I recently got into smart notes and Obsidian. I think they can be a great way to organize your thinking and research. Any other users here?
I don’t like that it’s not open source though
It’s not? I thought it was. Regardless, I still like that you can just save your files in MD in case anything ever happens to it. I like the concept of future proofing your work.
If you look at their page they have parts that are gpl3, but the whole project as a whole is not open source.
There was a huge thread about it here: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/266
TLDR: devs won’t make it FOSS.
Ye, obsidian is awesome. I hooked it up to Zotero to pull annotations from pdfs, which makes it all so easy to search. Don’t sleep on zotero either, makes managing a massive collection of pdfs easy. I have like a thousand lmao
I don’t really use much of the obsidian markdown functionality though like linking etc other than basic formatting. But it’s such a clean interface and easy to use. The mobile app is good too.
Can you say more about how that works?
Do you just use Zotero to get the meta data and organise your PDFs then export and read everything in Obsidian?
Or do you read and make notes, gather quotes, etc, in Zotero, then export your notes to Obsidian before re-writing these into something coherent?
If it’s the latter, what’s the advantage over e.g. using the Word plugin to drop Zotero notes directly into a Word document? Is it that you don’t have to use Word (admittedly, that’s a big advantage)?
If that’s the case, can you use Obsidian to make your final drafts? Or do you still have to move to a word processor for that?
Or (sorry, I’m quite curious about this!) do you read in Zotero, highlighting relevant quotes in your research, then export those quotes into Obsidian, where you add your own analysis, etc, and then either finish the draft in Obsidian or export your Obsidian notes to e.g. Word to make a final draft?
Or (last one!) are you talking about making notes for e.g. studying rather than while researching for/writing a specific paper?
I’m rather old fashioned, see, so I tend to make hand-written notes in a notebook or (in pencil) directly in books or, occasionally, on a PDF (but I can’t keep track of those, so I avoid it most of the time). Then I move straight to Word and write, re-write, and re-write ad nauseam until I’m done. This is a bulky process so I’m looking for a more streamlined system that helps me keep track of notes. I’ve started to use Scrivener again for this but that doesn’t help me get my hand-written notes onto the screen.
To answer most of these questions:
I organize and read everything in Zotero (with the night mode plug in), and make highlights for quotes, very brief annotations, or add #lu (look-up) for citations I want to search up in bulk later. Then I use the Zotero Integration plugin to pull the quotes, with citations and annotations into obsidian (into a note with a standardized title like: lastnameTitleYEAR).
I’ve gone back and forth between using Zotero to “Create Note from Annotations” and then importing that, versus importing it directly from the Zotero pdf. I’ve been using the latter though because it comes with hyperlinks that bring me directly to the location of the highlight in zotero from obsidian. But I think you can create a custom template for the first solution that gives you the same thing. I still do the “create note from annotation” even if I don’t import it because I have a custom search that shows me every pdf with a note attached, which means I’ve read and annotated.
I also write out some notes digitally with a pen on my laptop in onenote (I kind of hate it, but it works) and then insert that pdf into the Obsidian note. But if I ever need that in plain text, I have to retype it because my handwriting is shit and the recognition software needs too much babysitting. Retyping can be helpful though.
I wish zotero’s pdf reader supported pen annotations and clipped them into images on export, but unfortunately it doesn’t. Xodo works well with a pen, but fuck if you can export that easily, and I’d rather not comb through pdfs to find notes.
I fucking hate word. I’ve been considering learning LaTeX, but I just don’t need like 99% of its functionality, especially not now, and markdown is easy and useful enough. I like how obsidian lets me see my notes in folders, and then opening them in tabs quickly. Way easier than managing a bunch of word docs. Its search functionality is also great. There is a ton you can do with obsidian in terms of hyperlinking to other notes, or specific sections of them. Like, lets say you have a note of annotations, and you have added a heading (#) to a certain section, you can type [[notename#heading]] and it will link directly to that part of the note. You can also pull that section from one note to be displayed in another using ![[notename#heading]] and it remains editable. All of this will autofill too, so you can do “
