What can I replace it with?
Let’s see… In the meantime, I got Milanote and now Obsidian. I hear Joplin is good too, but I haven’t used it yet. To be honest, Obsidian is so far a godsend for me.
Any other suggestions or should I just stick with what I have for now?
Stick with Obsidian. Add Khoj, commander, editing toolbar and custom frames extensions.
Awesome.
I also added Smart Connections and the stylus thingamajig.
So far, Obsidian is a dream come true, but of course, there are soooo many options; how does one ever know which one is the best out of thousands, it seems?
There is no best, it’s what’s best for you.
Aye, but there’s the rub!
I don’t know exactly what I like best!
And the worst part is: you gotta try multiple and trouble-shoot to know what you like best… Though so far, Obsidian is working out for me.
Yes, but once it’s mostly set up, it’ll beat all others. Initial investment is high but worth the rate of return tenfold. You can feed everything into it.
That’s just what I need. Thanks. I think this and Raindrop.io are what I needed all along.
You can put raindrop in a custom frame, too!
How so? I haven’t done that yet.
Still, they’re clearly asking for opinions from others on what they think is best and why.
Don’t fix what isn’t broken. It’s a feature.
I’m saving this all these recs lol. One that I can’t live without is Advanced Tables.
Yeah, I followed them to the T
I’ll also try Advanced Tables.
I use Obsidian too and pay for Sync. It’s expensive but I get the student discount (for now). Once that’s gone, I’ll try a VPN to get it from a country that has cheaper pricing.
Honestly tho, I might shift to Standard Notes before that. The only fact about Obsidian I dislike is that it’s not open source while SN is. I’m still thinking.
Another option is shifting things to Nextcloud which is pretty powerful too.
What is Nextcloud, exactly? My org uses it or some version of it, but I haven’t really used it myself.
It’s like an open-source version of the cloud offerings by major corpos like Google Drive, iCloud, DropBox, OneDrive etc. The most basic thing is simple file storage like any of the others but it’s actually pretty powerful and integrates well with a lot of the popular foss/libre apps. I just don’t have a busy enough life to need it lol. Here’s a video that goes over it tho
thnx!
Obsidian. Its wonderful. Read through the manual, it can do so much. Lots of good plugins too.
I use syncthing to sync my notes between devices. The cost of obsidian sync is a bit too high for my taste.
I use omnivore for grabbing and annotating web articles, it syncs to obsidian nicely via an official plugin.
Yeah, the plug-ins are great so far!
Smart Connections and the one for your stylus is also great.
And oh snap, that Omnivore plug-in sounds great. So you can save articles to Obsidian? I already have raindrop.io for that, which I recommend to everyone. I’ll consider using this “syncthing” as well.
one for your stylus is also great.
Which one is this? Excalidraw?
I save web articles to omnivore, its like pocket but foss, and then tag and annotate in there, usually on my phone. Then that is synced to obsidian. I only sync my annotations and highlights so I don’t add a bunch of bulk, but I think you can pull the entire article if you want. You may even find a raindrop plugin to do the same thing.
Syncthing can be weird to set-up, but it works well enough. If you have an android phone, I recommend the syncthing-fork app over the official one. Its better on battery and works better too. Apparently Obsidian Sync does work well if you have the cash and want something easy.
Two more plugins to take a look at, as I use them all the time:
Dataview, its a very powerful way to pull notes into lists and tables to make it easier to find things. I use YAML headers, aka metadata, to tag notes etc and makes dataview really useful.
Homepage, I set up a homepage which pulls lists of topics, tags, tasks, and recent notes. makes it way easier to find things I am looking for instead of digging into all the folders I have.
If you read a lot of pdfs digitally, also look at Zotero. It is a different piece of software, but a good way to manage and organize lots of pdfs. I pull my annotations from Zotero into Obsidian so I don’t have to go digging through pdfs to find quotes or annotations.
Yeah, I use Pocket but mostly Raindrop.io. And yes, I meant Excalidraw.
Also, I’ll use the syncthing-fork app over the official one, as you recommended. Let’s see… Dataview and Homepage are being put on my list as well.
I read PDFs digitally, yes, but I have the Reader app for that and I’m not sure I want to replace it. I can already annotate and note-take with that as well. What else can Zotero do?
If you have something you like, keep using it.
Zotero is a reference manager intended for academics. So it works very well with academic papers (and books too). It pulls all the metadata you need, and is very easy to use to get citations/bibliographies in whatever style you need. The webplugin for it is great, it will download the paper, add to the software, and properly add the metadata needed. It can also redirect you to your institutions proxy server to get access to journals (which isn’t of much use if you don’t have institutional access though).
I also have rss feeds to journals I keep an eye on, and I can download the actual paper from inside the software.
My workflow with zotero goes something like this:
Find paper in journal, download into zotero and categorize via firefox extension, read and annotate paper, import annotations with citations and links etc… into obsidian so I can reference in notes, etc…
I also use pandoc in obsidian to automatically pull references from my entire zotero library, so if I want to cite a paper I type, for example, @marxCapital… it then autofills what I am looking for, and adds proper citation in the sidebar in the style I need.
Actually, how would you compare the Reader app with Zotero?
Here it is:
The two are related to each other.
It looks prettier, but from a quick google search I can see it isn’t as good for managing large quantities of academic papers. I’ve never used it though, so idk
Yeah, it doesn’t seem to be able to do the same things your Zotero can do…
I use Feedly for my RSS feed, but that’s expensive.
Also, I’m saving this comment. Thanks again! Let’s see… Pandoc and possibly Zotero for more academic stuff. Gotcha.
Frankly, I’m spending too much on money and Feedly is expensive.
You may like “Feeder” is a foss app available via f-droid. You can import all your feeds as an OPML file. Doesn’t sync like feedly does though. I find it a bit criminal how much people try to charge for rss apps.
I only use Zotero’s rss for journals, its not a great rss app.
Np! The feature I use pandoc for used to be in the actual zotero obsidian plugin, but they took it out because it was a bit buggy ig.
Oof. That last part sucks, but perhaps I’ll use Pandoc myself someday.
And yeah, it’s criminal how much people charge for RSS feed apps.
Feedly is better than Feeder, but maybe the expense just isn’t cutting it and worth it all the same.
thnx
Wait, are these only for Linux?
I can answer this one, no, emacs does function on windows, and so does syncthing, though, I don’t know if that would be what I’d recommend to someone (who isn’t a programmer) getting into emacs is a bit of an investment
Yeah, it’s a bit of an eccentric setup, not a general recommendation, but it is what I do and I am happy with it. Emacs has ports to nearly as many operating systems as Doom (GNU Emacs predates Doom by 9 years). Org-mode itself, while primarily implemented in GNU Emacs, is a publicly specified plain text format, kind of like Markdown on steroids. There are apps for Android / iOS which support org-mode specifically, making it useful for mobile note-taking, and then some mechanism like Syncthing (could use DropBox or Git or anything else really) allows you to synchronize your notes between various devices. With time, it is finding native support in platforms like Github / Gitea / etc.
@Clever_Clover@hexbear.net isn’t kidding about the ‘investment’ though. Emacs comes from a period before the conventional desktop environment. From a period before keyboard shortcuts like ctrl-c / ctrl-x / ctrl-v were standardized for things like copy, cut, paste. It can be tweaked (through
LISP scriptingadding third party modes) to use more conventional keyboard shortcuts, but its idiosyncratic keyboard interface has benefits of its own. Its entire nomenclature (i.e. what a “window” is in Emacs vs. a conventional OS, or that a familiar feature like the “clipboard” is known as the “kill ring,” or that highlighted text is called a “region,” and that all of these things behave somewhat different than ‘normal’). There are reasons for this (for instance, your “clipboard” actually stores a ring-buffer of strings, and the action of “cutting” text is referred to as “killing”), but it is a fucking rabbit hole for sure.What are your recommendations for android apps that support org-mode?
I do use emacs extensively for programming mainly but I’ve recently been feeling the itch to actually make real organized notes so org-mode is a pretty natural choice for me, I’ve actually played with org before to write a small paper for uni (exporting to latex) and it was a nice experience
And another question, how do you organize your notes with a setup like this (syncthing and phone app)? And can you link from a note to another one? Do you just have all of your notes in a single directory or are they like organized into folders for topics?
I’ve used Orgzly on Android. It is not as rich in features as GNU Emacs (it’s not going to invoke a python interpreter to evaluate embedded snippets, for instance), but for ordinary outlines / to-do lists and stuff it works fine. With Syncthing, the workflow is, I have a “sync” folder, and a “notes” folder inside it, and I just dump things in there until there are enough individual notes on a particular subject that it makes sense to stuff them into their own folder (but org-mode makes very large, deep outlines pretty manageable). On Android, the Syncthing app is able to do its job at the filesystem level, and you just need to open/save notes in that folder. You do also need to run Syncthing on a VPS or something if you want your notes to sync while you are not connected to your home WiFi or when your other devices are shut off (paying for a cheap VPS and maintaining it in lieu of paying for a specific service).
Org mode has support for linking to other notes, though I haven’t really taken advantage of that. In practice, most of my notes are not synchronized, and live in the same folder as whatever projects they pertain to. I once had a Syncthing instance running on the open internet (and it was pretty cool), but I don’t do this currently. Having Syncthing running was also useful for syncronizing my keepass password database, configuration files, and other useful doodads.
Very interesting!
Yeah, I can’t figure it out with syncthing or Org Mode.
https://youtu.be/XRpHIa-2XCE?si=tbYkRe19ewCKWgwn
This is a nice video I recently watched on the topic
Thanks!
On another note:
Evernote is ass and too expensive.
Honestly, don’t get it; they’re stopping operations in America anyway due to not making enough dough.
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I wonder what this wanderer from another Lemmy instance was trying to say…
