First Look at Obsidian - A Next Generation Note Taking Tool - Effective Remote Work

[@BobLucore]

Solid video. One additional point I would make is that all the features that you showed will be in the free version of Obsidian, I think. This makes it seem like a safer choice than Roam, to me. I am still tottering back and forth between TiddlyWiki (Stroll) and Obsidian. But this is a very compelling piece of software. The fact that it isn't opensource is a little bit of a negative. However, the fact that the information is stored, note-by-note, in individual markdown files on my computer, makes me willing to overlook the fact that it isn't opensource. So far I love your channel.

[@EffectiveCo]

Ah yes! I kinda misspoke when I said there would be a paid version. All of these features are in the free, personal use version. Sync & end to end encryption are a paid service. You can also acquire a license for commercial use. Glad you love the channel and thanks for the feedback!

[@timbushell8640]

All the data is "yours" rather than hosted somewhere else - and as it also works off-line the open source to me seems a little less important as the .md files are accessible to other general software again added to the reduction in risk

[@duncanwhyyou611]

Nice comment. I’m also going back and forth between stroll (+tiddlymap) and obsidian. the former has some degree of control over the map (e.g. initializing a tag as a tiddler also creates a node on the map, and an edge labelled “tagged with”). Such a feature isn’t on Obsidian, not yet at least

[@kirk0831]

OMG!!!! It can use vim mode. Completely sold!!

[@EffectiveCo]

Yes! It's not perfect yet but it works pretty well. I'm a vim user myself and I liked playing with this!

[@kirk0831]

@@EffectiveCo definately not perfect, when you press j, it only move one line. But it is beta version, it should go better on the way. But this mouse-free idea is great.

[@EffectiveCo]

Definitely some work to be done yet but I’m excited about the mouseless possibility too!

[@jpcampbell]

Woh. I’m sold if it gets iOS.

[@kosmos721]

Wonderful presentation. Calm, measured, nicely paced and useful. Really appreciate it.

[@EffectiveCo]

Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

[@go0ot]

Thanks. Obsidian will be the flagship of this emerging genre of apps, due to many underlying features of the dev team themselves. There are others like org-roam and Athens but they're different. I hope there will be a FOSS equivalent of Obsidian. The numerous possible open files (panes) feature is also very useful. The real power is in the interconnectivity as utilized by the Backlinking and Tags features. It would be great to have more videos on an in-depth analysis of Backlinking and Tags features on a sample set of files and folders. I think there will be great interest in that and it will become a classic video. Very nice channel content, soothing voice plus great insight into major features with precise analyses. Thanks again. 👌

[@EffectiveCo]

I think FOSS isn’t as big of a deal with Obsidian because they’re building on top of basic file formats. Thanks for the suggestions on the videos and the kind words! I will definitely look at doing those types of videos :)

[@Rez-N-8]

Best overview of Obsidian that I’ve seen to date - nice job!

[@EffectiveCo]

Thanks so much John!

[@paperheartzz]

The *random note* feature has converted me. Thank you for the thorough review with excellent audio!

[@EffectiveCo]

I think it's great! Super easy way to surface old notes to clean up. And I'm really glad you liked it and found the audio quality to be good! :)

[@hongkongcenterguam803]

Wow. This demo has tempted me to consider seeing how I can work in Obsidian instead of DEVONthink now.

[@EffectiveCo]

Both are powerful softwares -- if you have use of the document functions in DEVONthink (OCR, etc.) it may be worth sticking there. Or... use both!

[@kirk0831]

@@EffectiveCo I just see the DEVONthink forum, a lot of people actually requested this function on DT3. It is what Ithink , too. Our brains are wired similarly. :)

[@AwakendGainz]

hey just found out about your channel - Yout content looks great. Your audio is on point and well paced and I'm exciting to see what you can bring to the table man!

[@EffectiveCo]

Thanks so much for the kind words! If there are any topics you'd like to hear from me on, I'd love to know!

[@AwakendGainz]

@@EffectiveCo hmmmm what about digital note taking with a pen, in school my grades went up pretty considerable when I started writting them digitally. But one note is a bit of a mess with organizing them. If you could easily add them into obsidian I think that would be cool!

[@mamun4343]

Excellent video ! Obsidian could be used in conjunction with Notion. For example, I made an zettelkasten like structure inside Notion. Then I exported all the files in Markdown format, imported it into Obsidian vault and that enabled me to visualize all the relation between my zettelkasten notes graphically which is amazing.

[@EffectiveCo]

Nice point!

[@emil2000]

There's an free open source alternative: Joplin. Which is really nice has WebDAV sync, has end to end encryption for syncing etc. It's cross platform too.

[@EffectiveCo]

Joplin is nice -- last time I checked it out it didn't have the knowledge graph capabilities Obsidian has. It's a great alternative if you're looking for something like Evernote though. Thanks for the suggestion!

[@niklaspivic]

What a lovely presentation! Thank you so much for it. I'd just like to note that I experienced the same bug as far as the Audio Recorder was concerned. I logged a bug report here - forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidan-crashes-when-using-audio-recorder/2693/2?u=pivic - and the solution is to uninstall Obsidian, download the latest installer, then install from it. Worked a charm for myself. Their forum is excellent. The people in the forum are really knowledgeable and kind.

[@EffectiveCo]

Yes you’re right! This was fixed in a later version. I think this was recorded on 0.6 or something of the sort.

[@undisclosedmusic4969]

With applications like this, I basically only ask one question to decide whether to move on: is it open source and can my data be transparently stored and encrypted end-to-end? If not, IDGAF about plugins or anything else.

[@EffectiveCo]

Sounds like you have a process that works for you. Obsidian is bring-your-own-data-storage right now. So E2EE is up to you. I don't think open source is as big of a concern myself, but if that's important to you there are lots of options!

[@TheAshishdc]

Cool video, thanks! Comparing with Roam, can you run queries? I use the Daily Notes as my main page and the daily To Dos appear thee through queries. Do you know if its possible to do that in Obsidian?

[@EffectiveCo]

No, not at this time. Queries may be possible in the future via a plugin API, but it also may be a limitation of using markdown files vs. a database to store the data.

[@marcosfialhodecarvalho7259]

Hi! I'm trying to use Obsidian with Zettelkasten method. I'm learning both and I don't know how I can use Obsidian, how to configure, how is the workflow of Zettelkasten using Obsidian as a repository. Do you have any material / suggestions about that?

[@EffectiveCo]

Honestly, my best advice is don't worry about the specifics. Just start taking notes! I have a few videos on my channel about taking literature/book notes and crafting permanent notes. Those might be helpful. But the best way to start is just to start :D

[@JamesHumberstone]

Nice video, thanks. I'm trying to choose between Obsidian and Zettlr. Have you considered Zettlr and if you have, how do they compare?

[@EffectiveCo]

I took a look at Zettlr here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fpfSeIVqdr6Ha7s It's a great software if you're all in on FOSS or Zettelkasten, but it felt a little bit restrictive to me.

[@2904cc]

I would love this, but with a typora-style editor (instead of the 2-column layout) ...

[@EffectiveCo]

That’s on their roadmap, but they have a number of items to knock out first.

[@2904cc]

Do you happen to have a link to that info?

@@2904cc this the link to the roadmap trello.com/b/Psqfqp7I/obsidian-roadmap

[@xlzhsteven]

Personally I think Notion has better user experience! You can both type in mark down as well as using their intuitive helper (using /)! You always see the preview of the markdown also! It can also be easily migrated to github since the text is stored in markdown format!

[@EffectiveCo]

Very true! Notion doesn't have much for contextualizing information like Obsidian does via backlinks/unlinked references but Notion is a key player in the personal knowledge management space if you don't need that.

[@richasingh7595]

I like notion's ease of use with the / but its online and it opens PDFs that are in my local system on servers and quite slow, so is there any app like notion but offline?

[@djmihal90]

Great work on this video - great intro to Obsidian. I've been using Obsidian for about a week but this was very helpful for understanding functionality I'm not taking advantage of yet. One question - how did you allow your nodes to be different sizes based on their size (seen at 7:09). From what I can tell, I can only change the universal size of notes. Thanks!

[@EffectiveCo]

Thanks for the compliment! Nodes get bigger with the number of notes linking to them. So the big nodes in the graph have lots of incoming links.

[@Deviseeeer]

thanks for the video. I'm wondering how to make obsidian and zotero work together nicely.

[@EffectiveCo]

You’re welcome! I would have to do some research on this because I don’t currently use Zotero.

[@Bill-Piano]

The viper would love this

[@VitorGuerreiroVideos]

Nice stuff! How does it compare to Zettlr? What's your opinion on on vs the other?

[@EffectiveCo]

I like it better than Zettlr personally, but only because it works better for me and the way my brain works.

[@gmikhail94]

Thank you for the video. Quick and clear.

[@EffectiveCo]

Glad you liked it!

[@w-asabi2784]

hey how can you have the split screen automatically on for any note u click? I am looking for it can you tell me?

[@EffectiveCo]

CMD/CTRL+Click a link -- that should open it in a new pane!

[@1Road2Success]

I’m curious, do the tags show up the same way as pages in the overview graph?

[@ankitaishwarya5586]

No, they don't.

[@1Road2Success]

Ankit Aishwarya Thank you for letting me know

[@ankitaishwarya5586]

@@1Road2Success Np ^__^

[@EffectiveCo]

You could request that as a feature on forum.obsidian.md -- I think it has a use case for sure!

[@daddyodevil8686]

Can you please make a comparison with zettlr ?

[@EffectiveCo]

I made a bit of a comparison here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fpfSeIVqdr6Ha7s Not an exact comparison but I'd be happy to take a look at doing that.

[@asystematec]

Really cool video. 👍

[@EffectiveCo]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@aminali3004]

I can't seem to have the transclusion working. Do I need to do anything with the setting?

[@EffectiveCo]

There is a setting for it I believe, and in Edit mode, you can get the preview on hover when you hold the CMD or CTRL key I believe.

[@chinarut]

great to hear a fellow tiddler creator :)

[@EffectiveCo]

TW is a great software - I’ve actually moved to Obsidian for my personal notes but am considering using TW for a public site.

[@RahulYadav-nk6wp]

Does it have query based automation and mind maps?

[@EffectiveCo]

It does not but they may be possible via plugins once the API is available.

[@KadayiPolokov]

Good stuff dude.

[@EffectiveCo]

Appreciate it!

[@desireco]

Thank you, really useful overview

[@EffectiveCo]

Thanks so much!

[@CarlosEduardo-mo9pp]

Uauuu... awesome review! Thank you.

[@EffectiveCo]

Thanks a bunch!

[@wilsont1010]

Can it support colored text?

[@EffectiveCo]

If you're looking to change color on text like a rich-text editor (think Word or Pages) -- no, not at this time I'm afraid.

[@gmikhail94]

It is developed on chromium, so the color can be changed via html hacks. For example: Red text I think in the future this will be done using third-party plugins because the Markdown does not support colored text by design.

[@redforrori]

I really like Obsidian. Now I can't decide if I should get an iPad Pro or a Surface Pro 7 because Obsidian is that useful. *sigh*

[@EffectiveCo]

Obsidian is useful, but get the device you find fits your overall workflow better.

[@DettolObsessed]

Does it support a white theme? I find black themes visually uncomfortable.

[@EffectiveCo]

Yes it does - there’s one bundled by default and a number of community themes too.

[@llihak]

Good informational video, thanks. It would’ve been even better without the annoying and completely unnecessary “music” that seems to plague so many videos on KZbin.

[@EffectiveCo]

That’s fair feedback. Something we’ve been experimenting with as a new channel. We’ll take that into consideration!

[@DF430]

@@EffectiveCo I think the music was a great addition tbh :)

[@NishantGauravIITKGP]

Just use notion. Its a one stop app for note taking and anything and everything you will ever need to do around that.

[@EffectiveCo]

I say if that works for you, go for it. Obsidian and Notion are just two options that can accomplish many of the same goals.