This is the same for me. I recently decided to finally give Obsidian a go, and the shortcuts and document-creation experience is really nice. Couldn’t help but to feel that a lot of this “basic markdown editing” that I’m doing in obsidian could be done in DEVONthink as well, but after playing around with it I came to the same conclusion that markdown editing in DT3 is just not very nice.
I could hack support for daily notes, weekly notes and so on into DEVONthink with applescript, but the general writing experience lacks. I’d do it right away if the markdown editor improves though!
Both are “knowledge databases”, and I’m hoping that DT3 will improve some of those points some time.
I’ve been doing exactly that as well: DEVONthink is my “filing” application where I put documents in, but barely ever edit anything in there. If there is a new version of a PDF available, I remove the old one and import the new version.
Obsidian (currently, before that it was Craft, and before that just Drafts) are my note apps to scribble things down. If it ended up becoming something more long-lasting, I import the finished version into DEVONthink.
I’m not good with document organization so I try to treat them as temporary first. That’s also why apps like Evernote or Bear never clicked for me: I’m just really bad with organizing these kind of note snippets that are floating around. In DEVONthink everything is more structured and has a place where it should go. So DT3 is my “organized shelf” and the other apps a random piece of paper that’s on my table. Kind of.
Been with Obsidian only for a week so far and no idea if this one will click, but I already notice my sidebar getting more chaotic
For me the trick with Obsidian is pretty much the opposite of DT. No “structure”. Leave yourself links. Breadcrumb trails.
For example if I find out how to change my oil, I would create a note called “How to change oil” and link it to “Car Maintenance”, “Cars” etc. wherever is relevant.
Can you explain that a bit more? How do you "link to ‘car maintenance’, ‘cars’ and so on? Would you create a new “Car.md” document and in that insert links to those other snippets? The other way around?
The whole “linkings crumbs of information” didn’t click with me yet
If you have Wikilinks enabled in Obsidian you can just type [[ and start typing something that is part a note file name and it will show a list of possible matches that you can then choose to complete the link. Obsidian also shows you the backlinks so if you’re in an older note you can easily find what you’ve linked to it. It’s brilliant at this, in my week-and-a-bit experience.
I’ve also enabled wikilcnks in DT3 as well now, never having used them previously, so that the links in my indexed Obsidian files work there too.
Ah that I know, I meant more specifically how @DandyLyons is using it with the “breadcrumbs of information” approach. Like, how do you structure the notes, when do you link them, to what?
Ah sorry. I misunderstood your question. I primarily link to a very small number of individual notes, but I have some hub/structure notes to link to a load of related notes. In your example, I would personally have a hub note for car which links to key car maintenance notes which would interlink to each other as appropriate, but others have a variety of other approaches. There’s a lot of really helpful stuff on this on Zettelkasten.de.
My approach is pretty similar to what @tonywatkins just described.
Basically Wikilinks have been a game changer for me. Before I had to create a structure beforehand. But if 1) I didn’t follow it religiously or 2) the structure had some flaw in it, then the whole system would fall apart.
But now with wiki linking I don’t need to worry about that. I can use multiple “structures” and I don’t have to perfectly follow any of them. If one of them fails, another can pick up the slack.
For my use case, I’m learning the swift programming language. So I’m constantly finding articles that I will want to refer to later.
My system has grown organically. I just think about where would I expect to find this note in the future and then I save it as a wiki link in those places. The more places I link it to, the better (as long as they’re relevant) because each one is another chance for me to find it.
The graphical view of my linkages and notes. That alone is the major value I find in Obsidian. Contrary to the opinion of the DT staff that graphical view has benefits that they are ignoring or dismissing as a fad.
I also echo
these benefits.
Another one is that I want an option when I am viewing the markdown to see the various blocks in colors. Any decent programming IDE supports different colors for commands etc and it’s a simple matter to implement that in the markdown editor in DT but again, it seems that that need is ignored.
Much faster linking ability. Plugins that handle specific stuff that is highly useful, like the sliding panes one and several for integrating Zotero bibtex files directly for references that are much mreo difficult to do in DT3. Better ways to view backlinks and possible things to link. The graph view which I’m finding extremely useful. I can change the theme in Obsidian so that all the various markdown commands and sections can be displayed in a different color.
Some of those things you can do in DT3 but they are much harder to access and use.
The markdown editor in DT3 is incredibly slow if you want to see the preview. I don’t really understand why but it is very slow to display the rendered markdown text. I also can’t figure out how to link it so scrolling in the markdown also scrolls the preview so it’s just a lot slower to use.
In general, I’m finding Obsidian and DevonThing complement each other nicely. I do most of my work in Markdown, and Obsidian is a great Markdown editor and document repository. DevonThink is … OK at Markdown. It’s gotten much better recently, for which I am grateful, but it’s still just OK. For example, Obsidian supports folding, and readable line widths make it easier on the eyes.
Flipping between multiple documents throughout the day is easier in Obsidian than DevonThink.
Also, the Obsidian mobile experience (in beta) is light-years better — for me — than DevonThink to Go. DTTG is far inferior to DT for desktop.
On the other hand, DevonThink excels at storing and organizing multiple document types, and searching them. DT also lets you create a permanent link to a document, which will stay with that document wherever it moves to.
Also in DevonThink’s favor:
It’s bombproof. I’ve been using DT for three years and have never had a database corruption problem. I know others who’ve used it much longer and who can say the same.
It’s relatively futureproof. Been around for nearly 20 years. Futureproofing is relative; I’m relatively confident that my DT databases will still be usable years from now. I won’t say the same for other apps that have more current cachet.
It’s aggressively designed to work with other apps. Again, other, trendier note-taking and document creation apps are not so friendly with other apps.
Lately I think of Obsidian and DevonThink as a single, unified app, and switch between them multiple times a day. I’ll be writing an article in Obsidian and suddenly need to access a DIFFERENT project that I thought I was done with last week or in November. I Cmd-Tab over to DevonThink, find that project, and then flip back to Obsidian and keep going.
I would have agreed with you up until the issue I had recently with the lsot files on DTTG 3. The whole empty file syndrom. That has really made me question the viability of long term use of DT.
Have just begun to use DT - and love it. Began to use Obsidian a month or so ago; and love it too (though not so much as I love DT).
Have imported almost all my docs into DT. They all open with the apps I’d expect.
I initially resisted Indexing as untidy: both in case I move the folder in question - e.g. an Obsidian Vault, and - well, because I’ve Imported everything else…
But I’m prepared to Index - if only because Obsidian is such a powerful, growing and well-supported piece of software.
Can anyone find a better way to open an Obsidian Vault (still in ~/Documents - that is, neither Imported or Indexed) from within DT than creating a plain text file with the single line:
Why not indeed, Jim! Of course. Thanks. Works perfectly. .
Of course macOS does not (yet?) associate .md (which is even the TLD for the Obsidian project) files with Obsidian rather than anything else - like mind mapping apps.
You actually can’t do this with Obsidian. It’s a requested feature, but implementation is not as straightforward as it may seem.
Obsidian is actually more a “Vault editor” than a “markdown editor.” An Obsidian vault is a folder of markdown files (and other file types). Vaults are composed of these files, and you can’t have a file that is not part of a vault.
For folks in this thread: I made an Obsidian plugin and DEVONthink toolbar script that together provide a sorta soft integration between the two apps.
Now I think I may adopt Obsidian for all my note-taking… there is a bug (which seems to have been introduced in Big Sur) in TextEdit (I have used BBEdit since version 6, and Scrivener for longer such docs) whereby deleting a text-selection which includes a heading backwards (‘delete’ key/Cmnd-X) crashes TextEdit.
So I can see Obsidian becoming pretty much my default for simple texts. Because (new to DT) I have decided to import as much as I can into DT, the more seamless the workflow the better.
Appreciated: do you have a ‘Buy me a coffee’ etc link, please, Ryan?
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