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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
Special credits go to Stephan Ango (@kepano) for the redesign and Liam Cain for tirelessly polishing this release.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598
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.
Hats off to the founder and the Obsidian team!
[0] - https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkas...
That said Obsidian and Logseq are interoperable since they both run on a local folder of plain text files. Meaning you can switch over to Logseq for your outlining needs and use Obsidian for everything else.
(slightly biased since I helped on Obsidian 1.0, but I am a lover of all plain text tools)
I wanted to use logseq (I felt good about "Obsidian, but open source") but when I tried to find some text in a page I was writing it didn't work. I'm a total logseq noob but as far as I could tell I needed to install an extension/plugin to search through the page, which was weird. Plus, the plugin didn't work for me (I typed in the thing to search for, clicked "go find it" and nothing happened, I think - it's been a while and I didn't use it much).
I kinda boggled my mind that logseq wouldn't have a 'Find' feature for finding text in the page I'm editing.
Please tell me that I missed something obvious so that I can feel dumb for missing that obvious thing but happy that I can take another look at logseq :)
Enter Logseq, and after a 20 minute learning curve, ideas just fly off of my fingertips. I reach for it daily. Can't recommend Logseq enough.
"Time taken after creation to search for and open this note again"
This can show how useful your notes are and which are most useful.
While I think it's an interesting metric, it wouldn't capture the utility of my notes for me (emphasis on "for me", since everyone's probably different when it comes to notes).
Often, the act of writing the note helps better commit what I'm writing to memory. At a super rough estimate I'd say that 80% of the utility of note-taking is the act of producing the note itself, and only 20% of the utility is being able to refer back to specific facts.
I found it very useful to organize research papers like this.
If that's what it takes to make someones system effective so be it.
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well and all that.
What's a better alternative in your opinion?
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.
I’m using Org mode with emacs just so I can have cross references into PDFs and emails in my notes.
The fact runs super fast on any computer makes me wonder why did they downgrade into the current version which is absolute crap
That's why I'm working on creating https://visible.page because I want a tool that isn't just for markdown organizational obsessives, but rather for organizing and visualizing ALL kinds of information the way regular people do. None of these tools handle things like dates, locations, numbers, and other data of various types well. With Visible if you add a date or a location to some content, that content is now accessible on a calendar and a map side by side with all the associated text and media you added to it as well. No worrying about what table column it goes into or what metadata row or plugin you need to render it well. Just add the location, and add a map view, boom done. Want more than one date associated with some content? Just add it, you don't have to figure out to add another "Date type" metadata section the way you do in Notion for example.
It is not offline first. It is not file based. It is not catered to the needs you see so often here on Hacker News but don't actually hear when talking to regular people who just want to plan a trip together or keep track of an apartment/house hunt without spreading information across a half-dozen tools.
Does no one else get frustrated that even Google can't show you a map of your week's upcoming event locations? That when you are doing research online you have to tediously copy and paste each address one-by-one into Google Maps and then copy an embed link for that into another tool, and even then the addresses are isolated with no relevant information like photos or notes attachable to them?
We have so many amazing internet powers that are simply unavailable in any of these note taking tools. I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring. I want to see my information the way it was meant to be seen and in a way that my parents can understand it as well.
That is the intention. I don't want excitement with my note-taking, I want plain, boring, open-standards that will survive the test of time.
Chances are high that your startup will: 1) Fail 2) Get acquired and gets shut down 3) Aggressively monetize leading to poor UI/UX (i.e. Evernote)
The whole advantage of Obsidian is that it relies on an open format, and makes it easy to transition to a new platform
I want a system that I know 20 years from now I can still use (or can transition to a better one).
Maybe I'm in the minority but I've tried at least 10 different note taking apps over the last decade, and none of them have staying power because they all fall into the three issues I outlined above.
This describes me perfectly. I use obsidian to 'feel productive' but not actually do any work.
I'm also frustrated by the typical notes apps inability to store data in a way that it's convenient to retrieve. One example: I'd like to be able to just tag some string (think a UUID or other opaque thing) as a "blob" and then be able to click the "blob" just once to copy it to the clipboard, to be put into other tools.
Your app looks much more up my alley and I'll be signing up.
I had onenote once, realized my handwriting was shit, and never tried to hand write notes again.
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/
On the desktop the git extension does the same thing, but is automatic. Conflict resolution is as detailed and I want.
Yeah lots of non-opensource components in that flow, but it works well and is perfectly happy when I am totally offline.
The iOS client does not allow choosing the folder. You can specify either icloud sync or not, but you cannot select a folder.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/s4kw0k/set_fold...
because I have a thoughts been killing me in the back of my head:
Need a family version but self hosted + cloud which allows for an auto push of notes, pics and calander to your own thing..
basically a family planner.
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.
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.
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.
To HN readers who haven't tried it: it's the millennials' VisiCalc, basically, except for words.
You just enable it in the "Options → Core plugins" pane in the settings.
- 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.
- If you're a macOS user, check out the Minimal theme, which will make Obsidian feel more native. -> https://minimal.guide/Home
- When you are ready for plugins, you may want Omnisearch[1] to be one of your first.
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.
1. https://github.com/scambier/obsidian-omnisearch
I wrote Minimal theme. BTW, I led the redesign of Obsidian 1.0 so I brought a lot of those ideas into the core app. We've also made a big push around using more native components. I'm still improving Minimal, but hopefully the "out of the box" experience feels a lot more native.
Wow! It’s a shame it’s not highlighted in release notes! Great news, and thank you for your work!
This should be universal advice for everything.
Also, you can change the cursor by going to Style Settings > Minimal Advanced Options
I mean. This is what v1.0 is for.
It's also been fun to see how rapidly the plugin ecosystem has grown. The community is so friendly and creative.
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.
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.
[0]: https://minimal.guide
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.
I can mix a bit of Zettelkasten here, some daily notes there, and some 'old-fashioned' folder structures for projects to my heart's content.
Obsidian is less opinionated on the txt file format and folders too, so I consider it more future-proof.
- No export to PDF. There's a community plugin, but it's not great. The workaround is to export to HTML and print to PDF, but there's no real iOS option there.
- Managing images and other attachments are a mess. Using the "upload an asset" method gives it a random filename that if the app fails to save the page correctly, you either dig through the folder structure to find the random file name to link manually or you re-"upload an asset" creating a duplicate with a new random name. This could be alleviated if it was more stable or with a file picker with thumbnails to find previously "uploaded" files
- Pages fail to save correctly more than I'd like. I have no idea what the cause is, but it happens frequently on every platform I've tried.
- Page title changes don't propagate correctly sometimes, causing orphaned pages where it's a coin flip whether the page with the older title holds the content or the new one, leaving the other empty.
- Each page needs a unique title. I like how Notion allows multiple pages with the same title and are organized based on which parent page they're embedded or created in. I imagine Notion randomizes the actual file name similar to how Logseq already does for "uploaded" assets, so this could be alleviated if Logseq did the same. It could potentially alleviate the previously mentioned issue and it seems to me like the most logical method of handling this particular type of non-directory organizational structure.
- Their E2EE sync service is not yet ready, so no real mobile sync outside of iCloud (I use DropBox).
- Their documentation is terrible. There's tons of undocumented features, like admonitions, and the existing documentation is horribly structured, which is ironic since the documentation uses Logseq itself and the whole point of the app is to structure content.
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Side note, since we're on the topic of personal knowledge bases and note taking, my personal dream app is Obsidian with Asciidoc support instead of Markdown. A lot of the extra features they add to markdown are part of the Asciidoc standard, like admonitions and document-to-document cross-references, it would potentially make the backend easier and the content more portable with page attributes like specifying an attachment directory, and some features are simply more flexible/powerful like tables.
I still use AsciiDoc to create PDF documents that require more flexibility, like table spans and nested ordered lists (Obsidian's markdown uses just 1,2,... instead of changing to e.g., a,b,... for a nested level). My current workflow is typing it up in VS Code, converting to DocBook with asciidoctor, then converting that to a LaTeX PDF using pandoc. The result is a professional, academic-like PDF, but the workflow is a bit of a hassle and I'd prefer to do all of my document typing in Obsidian since it's so nice to use.
If I had more free time outside of my CS master's program and thesis work, I'd learn JS/TS to attempt to create a community extension that added AsciiDoc support to it and support for exporting to HTML and DocBook (and basic PDF since I'm pretty sure Obsidian uses an HTML-based PDF export anyway because CSS themes affect the look of the export), even if I still needed to use pandoc to convert to a more professional LaTeX PDF. I'm sure the VS Code AsciiDoc extension as reference and asciidoctor.js could get one pretty far.
Sorry for the rant. I've just been itching for a AsciiDoc-based note-taking/PKB for a long time.
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).
I hope the textbundle feature request[3] gets some love soon. It would be great for Excalidraw files integration too[4].
[1] https://fsnot.es/ [2] http://textbundle.org/ [3] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/textbundle-support/3585 [4] https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin
Another great feature that Bear and FSNotes share is the ability to insert hierarchy tags like #parent/child For some reason, I find it perfect to organize notes without too much thinking.
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.