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This week: Three paths to a collection of locally stored files that can be used in more than one app, with 4 reasons why Obsidian is still my favourite. Silver Bullet looks interesting and Org-mode intrigues me, but I won’t be diving into either any time soon.
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There are more popular apps for working independently with your notes than I could fit into the headline, so I’m taking these three as my poster children, just for today.
Silver Bullet is an up-and-coming that’s garnering some attention, while Obsidian and Org-mode have a measure of fervour bordering on the religious that I’d like to address. Briefly. Here it is:
Enjoy your favourite, and allow others to do the same. Amen.
If you like reading articles that offer x-number of ways to make you more productive with Obsidian, here’s your fix for the week. Of the 11 offered I found one I hadn’t heard of but don’t need (editing tool bar), six I use often, and four that are great features, though I don’t currently have a use for them.
Obsidian remains my most-used Markdown text editor, because —
Some will disagree with the last part of point 1, but it’s true. It’s easy to become locked-in to Obsidian-only features, but only if you don’t use the app in a manner that leaves you free to leave at any time with notes that are usable elsewhere.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have [an app] where your notes are more than plain text files? Where your notes essentially become a database that you can query; that you can build custom knowledge applications on top of? A hackable notebook, if you will? https://silverbullet.md/
I’m keeping an eye on Silver Bullet, the open source, Obsidian-like notes app that’s looking more and more interesting each time I see an update from them. My current knowledge of the Terminal isn’t sufficient to know how to install it, however — I’ll pop it on the list for Johnny to help me with next.
Org-mode has been presented to me more than once as the panacea I apparently didn’t know that I needed. According to its acolytes, Org will tick all my boxes and give me unlimited power to do things I’m doing now as well as other amazingness that Obsidian plugins can’t hold a candle to.
For now, Org is beyond both my current abilities and my desire to increase them. But! There’s an interesting but I only learned about a few days ago: Org-mode is a term that means two different things.
One is the programmy, more-complicated-than-I’m-ready-for thing, and the other is a simple markup language much like Markdown, but more consistent. Completely consistent, actually. Markdown has flavours, while the Orgdown syntax that Karl Voit proposes has none of that nonsense going on.
Orgdown shares Markdown’s intuitive approach to creating human-readable text with inbuilt formatting, but there’s a distinct lack of compatibility for it in common tools. I mean, even Google Docs is making room for Markdown these days.
Markdown continues to serve me well. My newest grandchild is 3 days old and life is wonderfully full, so all I’ll be doing with Org-mode and Orgdown for the time being is watching them with interest, from a distance.
Johnny Decimal is teaching me the command line. He welcomes input on the way he’s demystifying this baffling super power, so feel free to follow #LearnCLI and join the conversation on the Fediverse.
This week I’ve focused on entering my financial records into hledger format, and getting more familiar with basic reports. My brain gets a dopamine hit each time I enter something new and things still balance. I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but man, I love the simplicity and portability of entering data this way! Maybe next week I’ll see what the Ledger plugin in Obsidian can do.
Gareth Stretton recommended I read the book Practical Vim — Edit Text at the Speed of Thought, but I couldn’t justify dropping nearly $30 AU on it. Fortunately I was able to borrow the book here, and will work my way through it bit by bit. Hurrah for internet libraries!
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