MLO as a personal wiki

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Seeking That

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Mar 30, 2022, 2:18:16 PM3/30/22
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Hello All,

Just wondering if anyone was successful in using MLO as a personal wiki to be used as a ready reckoner or a knowledgebase ?

My thoughts on this topic:
MLO seems to be having good support of 'Markdown'.
 - Markdown has folding options using  "Summary" and "details" to  restrict view to inner levels of folding to give a summarized view
 - I see that MLO is invoking a notepad when a "*.txt"  is clicked which means that it does support helper applications.  But I couldn't see a place where this file association can be changed.
 - Personally I would like to link the "*.txt" with vim running from wsl2 maybe with as association like "bash -c "vim %" 
 - associate a Markdown file with a chrome-app which can display images and text well-structured in a markdown file

This would provide a basic personal wiki.  And this file subdivided with links so that it won't become a monolithic giant file...

If there is a provision to change the file associations with the app of our choice, MLO could potentially become a powerful personal wiki tool in my opinion.

Please provide your feedback.

Thanks,
Srini

Mark Levison

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Mar 30, 2022, 5:39:01 PM3/30/22
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Srini - I love MLO, I think I'm one of it's earliest users. As much as I love it, I can't see using as a Wiki. It doesn't support cross linking etc. 

If you enjoy Markdown, have you looked at Obsidian? Ugly UI, powerful app.

Cheers
Mark

Derek Verweij

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Mar 31, 2022, 2:50:48 AM3/31/22
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UI of Obsidian can be tweaked with downloadable themes as made by the public, just find your choice.

Op woensdag 30 maart 2022 om 23:39:01 UTC+2 schreef Mark Levison:

Derek Verweij

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Mar 31, 2022, 2:50:48 AM3/31/22
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Hi all,

My suggestion for a personal wiki would be: Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/). Markdown-based, loads of features, open source, not cloud based but can be synced across machines, my ideal solution.

Give it a glance, success! Greetings from snowy Holland, Derek.


Op woensdag 30 maart 2022 om 23:39:01 UTC+2 schreef Mark Levison:
Srini - I love MLO, I think I'm one of it's earliest users. As much as I love it, I can't see using as a Wiki. It doesn't support cross linking etc. 

ci...@online.de

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Mar 31, 2022, 3:16:59 AM3/31/22
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On 30.03.2022 23:39, Mark Levison wrote:
> Srini - I love MLO, I think I'm one of it's earliest users. As much as I
> love it, I can't see using as a Wiki. It doesn't support cross linking etc.
>
> If you enjoy Markdown, have you looked at Obsidian? Ugly UI, powerful app.

Same recommendation from me. MLO is great, but not as a personal wiki.
Note that you can link between Obsidian and MLO using special URLs.

-- Christoph

Fletcher Kauffman

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Mar 31, 2022, 10:07:39 AM3/31/22
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I second, third, fourth everyone else here in saying "Nah" as a personal wiki, but I will often a different suggestion: look at Joplin for a personal Wiki, if you want open source, and particularly if you're looking for functionality like Evernote.

I, myself, will be checking out Obsidian and *praying* this doesn't mean a third migration of all of my note stuff in 12 months.

Seeking That

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Apr 2, 2022, 5:34:36 AM4/2/22
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I agree with all the opinions here .. will give a try with Obsidian .. 

thanks everyone

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Seeking That

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Apr 2, 2022, 5:34:37 AM4/2/22
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I was thinking of creating a never-expiring task for brain-dump (whatever the name) and create a markdown link in the local file system in Windows. The file-type for md in Windows is to be set to the browser of personal choice and put all the links to text, images, videos in the order we want.  As part of weekly GTD updates, perhaps brain-dump can be refined.  But Obsidian also is good.  Thanks for the link.

Srini



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John Stanforth

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Apr 3, 2022, 2:02:41 PM4/3/22
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I've seen lots and lots of people talking about Logseq online as a competitor/substitute for Obsidian, especially since it's free, open-source, and has a small team of developers (I think six?) that crank out new code releases every other day at a shocking pace. 😊

I'd used other notes- and outlining-apps in the past, including Dynalist from the creators of Obsidian, but in the past couple months, I've played with Logseq quite a bit, then started using it daily, then migrated over YEARS of old notes, and I'm loving it so far.  Also, having all my notes in an open-source app with Markdown files in the underlying directories means I'm never locked into anything and I can already seamlessly migrate to other notes apps that use the Markdown format.

I liked it enough that I signed up on OpenCollective to donate monthly to their Logseq open-source project and hopefully keep the momentum going with all their many improvements.

Anyway, check it out if you can...

-John

Derek Verweij

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Apr 4, 2022, 4:49:40 PM4/4/22
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hi John, thanks for your reply! Could you point out the advantages of Logseq when compared to Obsidian? The points you mentioned about Logsec are equally applicable to Obsidian (free, open source, very dedicated team of developers, frequent updates).

cheers, Derek.

Op zondag 3 april 2022 om 20:02:41 UTC+2 schreef johnst...@gmail.com:

Mark Levison

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Apr 4, 2022, 4:56:00 PM4/4/22
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Derek - I'm fully committed to Obsidian, it isn't Open Source. This is their licensing agreement: https://obsidian.md/eula

Cheers
Mark

John Stanforth

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Apr 5, 2022, 2:15:26 AM4/5/22
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Hi Derek,

As Mark pointed out, Obsidian isn't open source, and I'd add, it's free for non-commercial use but if you mix work projects and personal notes in one big collection (with separate branches/folders for different types of projects, etc), then you'll likely exceed their personal-use-only free license.

More importantly to me, Logseq being open source means I can run it locally on my machine even without Internet access, modifying it however I want to add features, run it locally on my home network, experiment with different use-cases that others may not care about.  It really depends on your own needs and goals.

And especially for me, I'm working on other software that deals with Structured Data and then pairs with Logseq to handle the Unstructure Data type content (aka "Free-form Markdown outlines" in Logseq, Obsidian, etc), so my needs are probably even weirder than most people's... :-)

So... Logseq may or may not fit your needs, but especially since it's completely free and open source, seems like it's worth checking out before committing to any one product and spending time migrating previous notes and everything into whichever one you choose.

Cheers,

-John

John Stanforth

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Apr 5, 2022, 2:15:26 AM4/5/22
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Sorry, my last post hasn't appeared here yet so no way to edit it, but... correction... Obsidian works on the local machine like Logseq does, I think, and you sync it some other way, as some of you pointed out earlier.  So disregard that bit of my last message. :-)

Derek Verweij

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Apr 6, 2022, 11:22:00 AM4/6/22
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hello John,

thank you for your extensive review. Will certainly have a look (already gave it a glance)! My first impression is that Obsidian fits my (moderate) needs perfectly, but am always curious and on the lookout for the best fit - and before this thread had not heard of Logseq, so some personal reviewing to do this weekend.

Cheerio all!

Op dinsdag 5 april 2022 om 08:15:26 UTC+2 schreef johnst...@gmail.com:

Fletcher Kauffman

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Apr 20, 2022, 12:02:58 AM4/20/22
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I'm back, and sure enough, delving into Obsidian turned an experiment with it into using more regularly.

Having come from Joplin, I can say that while Obsidian has a lot of cool features, Joplin is open-source, seems to support nearly all the same features (it also has plugins), etc. and the one thing I've heard people cite as a weakness is, to me, a strength (after a few weeks working with Obsidian):

With Obsidian, the markdown file has the same filename as the note's title-- there is no distinction, so you can not name a note with any characters that are forbidden in the file system. This broke tons of my note names when I important, and some just can't be fixed (how many notes do I have that are titled with a question?). Joplin mangles the markdown file's name, and stores the note's name as distinct from the filename, so the note names remain intact, irrespective of the filesystem. Joplin also stores the data in a straight directory structure, with no hierarchy, but inside your Joplin.. uhh.. vault-equivalent, there is one.

I think if I had known more about this topic (not just note-taking, but PKM in general), when I started using Joplin, I might never have switched. It seems most of the other features I thought were missing from Joplin are actually available if you go to look for them. It has several export options, too, if you wanted to take your data (remember-- open-source) to another program.

I will give Obsidian props for several things: thriving community, insane number of plugins, pretty UI, and seeming to sit well with the committed PKM crowd. I happen to like (but others would likely feel the opposite way) that you have to come up with your own synchronization arrangement, unless you want to pay for their service.
For joplin: mobile app works pretty well, supports natively several types of synchronization, and isn't just the desktop app crammed onto the device's screen. Joplin also seems to be much more stable as far as the editor goes-- both the markdown and WYSIWYG editors. Feels more solid-- a truck, not a sports car.

Jon R

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Apr 30, 2022, 6:11:51 AM4/30/22
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A quick message of support for MLO (of course) but for a dedicated wiki what I use is ZIM: It's FOSS under current development and presents a clean text environment (good for focussed writing) and an infinite heirarchy/tree based on the folder system:
  • Architecture is the file system i.e. folders and txt files enhanced by wiki-like encoding (not markdown but xxx - sorry, forgot!) with clean & simple formatting.
  • It has links and backward links, universal tags, recent history, bookmarks, advanced search, attachments, image handling, background indexing and saving.
  • There are add-ins such as journal, task-list, maths and many others.
  • Data can be exported as markdown, HTML and other formats.
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