excalibrain VS fleeting-notes-quartz

Refer: Obsidian Search, How I Use Embedded Queries, Dataview, Excalibrain

It does not represent links in graph view, but excalibrain is a plugin that will visually show relations between files depending on your own ontology. You could define „treatment“, „disease“, and „side effect“ as your own ontological categories, and define how the links between those categories will be displayed (colors, labels, line types, etc). It takes a bit to understand, but it‘s extremly powerful and customizable.

It doesn't kill the graph, especially in its current state. Currently the canvas does not automatically show relationships between your notes. And even when/if the canvas gains the ability to do that, it probably won't kill off this graph.

Dataview + Datadraw = ExcaliBrain. It's a powerful plugin for aggregating and contextualizing notes by pre-defining relationships and keywords. This ExcaliBrain demo/explainer provides a concise overview of what it is and what it can do. I skipped the setup and config so go back if you need that. Side note, Nicole van der Hoeven's overview of obsidian is a fantastic primer and her youtube tutorials are very accessible.

However there is the Excalibrain community plugin that offers a different way of visualizing links between notes (like a fancier version of the native local graph), and you can customise how certain types of links would appear in the visualization

Happy to share some of what's been working for me. Some of this is stuff I'm actively using, some of it hasn't quite made it into the "day to day use" yet, but I've been experimenting with. (Random personal advice: Never let your note taking tools feel like using them is work, that's the first step towards not keeping notes!)

- For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

- For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian

- Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images

- For analysing the content for some useful stats there's: https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis but this is for a relatively specific sort of analysis.

- More general and flexible analysis and graph visualisations are available from the combination of https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain , https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview and https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... in short query your notes and note metadata like its a database, build reports and data visualisations, and then excalibrain is a whole thing built on top of that power.

- Dynamic embeds of outside content are available from https://github.com/dhamaniasad/obsidian-rich-links and https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed depending on the style and use you like. While there is a built in functionality to preview the links to other notes when you hover over them https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Page+preview which has a demo here https://youtu.be/dmnVml_jbsQ?t=222

- And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when you use the refactor to cut out a new note, the automations will trigger, ask you to give the note a new heading, tags, and you have a little script that checks last modified time of the folder tree of text files, and looks at the folder of the last modified time and asks you in that popup if you want to move the new note to the folder the note you cut it from is located in. Or anything else you can imagine using outside automation and scripting tools on your plain text markdown files.

These are just a start and if you haven't already browsed the plugins at https://obsidian.md/plugins I wholeheartedly recommend it, people are adding new cool things pretty often and other plugins add new functionality that makes them worth checking out if they were previously not something that you found interesting. I do a read through of the plugin list probably at least once every month or two just to see what's new, and more often if I'm experimenting with changes to my workflow.

The screenshot mid-page on this web page shows what it's like to show a portion of a graph using the Excalibrain plugin which also shows content in graph form

For visualizing connections, and making graphical notes, you might consider the Excalidraw and Excalibrain extensions.

Excalibrain: A graph view to navigate your Obsidian vault

Check out the ExcaliBrain plugin: https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain

Try Fleeting Notes - Google Keep with wikilinks & Obsidian integration. It sounds like it might fit your needs. That being said, I'm the creator of this app so I'm a bit biased.

I use git to sync windows and macos but I find the iOS sync gets a bit more confusing. So I use the Fleeting Notes app to sync a couple of notes directly. https://fleetingnotes.app/

As I've hinted to, I use it mainly for university. I am a History and Archaeology student an I'm currently in my first masters year. I use Obsidian to take notes in class, make summaries, study the material, annotating books and articles, and everything else that comes with studying. Besides this, I also use Obsidian as my personal journal or diary. I've long been interested in keep some kind of daily log but I never got into because I didn't have the right tools at my disposal. Now I try to make some sort of recollection of my day, everyday, but of course in practice I do it around 20 days a month, not every day. I also use Obsidian for personal projects or things I would like to look into more. For example I am currently working on researching the most well known celestial constellations, knowing their mythologies, recognizing their individual stars in the night sky etc. Another of my (growing number) of projects has as a goal to recognize edible or otherwise useful plants. Obsidian also became my place where I store my 'fleeting notes' or ideas. For this I've used multiple apps on my phone, which include (but are not limited to) Markor, Zettel Notes, Google Keep, the stock note app that comes on my Oneplus phone. But the app that I am now most happy with is called 'Fleeting Notes' made by Matthew Wong. I use it as follows: An idea pops in my head, this can be whatever it is, I write it down in the app, I add a title if possible, done. When I open my pc the next time I use a shortcut to import the notes made and they get placed in my 'Inbox' folder. From here I can decide to move them to my general notes that I can easily look up when I need them, or I can link and move them where they belong. So to summarize: I use Obsidian as my personal Wiki, everything in my life could be stored in here, in practice this is usually university stuff and personal projects.

This is how I came to create Fleeting Notes a note-taking application that combines the speed of Google Keep with the connections within Obsidian. It’s still a work in progress, but I hope to listen to customer feedback and continue to develop the application to eventually become a one-stop shop to quickly capture and connect notes with the option to extend to other note-taking tools.

As of plugin v0.3.6 of the Fleeting Notes app:

I had the same question myself. This is why I created Fleeting Notes. A way to capture quickly create highlights/annotations and categorize them through wikilinks. Combined with the Fleeting Notes sync Obsidian plugin, notes are seamlessly synced to Obsidian. If you’re interested in seeing how the browser extension works, check out my video showcasing the Fleeting Notes browser extension.

Feel free to check out the website for more information, and I hope it can help reduce the friction in your knowledge workflow ;)

Right now, taking notes from Youtube (YT) to Obsidian sucks. To take YT notes, I need to manually copy the timestamp of the video, annotate the video with the correct timestamp, and put all of this in Obsidian. If I don’t keep track of the timestamp, coming back to the video requires me to sift through the video to find where my note is referencing. I don’t like this manual work so I decided to add a better way in Fleeting Notes (FN).

I say this with all the respect to the developers of both Obsidian and helper apps, but something like Fleeting Notes shouldn't have to exist. When someone can build a business model out of a missing feature of your product, something is wrong with your roadmap.