notes-android VS obsidian-dataview

I actually have my own little nextcloud instance running on a $5/month digital ocean virtual private server. My intent was for family (only 3 people) and i to use it...but honestly, most of the time it is only me. I draft conventional old text files (though i do use markdown)...and save the files in a nextcloud folder to enable sync anywhere. For actually synching and drafting of the text/note files, i have the nextcloud mobile app as well as the nextcloud notes app on my phone (https://github.com/stefan-niedermann/nextcloud-notes)...so now i can jot down notes anywhere that i carry my phone. I do lack some advanced features that zim wiki would bring, like linkages, some color formatting, styles...but for my workflow i found them not to be ultra necessary anyway. Side note: i use nextcloud for general file synching, rss/feed reading, and other functions...so it was not setup only/specifically for notes...the note taking just came along as an extra benefit. Any headaches in managing my own nextcloud instance (and just like managing any of your own infrastructure, there are always costs), are outweighed by all the features that i legitimately use/benefit from nextcloud.

If you use nextcloud, you could also use other text editors on mobile phone like joplin, qOwnNotes, etc. - so you are not stuck only with the nextcloud notes app. Also, if you are not an adherent to open source software, my workflow can also be used via dropbox, box.com, onedrive, etc. too i suppose (you're just drafting notes on the road and saving them up to someone e;lse's server/cloud). I hope that helps!

Nextcloud Notes (version 3.4.13): View and edit notes on Nextcloud

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/notes https://github.com/stefan-niedermann/nextcloud-notes

At the end of the day, I use Dataview, a plugin for Obsidian, which allows me to make queries to my notes similar to SQL to visualize the collected information:

https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview

This whole ideas to have data, visualisations and knowledge base in one private offline place is very appealing

Since at least 2012 I've also been using a text file format from http://todotxt.org/ and more recently I wrote a program that takes a crontab-like list to pre-generate entries on a daily, by-day-name (every Sunday for example), and I also pull in a list of holidays from gov.uk, so they are also populated.

[^1]: (https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview)

> 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.

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

Ref: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview/issues/544 (Bearbeitet)

For using it, having SQL or JavaScript knowledge is useful, but you can probably figure it out without that knowledge. The Github page has a lot of examples that you can cannabalize for simple things without really getting too deep into it.

Check it here.

I think this could be helpful https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview/issues/1086

Have you heard of Obsidian? It's a note-taking app build on locally stored markdown files with bidirectional linking and a great ecosystem of third party plugins. One of the most popular plugins is https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview which lets you treat your notes as databases and query them to form tables. The creator has been working on its successor, Datacore https://github.com/blacksmithgu/datacore for a while - Datacore might come close to what you're looking for, its goals include WYSIWYG views and live editing inside tables.