obsidian-outliner VS logseq

For your particular complaints, check out obsidian-columns and Creases or Obsidian Outliner. The new Canvas built in plugin might also be of interest.

[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md). It is a killer app. Add one [plugin](https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner) and you have an outliner like Dynalist. Add another [plugin](https://obsidian-tasks-group.github.io/obsidian-tasks/) and you have a perfect GTD environment. All free, all in markdown.

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.

IMO: Obsidian does a good job in making me reflect and review notes, but not enough to prompt me to write more of them. Logseq does the exact opposite.

There's nothing wrong with Obsidian per se, but that's probably the crux of my issue with it. I'm not very naturally inclined to taking notes in the first place, and Obsidian just hasn't made me take that many more notes than I used to.

Logseq on the other hand has an editor that makes it hard for you to even write longer / multi-line blocks. In some ways, I suspect that writing in bullet points or smaller blocks encourages shorter but more frequent note writing, and my brain seems to respond well to that. Obsidian can technically do that to some degree, but the editor doesn't do enough to make me write shorter and more atomic notes, even with the Outliner[0] plugin installed.

[0]: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

As far as workflowly, the general workings of workflowly is an "outliner". I have been using Obsidian.md and the Outliner plugin: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner .

I have seen Outliner plug-in in Obsidian https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

It lacks a true outliner. There is a plugin, https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner, but up to now it is difficult to manage complex multi-line nested list.

The drop down Arrows for each Paragraph Looks like the plugin Outliner.

Athens Research (https://www.athensresearch.org/) uses a workflowy like UI. It comes with a bunch of other features, but you can ignore those pretty easily.

Obsidian with the Outliner plugin is also nice - although Obsidian isn't open source, it is free and all your data is stored locally as markdown files.

https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

Logseq support via our Logseq Plugin

Sorry, but _what exactly_ «it seems to do» from your point of view?

My «second brain» now is almost 300Mb of text, pictures, sound files, PDF and other stuff. As I already mentioned, it contains tables, mathematical formulae, sheet music, cross-references, code samples, UML diagrams and graphs in Graphviz format. It is versioned, indexed by local search engine, analyzed by AI assistant and shared between many computers and mobile devices. And (last but not least) it works: it allows me to solve my tasks way more faster than with the assistant of external, non-personalized tools (like ChatGPT, StackExchange or Google).

I know no tools for all this tasks except org-mode. Well, maybe Evernote in the 2010-s was something similar — but with less features, with more bugs and with worse interface.

Personal note-taking _is_ a complex task per se (well, at least for someone like typical HN visitor). I've seen many note-taking tools, that were ridiculously featureless, stupid and inconvenient because they were _not_ complex enough.

> Sure if one wants to do emacs-gardening it is fine.

1)You can use org-mode outside Emacs. See for example Logseq (https://logseq.com/), organice (https://organice.200ok.ch/) or EasyOrg.

2)Org-mode works in Emacs out of the box, you don't need any «emacs-gardening» to use org-mode.

3)The term «Emacs-gardening» itself sound a bit like hate-speech for me. The complexity of Emacs customization is overrated, mostly due to opinions of people who never used Emacs or used it in the previous millennium.

Obsidian is great.

For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/

For an opensource alternative to Obsidian checkout Logseq (1). I spent a while thinking obsidian was opensource out of my own ignorance and was disappointed when I learned it was not.

1: https://logseq.com/

I use logseq to keep journal of my daily work.

While Emacs and Org mode can certainly be used for this (and, when they can't, you can always inject little python/js scripts in your emacs config to take care of specific things), I'd also recommend you take a look at Logseq.