A few months ago, i took the bullet and migrated my notes from Notion to .md files. This was the second time i migrated my notes (last time from Evernote to Notion), and this time it was a lot easier. Kudos to the Notion team for making export so easy.

Just downloaded the notes, then told Claude to organize and remove duplicate or index mds (Notion keeps a lot of random indexes) and clean up and within 30mins i had a very clean and usable (and agent accessible) md vault. I can open it in Obsidian or other md file viewer (as well as my own code editor). I opted for obsidian.

Setup was super straight-forward. I do miss the visual editor in Notion (obsidian editor is not as smooth, and i find myself just writing the files in text instead of using their visual mode).

for sync, i use icloud, and it syncs between the iphone and the mac app flawlessly, didn't have any issue with corruptions (yet). I use the phone app as mostly an intake, and the desktop app for mostly visualizations. I also tinkered with adding git to track history (has to put the .git folder outside the repo with --separate-git-dir).

Obsidian has a terminal support (which i suppose folks can use to run agents in there) although i found it easier (habbit perhaps) to run my agents separately. They provide massive unlock as their turn my knowledge to an actual insight and can connect things that i didn't think it was possible before.

Overall, 75% happy. From first principle, file is as simple as it gets and i think this is good enough personal knowledge management. I do miss sharing capabilities as well as multi-user in Notion, so i don't think this is useful for 2player/team/corp.

My suggestions to new users are: Start small, just create notes for whatever you want to (actually) remember and create impromptu TODO lists. Ignore the whole Knowledge Database / second brain thing. Learn the obsidian keyboard shortcuts really well. You can build a structure in your notes later when you actually see what's good and what needs automation.

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly in the vault folder. And people sell courses for this??? Like I know you can add plugins, tweak css to your liking, and basically turn obsidian into an all-encompassing monstrosity to match your particular software kink, but the 80/20 of it all is really pretty basic to anybody who has ever used a personal computer.

Shout out to Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/), which I use on a daily basis.

It does most of what Obsidian does but has a free sync version where you just use your cloud drive as the storage.

The main thing missing, from what I've found, is that it does do the "notes mind map". But I never really found that useful.

One specific bit of advice in there that I disagree with is keeping just one vault. Rather, I find that having one vault per topic/project is the right approach.

The reason for having multiple vaults is simple: I find that the usability of the one big über-vault drops off sharply if you're not disciplined in maintaining organisation, and a consistent workflow, and, if you're storing a bunch of disparate things in a single vault, an organisation/workflow that's universal enough to encompass everything rapidly becomes a pain in the arse to maintain. Inversely, topic-specific vaults tend to rapidly develop their own bespoke structures and workflows that match the topic closely and are very natural to work in.

For example, I have a large vault dedicated to Blue Prince (the game). As in several hundred megs worth of screenshots, over a hundred individual .md files (most of which are almost empty, but their existence is helpful in itself), folder structure that groups information on a per-puzzle basis, and it features pervasive use of tags to encode game features)

Another vault is a cookbook. I don't cook by recipe all that often, so that one mostly has reference tables for cooking times/temps for different foods in different appliances (I don't cook pearl barley often enough to remember how much liquid to use and what rice cooker programme to set).

I love Obsidian, have written a popular plugin, and my wife and I use it for TODO lists and various planning.

However, every few weeks the official Obsidian sync makes an absolute mess of our shopping list (which has fairly frequent edits and deletions across our laptops and phones). I have no idea how to fix it.

This thread shows other users having the exact same issue as us: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-sync-incorrectly-duplic...

If it wasn't for this one issue I would be able to strongly recommend the tool but as it is now I just tell people it sort of works and I am mildly happy.

To be fair I don't think any of the popular alternatives like logseq or joplin even attempt to do automatic file merges and just dump files into a conflict mode.

I mostly use Obsidian for my blog nowadays (using Quartz and Cloudflare Pages). For that it's actually pretty great. It's super easy to write links to your own posts that automatically update, it's easy ensure that your attachments are handled correctly, it's easy to have whatever layout you want.

I liked the notes stuff, but I found I was spending more time with the bureaucracy of it instead of actually doing work, so I've kind of stopped using it.

Three asks for Obsidian to make it my #1 tool (and I mean #1 tool):

- First-class multi-vault support. It's difficult to keep personal / business / team separate. I want to keep shared notes for my team, but it's really hard.

- First-class git support. The git plugin is dangerous and will overwrite changes from other devices. The mobile git plugin (which requires hacks to even use) is deadly bad with blowing away your entire git history. Do not use. Obsidian sync is cool and good and all, but I want git. And the existing git isn't just bad, it's deleterious.

- Spreadsheets. Literally just free-form tabular data would work too. Their "bases" thing isn't it. I just need to be able to sort data and keep it versioned. Google Sheets is a huge daily use product - if I had the same function in Obsidian, Gsuite would be dead to me.

Daily Notes feature is a lifesaver. Just throw things in there throughout the day. Never lose anything

I recently setup Obsidian thinking of it as an easy note taking system with self-hosted sync that Claude can read from.

I'm still building the habit for using it instead of scattering notes in text documents or self-DMs on various platforms, but during setup, the complexity was concerning, since I associate complexity in this kind of system with fragility. For now I am still in the exploring phase, so not ruling it out yet.

I'm just so bummed that multiple vaults are pretty much unusable. I can't sync my sensitive work notes. But I want to sync general programming notes between work and other PCs. But multiple vaults hardly work. The just open in a new window.

Other than that, I love so many things about the program. Just linking and graphs are weird and strangely overrated. Search and tags still rules over everything imo

I've had a lot of fun combining Obsidian with Claude Code. It's very much like having a personal coach. It's a low-friction way to have it remember things about me without having to re-provide a bunch of context on new chats.

Obviously you have to be careful what you share, and make your own decisions about the utility/privacy trade-off.

I also agree with keeping it very simple. I went down a rabbit hole where I installed a bunch of plugins and basically treated it as a dynamic web application. Now I keep it simple and have basically no plugins, no enforced structure. I don't try to do Zettelkasten or anything like that. Usually I just write in my daily note and link to other notes as makes sense, but I don't force it.

I've tried obsidian so many times and want to love it but the sync situation - either the expensive official one, the approved options for mixed iOS/Windows clients (icloud) and third party tools like obsidain-livesync - were all way too issue-prone for me to ever trust it. I hope they figure this out

I have tried many times to migrate to Obsidian and DataView from OrgMode, but I just can't get there.

Obsidian is appealing because it's available on iOS, but the whole approach ended up (for me) being more fiddly and less effective (again for me) than orgmode.

OTOH & to be fair, I've been using Org for a really long time.

I migrated from Notion to Obsidian, mainly because of speed, and to a lesser extent I like the philosophy.

Having simultaneously embraced AI a lot more, it's been incredible having AI very easily access and work with my notes for me (not to mention making the migration so much better by brute forcing a lot of the tidying and database formatting).

The only thing I haven't been able to replicate from Notion is my shopping list. It used to be one big database, filtered by "unticked". So I could add items, and ticking them would essentially hide them. Rudimentary grouping & sorting by clusters (frozen section, fruit & veg) was a small help, too.

A pretty simple implementation but I can't work out how to get that to work in Obsidian. AI had no ideas either than an extension (which I've already forgotten the name of) which didn't really do it properly (or at least elegantly). Am I missing something?

I threw Obsidian over a vimwiki set-up I had and it's been pretty fun. I made a separate base for a "CRM" I'm building (it's just people, companies, and their projects, not customer relationship management). It's nice to have all my vimwiki stuff there and great to have a database when I need that view. I think I'm using about 5% of its capabilities though.

Sync is not automatic for me and so far that's a feature. I commit my changes to gitlab and since it's markdown that gives me a chance to review what I've done and add a summary in my commit message. It helps me stay a little more focused.

I'm surprised there's nothing about using this with Claude (or whatever LLM). That's the killer feature of Obsidian imo. My original friction of keeping up with a style or format of notes is taken care of. You can also do full passes of your vaults and ask it to look for connections you might have missed or to reorganize it after some time if the original purpose has drifted. You can also just open a terminal in the root of a vault and start asking questions. I use this for all kinds of things now: health tracking, music gear questions, work ideas, etc. It's such a natural choice for a basic memory system, and it's not beholden to a specific provider since it's just files.

for my obsidian is just my mobile markdown editor I just haven't been able find a better one, for desktop I use neovim and telekasten

I really like Obsidian, but its features are still too much for me. Are there any aesthetically pleasing, faster alternatives that simply render Markdown and LaTeX? It would be even better if it also supported mixed inputs like Obsidian.

I've used Flatnotes for about a year or so and if all you want is to write notes in markdown and search them it doesn't get much simpler. It has tags and decent search, but other than that nothing. Easy to sync or backup though with a single folder of text files.

https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes

In the last paragraph, OP mentions using Logseq "for short daily notes/journaling", which suggests both Obsidian and Logseq fall short in some ways.

As I'm currently contemplating using one of these tools, I'd love if you elaborated on that.

Great article, thanks.

I have been using Obsidian for 3-4 years, and I will keep using it. I really love it.

I have 0 community plugins. I use it for writing articles that becomes .qmd file for my quarto blog, I make lists, I track progress, and I have a standing file called scrip.md where I write tables, LaTeX equations, and screenshot and share them.

I have some folders, and I link some files. That's it. It has first class Linux desktop and Android experience, and that's all I want. No web browser, no internet dependence, no black box data processing, and complete freedom. If it is ever bought by potential enshittifiers, I just stop using it!

I don't use many Obsidian-only features to not be dependent on the benevolence of the creators.

The only thing I use openclaw for is managing my obsidian vault. The flow is a series of crons that prompt me to fill out daily files and update projects as they progress. I also use it for calorie tracking and basic daily journaling. This is simple, secure, and very cheap 'life coaching.'

I wanted to jump on the obsidian train but from what I understand I’d need to pay for their sync service to be able to use iOS and headless Linux right?

All other sync methods seem to come with caveats. I’d use iCloud Drive but I was not able to mount it with rclone.

> Don’t fall for FOMO marketing or feel anxious. Keep it simple. Obsidian should help you work on other things.

Great advice, I tried to get into Obsidian a few weeks ago and could immediately feel myself getting pulled into the "Workflow Optimization Spiral". I love nothing more than fruitlessly tooling with workflow stuff, in place of actually, you know, working. I kind of just decided to set it aside, rather than parse through exactly which parts would be actually helpful for stuff I needed that day. Really appreciate this blog post to help me revisit the app from a more practical starting place.

I first struggled with it, gave it another try couple of years later and now using it on a daily basis as a key work tool to organize my knowledge, like code snippets, documentation, roadmaps...

For me, the 2 most powerful aspects are: - as mentioned in the article, there is no pricing plan, no limits, no enshittification or feature creep... Fully usable from now to eternity

- md format! So damn easy to export it to a proper pdf file, to copy it into a html page converter etc.

Is there a reliable way to move content from OneNote to Obsydian? I have 10+ years of notes there and have a hard time figuring out how to migrate them to markdown.

I've been pretty happy with a terminal, sublime text / (forked) zed, and a directory hierarchy of .md files.

What can I expect to gain by using Obsidian?

Thank you for this. I am one of those that find Obsidian a mystery but now wish to learn to be able to reproduce How to build a Karpathy-Style AI Wiki in Obsidian Without Writing Code as mentioned here: https://x.com/KanikaBK/status/2042973243888554122 Hopefully this will help me with the Obsidian-based AI Wiki

AsciiDoc in a private Git repo does it for me.

Notebook Navigator solved Obsidian for me

wondering on starting with this

once you start tagging it stops being notes and starts being a project

Reading all the comments here i feel I’ve learned all the obsidian i need.