Item — HN Reader

Interesting project. It says it is inspired by obsidian (and roam). It is also keen on "end-user Programming", so the org-mode (and org-roam) comparison is inevitable on HN (20 emacs occurences in this thread and counting...)

So, what is special?

It is polish (=creator [4]). does that count? [0]

Seriously. For one thing, I spotted the "item" and "data" as queryable data sources [1]. if this is real "block level querying" (in that freeform page format), it could be indeed a missing link between obsidian and roam/logseq [0]. It is still early days though.

[0] Outside English-speaking/Western-Europe, Siuyan [2] is another local open source KB gem that successfully bridged this (blocks + freeform) gap with a very fast dev cycle. Being Chinese, It is not popular... wait.. what about logseq [3] ? (obsidian too? no.)

[1] https://silverbullet.md/%F0%9F%94%8C_Directive/Query

[2] https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan#-features

[3] https://twitter.com/tiensonqin

[4] https://twitter.com/zef/

2 comments

Zef here ([4]), the end user programming aspect is very much in development and its exploration phase. It’s not even so much about implementing it, more the design of how to make or useful and how to use it. Any input on this is very much appreciated. I try to take inspiration from Obsidian Dataview, LogSeq and others on this.

> more the design of how to make or useful and how to use it

Yeah 100%. Emacs is almost 50 years old and still very popular. You can't beat it on programming power. Personally, I am not an emacs person (I'm even more notion than obsidian), so I understand your selective, design first approach to this.

> take inspiration from Obsidian Dataview, LogSeq

IMO

1. Obsidian Dataview should have been editable by design (not to say batch-editable)

2. Obsidian creators should have leveraged their dynalist (outlining) heritage into their newer product.

Your project is still young of course (I like it so far !) but some features are better kept in mind from the start. I hope you will take the best of both world (= see my "block level querying" remark in previous post)

Good luck!

Making views editable is quite challenging. Especially in the general case. For tasks specifically this works, you can query them somewhere and when you toggle their completion state this gets propagated back. Editing other attributes is more tricky.

Re 1.

There are a few other plugins out there that help with this. I feel blacksmithgu never intended to use this as an editor of sorts.

To me, Obsidian flexibility and ease of customization makes it more of a personal operating system than simply a knowledge base.

An OS requires a DB, but a DB is not an OS.

> An OS requires a DB

You said it yourself: Obsidian (= an OS) requires a DB.

But It does not have (a good, full-featured) one yet. dataview ? db-folder ? Yeah, sure, we are getting there [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33820817

If it’s really going to go down this route then really someone should write one (an extensible PKM app) in a quicker language like Rust, Go or Swift. It’s an Electron app, if people are going to add massive amounts of plugins it’s going to become a resource hog before too long.

Even a completely empty Obsidian vault with no plugins is slow to load on iOS (although I am still running on an 8 plus so it might be quicker on more modern hardware). I actually capture any new notes when I’m out and about in 1Writer because it loads instantaneously then move them into Obsidian when I’m on my Mac at a later date. I only use the obsidian mobile app now if I want to specifically look up or modify an existing note.

I’m not a massive fan of all these extensions for Obsidian tbh, it seems to go against the grain of what the whole thing was originally meant to be about which was basically a note taking tool that had back links and block inclusion like Roam but one that was also portable due to it being markdown. Now people are just writing reams of config in code blocks inside markdown files which are going to be completely useless outside Obsidian unless someone is going to port that plugin to whatever application you want to migrate to. Plugins that add functionality that work within the existing markdown format are ok such as the Calendar plugins, advanced tables, natural dates etc but the config based plugins are no bueno as far as I’m concerned. If they become syntaxes like fountain or mermaid with a life outside of Obsidian I’d consider using them but until that day I will most likely steer clear.