Obsidian - Roam competitor

[Diego Mesa]

Yet another Roam competitor, Obsidian: "Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files."

Link:

https://obsidian.md/

HN Comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598

Note the creator of obsidian is in the comments as well.

[Diego Mesa]

I recommend searching the comments thread for "Tiddlywiki". One comment:

"Obsidian is crazy good for how new it is. And the team is moving extremely fast. It seems like they really know what they want out of this product.

I've tried dozens of knowledge management tools and settled on TiddlyWiki a couple years ago. It took a lot of customization to get anywhere close as useable as Obsidian is out of the box.

Here's what I love about Obsidian:

- Local files, syncs via iCloud/Dropbox/etc makes it future proof

- Markdown with [[ ]]] bidirectional links and - [ ] checklists.

- Automatically updates all old links if you rename a file(!)

- Compatible with 1Writer on iOS

- Really nice keyboard shortcuts

- Runs as its own app (in a wrapper), but can be styled via custom CSS

- Automatically parses external URLs (don't necessarily need to use the markdown format for simple .com URLs)

- Great editing experience, e.g. auto indenting bullets

- Autocomplete for everything (tags, linked pages)

- Lots of extra nice touches like graph view and the pane system to open multiple files at once"

[Reet Pandher]

Well until it gets a web version or an android app i don't think it competes with TW.

Plus strollwiki with Tiddlymap is a pretty fantastic combo i'd say.

IMO the biggest problem why TW doesn't immediately appeal to the broader audience is the difficulty of theme customization. And even when you do manage to change the colors in the default wiki there is no guarantee that your plugins will also respect it.

Also stuff like TiddlyMap needs a bit of a facelift, doesn't matter to me but for the general public

[TonyM]

Yes

Almost everything is possible in tiddlywiki and a lot more. An elegant focused solution us nice, but then you could make your own edition.

Cloud services are often better thought.

Regards
Tony

[Ste Wilson]

Also from the comments this person linked to their getting tiddlywiki started tutorial.

https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-tiddlywiki

[Tony K]

I do use Obsidian and it is great

however give me a faster version of TiddlyMap and I wld be happy, vis.js is very slow

[Reet Pandher]

Is felix hiyashi in this group?

[Hubert]

I'm not sure if it's fair to compare TW with all these tools. What exactly is lost if TW does not immediately appeal to a broad audience?

TiddlyWiki is like a programming language, so some learning curve is part of the experience.

We can do amazing things with TW, both functionally and aesthetically, but only after investing in "cognitive load": learning and practicing the language. Much of the flexibility could be lost if more "features" were forced upon the uninitiated "out of the box".

An audience unwilling to learn is perhaps not TiddlyWiki's target "market"? Maybe it's apples to oranges in the first place?

Just some thoughts.

[Diego Mesa]

I'm in strong (but always respectful) disagreement with some of these thoughts.

There is much momentum building on the concept of bidirectional linking. This is literally TW bread and butter...

The flow of conversation around this topic is often like this:

• Statement: "TW is hard for new users to get started with!"
• Response: "But its very powerful!"
• Statement: "TW needs to improve its documentation!"
• Response: "But we have the Google group!"
• Statement: "TW needs to have a more "full" version that users can get started with!"
• Response: "Make your own edition!"
• Statement: "TW should appeal to a wider audience!":
• Response: "Why? And also, we don't know how many it already appeals too..."
  

In my mind, many of these other competitors have a basic TW data model (flat files, bidirectional links, etc.) polished it up, and are now seeing much more momentum. Note: I am not a technological historian, and the point of who invented something first, who's copying who, etc is not my point and beyond the scope of this response/thread I think.

I also do not want TW to eat the world. I am not a shareholder in the TW Corp, I don't want to see it grow for the sake of growth. I don't care what people used to organize their thoughts. They are free to use as many tools as suits their needs!

My #1 goal is simple: If I, after years of using TW strongly recommend it to peers, family and friends to try TW, I don't want to immediately have to issue 100 caveats about documentation, Google Groups, plugins, and saving mechanisms. I want something reasonable a person can just immediately pick and up try for a week without having to go many extra miles to climb the steep learning curve so early!

TW is very powerful, and does have a learning curve. But in my mind, there is no reason that it needs to be exposed so early.

IMPORTANT: Everything I've said here is my own opinion, and I mean it humbly (as someone unable to make any serious code contributions to TW) and respectfully to all who contribute and work on TW and in this group. I also recognize that there are different philosophies about the trade off between ease of use and access to power in software. For example, just look at the wide world of Linux distributions - i.e., arch Linux vs manjaro Linux.

I just don't see a reason why TW can't offer both - a polished, full, easy to immediately use getting started version, and a bare-bones power user version (empty)

Diego

[OGNSYA]

Diego: Fully agree. Keep TW as it is - highly customizable. But allow casual users to get a much more straightforward out-of-the-box experience.

About Obsidian: Seems interesting. But one thing that I really can't get behind is the edit window separate from the preview one. I know it's very popular, but I'm suspicious it's mostly among devs. For non-devs it's a dealbreaker. To me it's so akward - such wasted screen space...

[SizzlinSJ]

I actually don't disagree with you fully but how i see TW is like a blank paper. A Piece of paper can be used to write, make to todo list, draw on it, fold it like in origami. What one does is experiments, draw lines on it as instructions for other people and makes a origami paper. Here origami paper can be Stroll, Drift etc

I am just 3 months in, using TW, i did see huge improvement in this time. 

There are many tutorials but i think youtube/video has now become a important medium of tutorials than a text on a webpage explaining it, thats what is lacking in my opinion which will change as time passes for sure.

Edit: sorry for not mentioning reply is for Diego Mesa.

[Soren Bjornstad]

How about creating a second official edition that consists of the core bundled with a plugin or three designed to make TiddlyWiki simpler for beginners? This edition could be presented as the default when downloading TiddlyWiki, with a smaller option to download empty.html for people who already know what they're doing. And if you wanted to get rid of the training wheels later, all you'd have to do would be uninstall the plugin(s).

[Birthe C]

I think I remember that editions are not supposed to use 3 party plugins.

Birthe

[TonyM]

Soren,

I have said this a number of times, I call it the "Standard Edition". I also built a learning edition, based on all tiddlywiki.com with additional note taking facilities.

Always having an Empty.html is a good design approach, the minimal version. It is not suitable for new users transitioning.

Regards

Tony

[TonyM]

Birthe,

I would be surprised at that, an edition is the only way to pack a melange of components for a "finished solution". If so it is only a convention to be broken.

Regards

Tony

[Birthe C]

TonyM,

The discussion was about an edition that could be downloaded from tiddlywiki.com. The explanation I remember from earlier discussions was, that it was difficult to make sure, that 3 party plugins got updated.

Birthe

[Birthe C]

TonyM,

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/LdeTPT33J3M/CrAQ_KNmAAAJ for the last discussion.

[TonyM]

Birthe,

That discussion seemed older. The advantage of an edition is whatever the version the wiki, plugins and third party additions. they work together and are tested to do so. Upgrade at your own peril.

 

Recent examples of not yet formalised editions would be Davids "stroll".

Regards

Tony

[Birthe C]

TonyM,

I fully understand what you are writing.

The above link is from a discussion about 1½ month old, started by Diego Mesa wanting an edition, that feel finished like Roam.

I always thought that was the reason for not many editions on tiddlywiki.com, but lots of adaptations around the internet. I fully enjoy a couple of them, no doubt they are valuable.

What I was trying to do, was to point to an answer that has come up every time it has been discussed earlier.

Birthe

[Tony K]

There are quite a few of these 

Stroll : https://giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html

Drift : https://akhater.github.io/drift

TiddlyRoam: https://joekroese.github.io/tiddlyroam/

and many more

[TonyM]

To Illustrate "my insistence it is easy to build an Edition"

Here is One I Created Just now

Prepared CodeMirror Edition

See inside for

• Some easter eggs I have not had time to Publish.
• The way I am publishing it though my Own Google Forum

Reviews and commentary requested.

Next Edition - Offline learning. Edition.

Regards

Tony