excalibrain VS obsidian-git

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

In practice I write in Obsidian, the best thing since slice bread for me. And it was obsidian-git, running every 10 minutes or so, who was keeping my GitHub vanity metrics very green.

> Joplin is using md to.

The way it's handled can make the difference in control.

> by separating that in their DB, it's a big NO for me since it's a closed silo.

Joplin is using a popular open database with a healthy community and good tooling. It's as open as markdown. Maybe not for you, when you lack the knowledge, but markdown is similar closed for anyone not understanding filesystems and editors.

> This: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview works so wonderful for me

Good for you, but that is very low level in terms of data-handling. Dataview is really just an elaborated search, there is no good level of interaction. Datacore, the next project of the Dataview is supposed to bring this, but it's not even usable yet AFAIK. Coincidental, the Obsidian-devs are also working on that front, but nothing is finished yet.

> https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git and b) easy to fix since it's a text file. Gosh!

That's useless when the app itself is not working. And even worse if you are not realizing the errors early.

> Aha. I don't think so. Which authority says that?

My own experience. I've tested enough plugins over the years to know their dark corners.

> And even if It's like that, my markdown files would survive everything

The thing is, technically you are not even having proper markdown, but a fork with some extensions of Obsidian. So some features of your parts might break when switching away from Obsidian. And the reason for all this is also because markdown is lacking definitions for what obsidian-people are doing with it. Coincidentally, this seems also one of the reasons why Joplin is using a database.

> And gosh, this is a good thing!

Not if they all suck.

> Installing multiple task plugins shows that something is "broke" on the user side.

Sure, because the plugins are lacking features, its the users fault... Maybe some users have just very different levels of requirements from you.

The Obsidian team uses the "remote vault" feature[1] to collaborate on making Obsidian. Since Obsidian runs on local files you could use any shared file storage like Dropbox. If you want more granular version history, you can use Git, there's a nice plugin for it[2].

[1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Share+remote+vaults

[2]: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git

I've been using the main Obsidian git extension, https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git. Took some work to set it up ergnonomically but it works great now. I enabled auto-commit and push on save, and auto-pull when you start the editor. No merge conflicts yet between two machines.

Should note I use Obsidian for a journal, so it's pretty much append-only.

I use Obsidian to create notes as Markdown files on my computer and use the Obsidian Git plugin to version control the changes via Git. The Obsidian vault in which I store my notes is stored in a folder synced using iCloud Drive.

Up to my knowledge, Obsidian GIT doesn't support merge on mobile. There is a different approach for handling those on mobile using Command Line, you can find more info in this post and this article.

Plugin: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git

I am using Git for that. Here is the extension that might help. https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git