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?
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.
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:
https://read.readwise.io/
https://readwise.io/
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.
To be clear, there are two different apps called Feeder, a paid one like feedly, and a Foss one available on fdroid. Confusing, I know.