@bjhess I’ve been in this boat before so many times. What would it look like if it worked for you? What are you wanting out of it?
@365Erik Thank you for your ideas. Transcluding does look simple, yet powerful. Thanks for that tip. You have good tips for building up to stuff. I definitely don't want to go whole hog. I'm a little cautious here because I currently have notes/writing spread throughout Bear, Apple Notes, Evernote, iA Writer, and Dev Logs in my various coding projects. I have a dream that Obsidian might replace all of those save for perhaps iA, but I don't want to commit to early.
@mejh I'm liking the Blue Topaz theme, but Minimal is installed for me to swap to as I'm experimenting. I'm avoiding the directory structure right now, though I wouldn't mind moving my Dev Log over to Obsidian (and put it in a tag/folder). Problem is that code pastes add a bunch of extra newlines. Gotta see how to fix that.
Will be curious to see how you like Obsidian over time!
@christopherchelpka I think the idealistic way it would look is that it replaces Bear, Apple Notes, and my dev logs that I keep per project right now. I think that's a bit idealistic as Apple Notes are great for sharing with other people in that ecosystem and Obisidian doesn't seem to handle pasting code in very readily (it adds newlines between each line).
I think it's hard to have a "digital brain" if your notes are spread among 4, 5, 6, or more systems. I'm not sure if you can get the benefit of Obsidian without fully committing, but it's hard to fully commit without knowing you'll get the benefit. :)
@365Erik Of course now I want to transclude links to webpages, but I don't think that's a thing...
@bjhess From what you’re saying I think you’re going to need a few different tools. But maybe you’re sensing a need to reduce the number of tools/spaces you use? If so, you could start by combining one or two and see if that helps enough. Obsidian is great but I don’t know Bear. Is there something about Bear that you are hoping Obsidian will improve?
@365Erik I’ll have to check that iFrame business out. You said IDE, have you figured out how to avoid code pastes having a newline inserted between each line?
I’ve used many of those tools as well, and also am considering building my own via a logbook concept. Probably that would be for shorter things like food logs, exercise logs, etc.
@christopherchelpka I was actually hoping Obsidian might require less top-down structure and might form it’s structure organically. Where it seems to work more naturally appears to be in the linking between notes. Bear feels like a place to make lists, but when you want to break one of those list items to its own note it gets frictiony. Obsidian seems like it might make that easier? Probably drawing some inspiration from how wikis work I would guess.
@365Erik Now I’ve learned something new! Having not been aware of this, I’ve been annoyed so many times by the formatting. Wish this was an option on iOS with the built in keyboard as well.
@365Erik My number one example is when I write a long title in Apple Mail for iOS, then finding out a little afterwards that I really should have that as part of my email content, and then I copy the title, paste it in with the rest of the content, and it’s two points smaller, so I have to mark it, and then alter it with the format-pane.
(Trying this just now, and it seems like it now automatically inherit the format of the content when I do that). 🤷♂️
@bjhess Obsidian doesn’t organically form its own structure, though I suspect that AI will make this possible someday across a number of knowledge management systems. What Obsidian does do is show you the structure of your notes, which is very cool and can be helpful for perfecting your structure. Obsidian also allows you to create your preferred structure, using (or not) vaults, folders, tags, wiki-style links and directory type pages that some people call maps of content. You can create anything from a very flat structure to a very hierarchical one. It’s worth noting though that other apps offer this structural flexibility as well, including Notebooks and DEVONthink.
@365Erik I feel like an idiot for not trying ‘cmd + shift + v’. I must not have needed that for a while!
Thanks for sharing your layout and usage! Today I'm starting to get an idea how useful this can actually be. Kind of excited! I'll put those plugins on my list to investigate once I get a little more comfortable.
@christopherchelpka Ah, thank you! I was reading this post on Daily Notes and started seeing how you can mix and match. It made me realize that Bear sort of deals with tags, but visualizes it as folders. That's never quite felt right. I think I'm going to commit to putting some things into Obsidian and seeing how it goes.