obsidian-tasks VS obsidian-outliner

Obsidian has a large collection of community-contributed plugins to serve various user needs. For this guide, we'll install Templater and Tasks, two plugins that can be really powerful when combined to create notes and task lists.

> Not really. Obsidian has its shares of problems too, and most of them originate from using Markdown.

Aha. Which problems do you mean?

> Markdown is a freeform text-format, and works very well for writing text, but it really sucks for data and structured content.

Joplin is using md to. And if Joplin does a good job on "data" and "structured content" (whatever you mean by that) by separating that in their DB, it's a big NO for me since it's a closed silo.

This: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview works so wonderful for me, and it never breaks anything in my simple md files.

> Most plugins and features in that area are very brittle and overspecialized, working only well enough in their specific use case.

Aha. I don't think so. Which authority says that? And even if It's like that, my markdown files would survive everything, since they are a) in git. https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git and b) easy to fix since it's a text file. Gosh!

> And gosh, Obsidian has really a huge amount of plugins for data-handling.

And gosh, this is a good thing!

> At some point, it was so bad that there were multiple competing task-plugins which broke each other just because they had different formatting for dates.

Installing multiple task plugins shows that something is "broke" on the user side. It's not the fault of Markdown or Obsidian.

Just have a look on: https://github.com/ivan-lednev/obsidian-day-planner but you dont need a fancy task plugin like this, if you know your way around https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview or https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks

Since the Ecosystem around Obsidian and pure Markdown, most of the time I stay in my browser https://github.com/deathau/markdownload and nvim https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim

Here’s the plugin’s Github page and here’s the documentation

It’s simply called tasks

I suggest you have a look at the Tasks Plugin.

Would you be so kind as to make the date and time format compatible with https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks ?

Tasks plugin - https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks

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