complexity if and when I want it, without having to import or export or rearrange everything I've accumulated so far. I've played with more complex plugins for language learning, but ultimately I found it more trouble than it was worth, so I'm sticking to something simpler for now. The process of writing things down and deciding how to organize them inherently involves some consolidation of information, which is already most of what I wanted out of any system. I also like being able to write up long lists (e.g. chapter-by-chapter topics) and slowly generate the individual files linking back to each item on the list, which I use as a kind of progress bar. This would work on paper too, and it's approximately the system I adopted from on paper. The only differences are I won't have to worry about not being able to find or have on hand any particular physical notebook, and I can search the aggregate material. With regex, which has occasionally been very nice. The place where I find Obsidian doesn't have a good substitute on paper is mainly when working with code. There's really nice formatting with syntax recognition in fenced code blocks, and both copy-paste and links are functional in a way I can't get on paper. There's also something to be said for versioning. I keep date created and date modified at the top of each document in metadata, at minimum. I can access entries by date if I need to, which is occasionally very nice to be able to do. I think version control with git is more powerful and usually more appropriate, but not everything I do lives in git, so this is a kind of middle ground. I've had a plugin of my own in the works for a while, a feature request from a friend for a period tracker. The open source nature of plugins means I can build off of much smarter people's nice calendar interfaces and data aggregating functionality, and the local-first nature of Obsidian means she trusts her data in the plugin, but not in any app or cloud-based solution. I got distracted and haven't finished it yet, but the fact that I'm capable of this is another thing I really like. I haven't needed any functionality yet that no one else has built, but if I hit a wall somewhere, I can just go build it myself. That's really important to me. I've gotten so tired of walled gardens and rug-pulling. I lost years worth of notes once when Evernote corrupted my local files during an update, although I eventually recovered them. Even if I move away from Obsidian at some point, I can keep my notes. I'm sure this was more than you wanted, but I hope it's at least useful!

  Open ##3852497