obsidian-outliner VS obsidian-dataview

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

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.