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Joshua Lo's avatar

The links and graph features look so valuable! I have this massive document of linked materials that I've been thinking about porting to a more robust and searchable setup that doesn't ask Word to reindex the document for... 30 seconds... and search only by substring, which isn't always the best when I don't actually remember what I wrote

I'll be giving this a whirl!

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Reece's avatar

Please let me know how it works for you

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Joshua Lo's avatar

I've been assessing it for a few days now, and I've come across a lot of pros:

1. Excellent Wikipedia-style linking + traditional markdown linking + link/backlink view + tagging = excellent visibility by search

2. Graph view is cool! I'm going to chuck a conlang dictionary at it and see what happens to the graph and see if it can be traversed to easily find stuff I'm looking for

3. Tagging. Tagging. God I love tagging. Word can't do this so easily and neither can Scrivener/Scrapple

4. Community plugins are great. They also fill what IMO are some glaring feature holes in Obsidian, like table manipulation without looking at the source .md, the document processor-style UX (since that's where I'm coming from), and symbol insertion - coming from Windows, it's not very easy to insert symbols

A few cons, though:

1. Symbols are still super difficult to deal with even with the Unicode Search plugin. It might be a skill issue, but I'm finding I can't use combining diacritics - they get turned into normal diacritic characters, so I have to hope that I can use the Unicode Search plugin, which could do with a better, Word-style insertion UX - right now I have to know exactly what I'm looking for by Unicode name, otherwise I get a hundred unrelated results

2. Why is the document centre-aligned in the window lmao I have two monitors so my head is constantly turned to one side

I think I'm going to port everything I have in Word to Obsidian.md - I open Word sometimes and my fan goes nuts, which is worrying 😬

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Reece's avatar

I'm happy it sounds like it's mostly going well for you. That being said, out of curiosity, what are you using all the symbols for?

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Graham's avatar

I used to use Evernote for the longest time with little complaint but once they paywalled additional devices, I really burned out on them. I also share your frustration with Google Drive, I try to avoid it at all cost. Plus after a while, it feels like almost every note app under the sun becomes little more than just a storage bin for links to websites. I remember someone not too long ago recommended Obsidian to me for use with my then other job, reading this definitely makes me want to give it a proper try and see what I can do with it. Thanks!

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Reece's avatar

Please do I think your experience with Evernote will mean a positive experience with obsidian, anyway, let me know how it goes!

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