The Reddit thread has some good discussion about the feature
https://old.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1mtxh52/obsidia...
The solution I used before bases is eh... pretty hacky.
```meta-bind-js-view {memory^inputText} as title --- const toShow = context.bound.title || "TKTK"; const str = `\`\`\`meta-bind-button label: New Project Idea - ${toShow} icon: "" hidden: false class: "" tooltip: "" id: "" style: primary actions: - type: templaterCreateNote templateFile: Templates/Project.md folderPath: Project Ideas fileName: ${toShow} openNote: true \`\`\``; return engine.markdown.create(str) ```
But HN has spent the last 3 years with it's head in the sand wrt stochastic parrots so it tracks that how far we've come is not apparent
Using a base you can manage, sort and filter your files and their propreties (ex add a rating, price, or deadline proprety to your files or only show files from my movie folder where my proprety is set to [this])
The base doesn't DO anything you couldn't do by hand, it just allows you to do it faster, as you could always modify a file propreties by hand in that file, or search for it using the search features.
The propreties you add are stored in plain text on top of your markdown files The base is stored in a very readable format similar to yaml to the .base file you can see in obsidian.
Here is the generated .base file for a test Movies folder : views: - type: table name: Movies filters: and: - file.folder == "All/Movies" order: - file.name - tags - Watch Date columnSize: file.name: 167
I think there was (probably still is) a plugin that did something similar to bases that I tried before and didn’t really like conceptually.
On top of that, you can add other properties to the view, especially one like modified date, which updates every time you modify the file. This is useful for seeing which files you haven't looked at in a while. Old concepts often apply to new ones, but we sometimes forget to check back to make that connection explicit."
Maybe it's a bit harder to understand, as it's a more mushy than the usual relational database.
No, horrible job at explaining. What does it mean to turn any set of notes into a powerful database? What does it mean to "turn"? Does it mean that a file will become a database? Or does it mean that a file can be interpreted as a database? And why set of notes? If I have a single note, can I turn that into a database too? Are the records of the database files, or items in a file? What is happening when I type ![[Untitled.base]]? Is the file where I typed that a database now? Or does that text assume that the file named Untitled must be a database?
They do a horrible job at explaining it.
Like, why would I want to take advantage of this, and how? I'm with you here. I don't get it. I can stick data into SQLite and do all kinds of neat stuff. Why am I preferring a mushy database trapped inside Obsidian?
As someone who uses Sqlite for a ton of things I don't think the exietence of sqlite makes this useless.
I “could” stick data in SQLite but if I’m not then it’s quite useless to me.
You must be fun at parties. Complaining about everything, but not even bother to read the damn manual... It's explained on the third sentence on that site. Ok, to be fair, there is a big picture between those parts, and you have to follow some links for more details.
> And why set of notes?
Just curious, do you even know Obsidian? Have you ever used it? You read like someone who has no clue about this software, jump right in the middle of the manual, and then complain that you missed the tutorial.
Obsidian is a markdown-editor with knowledge base. Notes are its lifeline, and they have since nearly the beginning the option to put metadata into each note in a special section (in yaml), basically the header of the note. This metadata are now called properties. Bases is a feature building up on this metadata, offering a database-like experience for viewing and editing them in a specialized UI. The database, is the vault, the folder+subfolder containing the notes. Each note is a row in that database.
This is all explained in the documentation, if you just would read it...
Otherwise it is a bit like saying "all monads are functors" when trying to make your reader care for investing time and energy into understanding the concept of monads. The problem there of course is that explaination is circular: without the reader knowing what a monad or a functor is they can't understand the explaination.
A good explaination gives you the technically correct slogan in the beginning (for the advanced readers) and then explains the words and what you can do with such a database and why you should care. Many explainations skip the last step and leave that part as an exercise to the reader.
You can't constantly optimize your communication for the least educated recipient. Obsidian is full of technical, specialized terms. If you don't know a word, research it.
And database as a concept is common knowledge today. Everyone will have the word heard in news at least, most will have a rough understanding of its purpose. And people using obsidian are usually not the most uneducated, there have a certain level of technical expertise. Most will also know and understand the dataview-plugin.
However, it isn't exactly rocket science and if one developes such a feature it makes sense to test it with multiple realistic usecases anyways, so why not just use those to show the users how it can be used?
Unless ofc a feature is developed in mental isolation by a recluse with a niche interest in the code without thinking about the potential use at all. But then it is probably more like a extracagant hobby than a serious project that others should rely on.
> The idea is that you can store properties, or metadata about the current file, in Obsidian notes. For example, if I have a note about Decoder, I might put the name of the host and a list of episodes. For each episode that I want to take notes on, I might write down which guests were on, what date it came out, or the episode number. What Bases allows you to do is visualize a certain kind of note as a table or eventually as a Kanban view or another type of view. So, it’s like a visualization layer on top of the data that you already have. We just make it really easy to create that database from the bottom up.
> It’s kind of like a backward database because all the data is already in there. You’re just looking at it and saying, “Show me all notes that have the ‘books’ tag,” for example, or a link to “Casey.” Then, I get a table and then I have all my metadata, which I can edit. It’s quite powerful if you’re someone who enjoys tracking books that you read, or the movies that you watch, the places that you go, the articles you’ve read. You can very easily create these structures or do project management.
Sounds like a View.
https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/
I often want to answer questions like:
- When was the last time I chatted with this person - What did we talk about - Who haven't I spoken to in a while
And still after using and making changes in the GUI the query is stored in a nicely formatted and editable YAML file.
Frontmatter is not part of the original Markdown spec, but it became a standard way to add metadata to Markdown files long before Obsidian came along. I believe it started in 2008 with the introduction of Jekyll:
https://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-ha...
Frontmatter is supported by almost all SSGs and many apps like Obsidian add autocomplete and other QoL features around it.
Bases to me is exactly what you describe. A feature that provides an excellent editing environment and extensibility for Markdown files.
For example, my blog is a set of Markdown files compiled with Jekyll, that I edit in Obsidian. Now I can add a base in Obsidian that helps me see the state of different blog posts/pages, quickly sort/filter them, and edit their metadata. It helps me spend more of my time editing Markdown files, but at a higher level.
Being able to view your Markdown files as a graph or show a list of backlinks is possible because Obsidian has some JavaScript to do that. Previously one could write other views with plugins, but bases make it easier for non-technical folks to create views.
The views are described in human-readable YAML, so recreating them in another tool is possible. That's effectively what many people are doing if they're converting views from Dataview to Bases. There are already tools that automate this: https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox
The output of views can also be converted to plain Markdown tables or CSV.
If you boil it down, bases are a visualization layer that is in service of creating and editing Markdown files — and that's what Obsidian has been since the start.
If you're not interested in this feature set you can disable Bases in core plugins :)
Having a database isn’t mutually exclusive with the core functionality. You can simply not use it.
Everything more "advanced" like tables, to-do lists and multi-line code blocks aren't a part of the "standard" as it was written, but were added on top by different implementations (like CommonMark) which are now commonly-mistaken for the original Markdown.
My point being that this isn't something unique to Obsidian, pretty much everyone does it slightly differently while still calling it "Markdown".
They have several modifications of Markdown, everyone has. But not everything makes sense to implement in a flavour of Markdown. YAML is for structured data significant better than a freeform-format, especially when you're in the phase of building the foundation of a new feature-family.
The complain is valid, Markdown is for documents, free form, free flow, structured data are a very different use case, and while YAML is better for the job, it's still a different language with different smell.
But Obsidian is a tool for managing knowledge, always has been; it's not just a plain Markdown-editor. All those features which are going beyond simple flavoured text, have always been part of it's Core-Mission, just not materialized yet.
Valuable features such as this make working with markdown files much better. It's overall a huge plus for working with Obsidian. It does not change the content of the markdown files themselves, so there's no lock-in or other potentials long-term problems. It allows me to move further away from Notion, which is a great thing, and I hope to see them be able to fully replace Notion Databases in the future.
An obsidian base is primarily defined as a code block in an existing markdown file. That code block defines a series of queries (filters, really) that produce a result set of markdown file names.
So… more a way to work with a large collection of markdown files than a relational database.
Your notes are still in markdown.
That's like saying McDonald's is going to lose customers because they started selling coffee and muffins.
I kind of wish they would slow down development and just polish what is already there. They are on this treadmill where they feel the need to keep adding new features, new maintenance burdens, bloating the product in every dimension.
In a few years somebody fresh will come along with a product that's a lightweight alternative. It sucks, but that seems to be the lifecycle of this kind of thing. For now, I've turned off automatic updates on Obsidian which isn't ideal either. :(
(not trying to be hostile, just curious as another Obsidian user who is excited by this feature because the current meta search functionality is really poor IMO and this is very much needed polish from my perspective)
They probably have lots of ideas for new products. They could start working on a follow up product or service.
For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.
But don't install Obsidian and then spend hours adding addons. You'll get overwhelmed, confused and wondering why all the Influenzers are saying it's CHANGED THEIR LIFE. It hasn't.
I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134
https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual
The cool thing about Howm is that it's note-taking and task management for lazy people. It predates org-mode (but it also works with it nowadays) and has a distinct way of linking notes by way of go-to and come-from links, think saved search and automatic backlink respectively. Also the way tasks are displayed and surfaced is pretty neat too, the guide/manual goes more in-depth but if you find stuff like org-agenda too complex you'll appreciate Howm's way of tracking and managing tasks.
It is a simple markdown editor yes but it's the addons that make it so different. There's tons and tons of markdown notetaking apps, but this one just hit the right balance for me. End to End encryption, self-hosted livesync (I can see myself typing from another client), good mobile support, fast searching. Self-hosting is a must-have for me, even with end to end encryption.
The one thing I miss is a bit more security on Android (it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area). And for it to start quicker, it has to load a whole browser on every open because it's an electron app even on mobile.
But overall it's great for me. Not earth-shattering but it just offers the right combination of features for me.
I don't really see what the 'wankery' is.
> Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.
For me there are several third party addons that are invaluable. The livesync plugin first of all, it's really great sync and fully self-hosted. This is quite a complex thing to get working and one where so many other apps fall down.
ReadItLater for capturing websites is also pretty nice. And the copilot one for searching notes with RAG.
For what it's worth, you can do just that now. Not sure when it was introduced, but on the current Android version, you are prompted to select either "Device storage" or "App storage" when creating a new vault.
You can also change the location of existing vaults from app to device and vice-versa.
With that now available, the one thing missing for me is a biometric lock option. Or even any kind of locking at all. There's a community plugin for that, but it's quite unstable and no longer maintained.
But it does have a "secure folder" which is more or less what you mean by "spaces", I guess.
The downside of the secure folder against normal app locking is that the apps are no longer seamlessly integrated with the launcher and other apps. It's definitely more secure but is ultimately overkill for my needs.
And I also have a work profile as well through "Island" :)
The option is available to move a vault from the app to the device storage, but not the other way around. At least not from within Obsidian.
But if you use a PC or a file manager that has full device access, you can manually copy the vault folder to the `/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/md.obsidian/files` directory.
I just tried that and Obsidian recognised it.
nobody cares what you think people "should" do
I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing).
Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
> Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).
wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...
A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".
Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.
Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.
Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.
Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.
Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?
I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.
I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.
Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.
For a personal knowledge base I think the latter approach saves time in the long run. I have clusters of well organized information. Well tagged and linked. I can always find my movie ideas, projects, and deep thoughts when I want them. I like the idea of just curating the clusters I care about. Just enough organizing. I then have a few highly connected entry points to my clusters. Often I find people don’t link enough in their Obsidian. It’s free and puts things in a more graph oriented layout that the tool can show you.
Edit: oh, also remember, these are text files. Grep still works. Also, we have very powerful CLI LLMs to summarize and categorize text data rapidly. Like “suggest 3 tags for this document based on <prompt magic here>. :)
I tried going down the road like you’re talking about one for managing past, present, and future trips. It technically worked, but it was so fiddly that I hated using it. I just made a few folders instead.
I suppose now, if I wanted all the metadata you’re talking about, using a base would make the most sense. But I’d still need to be realistic about how I’m going to use it. Do I care enough about future sorting abilities to turn adding a movie to a watch list into a multi-field form, where I need to consider all these potential futures to fill it out, creating a lot of friction to the action?
The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik
The hubs described are nice, but they don't always reflect larger changes. Updating a hub becomes a dependency that seems silly as I feel like that should be one of the easier things to keep up to date with a basic code overlay. It's one of the first things I wrote when messing with Obsidian, and part of why I really like dendron (easy refactoring, but it's got other issues).
I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!
Thanks for bringing this history up, and I think everyone should be careful when downloading a new version for this product, or better build by themselves after checking out the recents commits with some AI tools.
When I was looking for nv->then->simplenote replacement Joplin and Obsidian didn't even stay on the radar for more than a few mins.
Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.
For me it's a feature.
It can be fun to explore various features and extensions, but set limits and try to keep things simple rather than complex.
Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files.
I found it useful for reading code in markdown.
Based on the documentation and the screenshot next to it, I don't see how it differs from Obsidian on this point.
A Markdown code block in Obsidian is going to be highlighted as expected.
Actually it appears that they both relies on Prism to achieve this :
- https://help.obsidian.md/syntax#Code+blocks
- https://github.com/suchnsuch/Tangent/blob/main/apps/tangent-...
‘’’go {your code} ‘’’
I've seen this feature off and on in some online code editors. I didn't know this was a (universal?) Markdown feature. Is it supposed to work universally in all Markdown editors (e.g. VSCode's Markdown view)?
My other advice is that it’s fine to boot up new vaults for other things. I’ve got two main vaults - a sort of work KB and a journal. But then I’ve got a bunch of smaller ones - songs I’m writing, courses I’m making, writing. Don’t be told that you’ve got to get some kind of universal thing that does everything. This is also b/s and often pedalled by the productivity wonks.
Say you're setting up a media log of your engagements and you want to track completed season for a show-- if you're doing a handful of shows, this isn't a big deal. Over 100 shows, averaging 4 seasons -- that's 400 "completions", one file each. Plus another 100 files for the media metadata itself. That's 500 files that can be simply represented by 500 lines of a spreadsheet, even if you're duplicating title, year, etc. over and over.
The sharding of data into tiny files is what makes it difficult to use anywhere outside of Obsidian. If Obsidian Bases used the full power of YAML front-matter data properly, that'd be SO much better.
It's still faster, more efficient to use a spreadsheet. For anything more than what a spreadsheet can handle-- I would use SQLite.
The Obsidian dev team has been really responsive to feedback from those of us in the beta, and I'd encourage people to look at the changelog to see that in action (e.g. changing the syntax to be more object oriented, smoothing over UI issues, etc)
Having a more Obsidian-native interface for managing all of that is. Like other commenters, would definitely watch a video of you sharing your Obsidian "build" for that use-case.
https://gist.github.com/LordDragonfang/d826cb686c64d582afbe2...
This is a combined view of the players and npcs from one campaign with the portrait gallery in the second view.
I've got the official template plugin bound to ctrl-shift-2, so I just hit that to pre-populate the frontmatter whenever I create an npc/pc/etc note with the appropriate template.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWhMzDKA7vJ4NDvVhlZMk...
For bases to work I need to split my stuff up into tiny documents but I'd prefer to have one big document with separate sections. For example I keep one document `book-recommendations.md` with many small sections for books I'd like to read. I can't search through that with bases unless I split those out into many small files in with one recommendation each.
I don't need entire files for each individual book/movie/task I want to manage.
They'll have maybe 4-5 properties at most with not much content in them.
File system, and syncing operations will take a massive hit if I have to manage that many files.
I'm a fan of Obsidian, not affiliated with them, but my experience with basic file syncing like syncthing or git is that you should be able to easily get up into the ten's of thousands of files without an issue.
I recently had to sync a new Obsidian vault from scratch, a vault with thousands of files, and it took minutes to complete because of this, even though most files are a couple of KB at most.
Easy to fix and low hanging fruit, but still an issue for us with many files in our vaults.
And it design for a big document, with many nodes in it, it will filter this nodes by tags and properties.
Obsidian Bases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44058972 - May 2025 (13 comments)
I hope the API has support to allow extensions---I see that it is on the Roadmap[0].
I'm particularly interested to see how this integrates with Canvas and other note types.
I even started just writing the daily journal all in one file because that gives me that but it's starting to get a little big.
Very happy that Bases is officially launching. My experience so far has been great. It can definitely replace the "Projects" plugin for me, maybe the "Dataview" plugin as well? Hope it can rival Notion Databases in the future, e.g. by adding a Kanban view.
The lack of something like Notion databases / tables was the last thing stopping me from migrating over; I found this feature really helpful for organizing my thoughts and tasks as I want them organized, and not having it would have been a noticeable UX regression for me.
With this launch, I'll take a deeper look. It's that simple: it provides a feature many want, largely because it's seen as a killer feature of comparable closed platforms.
I remember being a bit spooked when they announced this and their Notion clone Loop (I’d been at Notion for a year or so). Where are they now? Idk.
There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension.
The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to a Markdown table or CSV.
See also: https://help.obsidian.md/bases/syntax
If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mermaid works, defined in a codeblock) that references a nearby CSV/JSON/etc file.
I often have a lot of .md files floating around "data" projects and a lightweight tabular renderer (with filtering, sorting, possibly editing) would be absolutely killer. Does such a thing exist already?
For example, book list, movie list, customer list, invoice list, asset register, key register… once you hit a certain point, obsidian probably isn’t the right tool anymore. But no reason to go to the monthly SaaS “right tool” at the POC stage.
Obsidian is the pre-step for a larger database: cheap, fast to customise, easy to backup (git), self supported. It’s probably not going to run a company, but it will suit an individual or small startup.
And 99.99% of discussions about scaling are premature optimisation (cit needed). A lot of people spend more time thinking about scaling then entering their data, which probably means the data is smaller than they think! ha
I am with you on this, I wish Obsidian would optionally allow you to use YAML or some other structured data directly in the fenced code block or base file.
I really, really want something that kind of takes an Obsidian-like approach to local databases, sort of like Excel/Airtable but with flat, human-editable text files that live on your filesystem with a schema driven property editor. It’s kind of a bummer that this gets so tantalizingly close but doesn’t take it to the logical conclusion. I hope they do it eventually or make it possible with plugins.
Here's a little demo of what I've got working: https://youtu.be/LCR9pAc_xn0.
It's currently still very rough and I'm just using it myself but hoping to open source it at some point.
It allows inline blocks in the `key:: value` format, as well as frontmatter-based data (sort of what Bases are doing) and probably even more.
For iOS, the "hard" part is getting the initial git clone, but after that whenever you open the app you can pull/push any changes or set it to automatically do that on a schedule.
To setup a git repo on an iOS device you need iSH[1] but you can delete it the initial `git clone`. The plugin can handle it from there. Make sure to use https and a token that doesn't expire as part of your git clone url. Here is a guide[2]
The only thing to keep in mind is to have a .gitignore that excludes some of .json config files in .obsidian folder as they often cause conflicts. I exclude workspace.json and workspace-mobile.json which just define what tabs you have open on a given device so I think it makes sense to keep that device specific and not commit it.
[1] https://ish.app/
[2] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-sync-with-git-on-ios-for-...
You could also pay for Obsidian Sync. This has the added benefit of being officially supported and it funds the development of the software.
In general you can use many cloud provider, SyncThing Fork or GitHub.
I wrote about all these options in more detail here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian
The easiest way to sync would be with the official Obsidian subscription, which costs the most amount of money from the options mentioned here.
Does anyone know what JS library (presumably) they are using to display, filter, sort the table?
Everything else is custom as we generally don't use existing frameworks and the large amount of baggage they carry. CodeMirror and Lezer we already used before Bases.
I can see plenty of SaaS apps, especially indie made, that could benefit from such functionality.
We include very few dependencies, see: <https://help.obsidian.md/credits#Third+party+acknowledgement...>
I'm finally able to kill Notion (good riddance - I never liked it!), and if it can handle larger tables then I'll stop using Google Suite as well.
My last request of the Obsidian team is a better git plugin. Their official built-in sync product is fine, but I'd still like to manage my own versioning so I can use automations.
The currently available git plugin is extremely dangerous (!!!) if set up incorrectly. I would consider myself an advanced user of git, and Obsidian's git plugin has on several occasions blown away my history and notes. It has frustrating and opaque behavior for how it consolidates change sets and diffs.
I've been working on making Obsidian "work for work" with a real-time collaboration plugin called Relay [0]. We use CRDTs for conflict resolution between users/clients and it also happens to remove a ton of headaches for device-to-device sync as well.
Our collaboration server can be run on-premise and we also just open sourced a Git Sync connector so you can do google-docs style collab via Obsidian+Relay but still have the merged documents end up in git (and plug into (Markdown + git)-centric publishing workflows like Mintlify and Quartz.
The whole Obsidian ecosystem feels really electric right now.
[0] https://relay.md
One caveat is that the obsidian android app DOES NOT seem to save files to storage until the note unloads, which can break things if you pull in the middle of making changes.
[1] Though I have had to fix my termux clone of the vault enough times that I now just nuke it and re-clone instead of bothering with git - but that's more of a "termux likes to break git" issue than anything
Why is a plugin necessary?
Sometimes you'll have to push a big ugly commit.
But other times the manual diff review can save you from a headache, like if you have some obscure syncing going on, like syncing READMEs and other markdown files to external repos to manage all markdown with the same Obsidian interface.
Also if you need to maintain a high-standard for the contents of your notes while still utilizing AI tools, the manual diff review can prove invaluable in ensuring trusted resources don't turn into slop
Also, I'm still waiting for the org mode comment from a seasoned emacs user. :)
In particular, I love how you select text/blocks in Notion and how every line is a "block". I really wish other editors did that as well. In fact, it's probably the main reason why I haven't moved away from Notion.
Logseq[1] is also markdown based but also has a block approach.
SiYuan[2] is more similar to Notion, but self-hostable.
[1]: https://logseq.com/
I think my issue with the smaller players is that I've been burnt too many times where they've just stopped development or cancelled the product because it wasn't profitable. So I've generally steered away from them.
On the other side of course, what happens with the big players is the enshittification of the product which I think is slowly happening to Notion, though it still ticks enough boxes that it's the preferred option.
If you just want to take plain notes, then yeah. Notion isn't what you want. However if you want sprawling databases that all inter-connected, amongst a variety of different formats, then Notion is amazing for that.
I'm a strong proponent of File over App: who knows how long Obsidian or notion will exist - at least I know I can work with my Obsidian notes as long as text editors exist
I hate making notes in plain text. It's too inconvenient, not to mention doesn't provide me with the functionality I want. On the other hand, I love organising things into databases i.e. Notion.
So either I don't take notes (net negative) or I take notes (net positive).
Do you need that complexity? That's a personal question.
I love the dataview flexibility and multiple display options.
I’ve moved my Chinese vocab list to Bases (I already had all data in front matter so it was easy) and it’s much much nicer and faster than Dataview
However, for task lists, Dataview still works better imo
But as an Obsidian power-user, I regularly paste screenshots into notes
There is a plugin that allows templating the screenshot file name, so naming the pasted screenshot, using the same as the note where it's being pasted, and a timestamp, for example, is easy.
Hands-down my most productive interface to LLMs for [years since GPT3.5] years running.
Do you have any examples of what decent RAG functionality might look like? And where the current plugins fall short?
I'd hope that any inference performed in a given note would take as context not only the full text of the note, but its nearest neighbors—although, frankly, what I really want are the implicit definitions of proper nouns, ie links.
I also frequently generate articles based on the subject's backlinks, ie mentions in other notes.
Both of those functionalities are provided by Obsidian's core featureset, so all that's missing—and what might provide outsized value—is indexing notes based not only on the embeddings of their literal text, but on meta-text such as: the questions they might answer; the definitions of their principle subjects; counterfactual statements they falsify.
All of which would allow the editor to bring up a relevant note when writing/reviewing another–ie the "unknown knowns".
I think this technique is akin to "knowledge enrichment", or "meta-embeddings," but I think actually those terms have lower-level meanings.
Of course, generating these embeddings would make the indexing process slower and more failure prone, and so I'd be even more likely to fail to get it working and call it a dud.
That would be perfect!
Smart Connections does seem to have improved a lot recently.
Is it possible to embed `Bases` in existing notes? Or do they always have to be standalone files?
Currently I have lots of files with embedded Dataview queries in files. I’d like to replicate that with this new functionality.
It's also open source, unlike obsidian which is proprietary
They use the Notion API though, not any export option that Notion offers.
No more need to evaluate AnyType or similar apps.
Obsidian rocks.
Pepperidge farm 'members
A .base file is a query written in yaml that aggregates frontmatter values across many .md files into a table view.
Interesting to see how well this scales.
Are things like Kanban views (a la notion) planned?
(I’m currently using Org-mode, but the approach is the same.)