obsidian-releases VS obsidian-dataview

The solution was already installed on both my computer and my phone: Obsidian.

> why does open source need to "win"

Open source does not need to win.

But your ability to be in control of your computer needs to be preserved. A proprietary fridge cannot control your diet, while a proprietary App Store can control what software you install on YOUR phone (unless you live in EU, hello DMA!). The tail wags the dog, so to speak. Proprietary software has also been shown to break user workflows or remove functions in an update while leaving users with no choice whatsoever.

One alternative to having open source win is to ensure software must come with a robust warranty and other assurances you expect from the things you buy. EU's CRA will make software vulnerabilities in WiFi routers covered by warranty, for example.

You can also ensure robust and interoperable data storage options. For example, https://obsidian.md/ stores all notes in Markdown, not holding the data hostage in case users will not like how future versions will work. GDPR actually has a provision for data portability (Art. 20), but it does not seem to have a requisite effect on the industry yet.

And until the above issues are solved, open source remains the best way to ensure that a software tail cannot wag your computer dog.

[2] https://obsidian.md/

So I've had my fair share of personal websites and blogs. I have built them on stacks ranging from the most basic HTML and CSS, to hosted frameworks like Wordpress and Laravel, to the more modern single page applications built in Vue and React. For a simple content blog I think you can't go wrong with a Static Site Generator though. These days I am almost exclusively writing everything in Obsidian. Which is great because its all in standard markdown format. This allows for a really neat and easy content publishing workflow.

Consider making an Obsidian[^1] plugin, or writing to Obsidian-compatible Markdown files :)

[^1]: https://obsidian.md/

Obsidian is a writing application created to allow for offline / private note taking in markdown format, in an interface that looks a lot like our regular programming IDE. It is very flexible, with a good collection of community plugins that you can use to customize Obsidian to your heart contents.

Obsidian support via our Obsidian Plugin

Thank you!

In the beginning, I used kognise'z water.css [1], so most of the smart decisions (background/text color, margins, line spacing I think) probably come from there. Since then it's been some amount of little adjustments. The font is by Jean François Porchez, called Le Monde Livre Classic [2].

I draft in Obsidian [3] and build the site with a couple python scripts and KaTeX.

[1] https://watercss.kognise.dev/

[2] https://typofonderie.com/fr/fonts/le-monde-livre-classic

[3] https://obsidian.md/

Great job!

I played around with this on a couple of small knowledge bases using an open Hermes model I had downloaded. The “related notes” feature didn't provide much value in my experience, often the link was so weak it was nonsensical. The Q&A mode was surprisingly helpful for querying notes and providing overviews, but asking anything specific typically just resulted in less than helpful or false answers. I'm sure this could be improved with a better model etc.

As a concept, I strongly support the development of private, locally-run knowledge management tools. Ideally, these solutions should prioritise user data privacy and interoperability, allowing users to easily export and migrate their notes if a new service better fits their needs. Or better yet, be completely local, but have functionality for 'plugins' so a user can import their own models or combine plugins. A bit like how Obsidian[1] allows for user created plugins to enable similar functionality to Reor, such as the Obsidan-LLM[2] plugin.

[1] https://obsidian.md/

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.