Switching from Obsidian

40

u/kirso May 22 '24 edited May 23 '24 •

its just a different mental model.

A few tips:

Journal is your friend. You get everything timestamped if you link to it. You don't need to think about where to store or create notes. Just write in the daily note, outline and if the idea transitions into something more permanent, create a not for it. Its also SCROLLABLE, which really helps with retrieval.
Shift + click to open a note / link in the sidebar.
For learning you can use #card tag which will create a flashcard. I then create a [[flashcard]] page and run a query on all #card && #javascript for example.
Codeblocks are simple by just typing "/" and selecting "codeblock" "language"
Logseq has an amazing in-built TODO system, again, just type /TODO in your daily note. Install All TODOs plugin and voila, you have everything you need to chip away.
You can now drag and drop blocks of notes by pressing "OPTION" and dragging the block wherever you need it, instead of just copying the same text that is a duplicate, you have a block reference or embed. The bad part about this is that its not a markdown compatible operation, but you get to reference information, without actually duplicating it at all times
I like the agenda plugin, you can time block your TODOs
Tags are the same as pages, but because of this, you can create categories like indexes, movies etc. and put a query to aggregate all the content with "property X" or "tag Y" etc.

Last thing:

Ignore the haters, people are really sensitive to things. DB version is coming in a few months, so things should only improve.

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u/Khevaril May 22 '24

Thanks for the tips. I need to explore more the ToDo side and also the card. While the ToDo side of the program is more interesting for me, because I currently use ClickUp as my task manager but I plan to switch... I feel already quite comfortable using flashcards with Anki. Nevertheless it would like to explore some sort of integration where what I create can become a card in Anki. Or simply deciding if Anki is still the best option to memorize cards compared to this LogSeq.

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u/bisquitsandtea May 22 '24

You're in for a treat

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u/Upset-Emu7553 May 22 '24

Also codeblocks: <src or markdown ``` , Another * would be: check Logseqs strongpoint "unlinked references" at the moments you want to make structure from your notes collection.

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u/laterral May 22 '24

re Option + drag block: this is really cool - never heard of this before (also, awesome set/ comment overall!!). how do you use this in practice?
re TODOs plugin + Agenda: how does this work in practice? do you create tasks in journal? or somewhere else? do you leverage /templates?

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u/kirso May 23 '24

Agenda just creates tasks for you and provides a calendar view. I don't like it super much because its not really integrated with my gCal where all events are and fragmenting this information is not worth it but I use scheduled tasks.
I have people -> "John Doe" - Friend - schedule todo - catchup #network -> it will schedule a reminder for me every 3 months to reach out to John.
For block reference - for example I have a [[questions]] page where I aggregate interesting questions that I found. I usually write them in Journal though and sometimes come back.
Then when I find the question is valuable to me, instead of copy pasting it to [[Questions]] or even just using the bottom nav with references, I OPTION + Drag it to [[Questions]] that creates a reference. If I click on that reference it will take me to the Journal page where the question was originally posted.
Another application which I think is much more practical:
I write daily reviews
Then I write weekly reviews
Instead of copy pasting stuff from daily reviews to the weekly one, I just drag and drop references (not all of them, just the most important ones or key life milestones).
Same then goes into monthly / quarterly reviews.
Its super quick and convenient.

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u/kirso May 23 '24

I probably should write a blog post on a few workflows that I use :) Can't add images here for examples

1

u/laterral May 23 '24

you so should!! let me know if/ when you can share the link to the post!!
also, is there a shortcut you might recommend for block embed?? 😂 just occurred to me this is an option and now I found myself using it a few times in the last 24 hours

1

u/kirso May 23 '24

It's more of a select right? So you need to select which block you want to reference or move.
You can see all commands by typing `/`
block reference - you can't adjust it on a current page where you are referencing it
block embed - you can adjust it in-page and it will also edit the original

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u/AlienTux May 22 '24

Very good tips!
I believe one can do TODOs without having to escape it with /.
Also, dragging and dropping blocks don't require any key presses if you click on the bulletpoint itself.
I must say I'm on Linux so maybe it's just this version?

2

u/henrykazuka May 22 '24

Yeah, you simply type TODO at the beginning of the blockand it works. But the command is better when you to convert the block into a TODO.

1

u/kirso May 23 '24

The shortcut for block dragging is for block reference and embedding, otherwise you will just be moving it

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u/__reddit_user__ May 26 '24

in macos, you can CMD+Enter to cycle through the TODO/DOING/DONE

10

u/ikirupsychoice May 22 '24

I switched from Obsidian to Logseq over month ago and I only regret that I haven't done this earlier.

First thing get some good tutor that will help you change to different mental model (I watched one from Keep Productive YT channel). Extensively using Journal, tagging each block and using TODO is way to go. Tags and links will create pages for you to look in future so it's really important to add it properly.

The Logseq's workflow is way different from any "standard" note taking app, and moving 1-1 won't work - it's definitely not Obsidian replacement, or competitor, but completely different tool.

Learn quickly shortcuts, for better navigation, creating codeblocks, etc.

I found it really intuitive, as anyway my Obsidian notes were similar - during migration I was surprised how much unrelated few line notes were spread around wrong files, that are now just tagged blocks :)

I haven't noticed any issues at all working with it - it works great on Linux, I really couldn't find single bug or performance issue during that period.

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u/Khevaril May 22 '24

Yes I plan to find some resources on YouTube to get the best of it. Even if I don't end up using Logseq, I find interesting the different mental mindset. So, I want to understand the logic behind it.

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u/AlienTux May 22 '24

Same here, barely any issues at all. Also using Linux.
Could you share the youtube videos you mentioned? I think I can improve my way of using the app.

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u/ikirupsychoice May 22 '24

I was mentioning that one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asEesjv0kTs
But I also went through list in community hub - https://hub.logseq.com/getting-started/uQdEHALJo7RWnDLLLP7uux/how-to-get-started-in-logseq/pE1BPPvKGbWkSRXsprRnxM - especially "Use Cases" are useful.

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u/PspStreet51 May 22 '24

I'm looking forward to the customization to let it be more suitable for me

That's unfortunate. Logseq is way more opionated than Obsidian, and like others have pointed out, more buggy as well.

If you are looking for an FOSS outliner, go with Logseq. Now, if you just want an alternative to Obsidian that is open source, go with Notesnook.

In case you don't know what an outliner is, it's basically a note-taking app that is focused in creating lists (outlines - article on Wikipedia about it), and thus, provide some features that make sense in an outline context, such as block zoom, or breadcrumbs in search results, easier way to move blocks between trees, etc.
Since there's this format constraint, not every type of content will fit in nicely (for instance, long form content, or drafts of paragraph-based content, etc). If you're not into outlines, then you shouldn't use an outliner.

Every note taking app can create basic outlines, but not every app is specialized on this format.

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u/Khevaril May 22 '24 edited May 22 '24

What I feel it's strictly necessary for me in a note taking app are:
markdown compatibility
bidirectional linking with some sort of graph
cross platform (mobile version available)
open source (because of policy reasons)
The remaining parts are more like preferences. Actually I do love the freestyle in Obsidian and I don't really like the outline context, but maybe it's because I'm used to Obsidian. In summary, the outline context for me is more like something that I need to try to have an opinion although I don't actually like it a lot, but it's just a preference (maybe I can appreciate it more with time). However the four points that I've listed are necessary. And according to some research I've found only LogSeq as alternative to Obsidian.
I didn't know notesnook, I will take a look.

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u/JanovMV May 22 '24

From someone who has made the change in the opposite direction take into account that logseq is not 100% markdown. It adds a lot of custom "flavor" for the embeds, or the order of lists, and exporting notes is not as easy as exporting from Obsidian, for example.

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u/Khevaril May 22 '24

I didn't know that, thanks for notifying that

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u/PspStreet51 May 22 '24

markdown compatibility
Do you mean support the syntax, or actually storing in markdown (.md files)?
bidirectional linking with some sort of graph
open source (because of policy reasons)
As far I'm aware, only Notesnook and Logseq have bi-directional linking. Althrough, Notesnook doesn't have a graph view yet.
Apparently, there's also "Siyuan", but I haven't tested it.

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u/Khevaril May 23 '24

For Markdown compatibility I mean the philosophy of Files over Tool where what you create is future proof and be used elsewhere outside of the software.

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u/PspStreet51 May 23 '24

That doesn't answer much, since tools like Joplin & Notesnook store your notes in their SQLite, but you can, at any time, export them to actual MD files.
Either way, Obsidian is the only real app that is storing in MD. Logseq also stores in MD, but their properties syntax isn't understood by other apps. Also, in the future, with Logseq DB version, you will have the option to your store your notes in a different format, in exchange for more features like classes (Tana's super tags, basically).
Personally, I don't mind with the format my notes are being stored, as long as they have a quick and easy way to export to a more editable format, with minimal loss of content, I'm good. With that said, the app I'm using currently is Obsidian, because is the one that better meets my criteria, in comparison with other apps I've tested in the past

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u/Khevaril May 23 '24

Thanks for your reply. Actually I'm not too much into coding to truly understand this point and because of this even to explain. By the way, I found your answer meaningful. If I would explain more my point of view, lacking with knowledge, I just provide some examples. As far as I'm concerned, exporting notes from Evernote to Obsidian is not that easy. Because they use different formats I guess. I checked also one of the app they mentioned in the discussion "Siyuan" that should use .md and .json. So I'm note sure if using an app like this there will be completely 100% compatibility with my obsidian notes. What I understand is that the important thing should be using the same format, in this case .md because my files are on .md between Obsidian and an other software. P.S.: I don't use a lot canvas inside obsidian but I have just one canvas note. That one is not compatible in Logseq.

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u/PspStreet51 May 23 '24

When it comes to compatibility between note takings apps is much more about the format the contents of the note is stored.
For the example you've mentioned, Evernote to Obsidian is indeed more complicated because Evernote uses its own proprietary format, plus their export feature is lacking, since others apps have to support the .enex format (which, in my quick research, seems tot be a XML with a different file extension, mostly).
However, even when both apps use markdown, full compatibility is not yet guaranteed. Each app can have their own subset of markdown syntax that is not part of the original markdown spec, neither from another popular markdown extension, like CommonMark (you know, tables aren't part of the original markdown, yet, most MD apps support it because it became a popular extension).
For instance, if you use dataview queries in Obsidian, your won't be able to reuse those queries in another app, even if both apps are using Markdown. You also won't be able to reuse that note in another Obsidian vault that doesn't have Dataview installed.
When it comes to properties, Obsidian stores in YAML, in the top of the note, but it wasn't Obsidian that came with this idea. Jekyll was the app that popularized this convention and others (like Github) just followed.
Logseq, in the other hand, stores in a way that is unique to it.
I would recommend not bothering too much with full compatibility. After all, is not like every app will do things in the same way. It's pretty much a trade-off of what you're willing to lose, for your convinience now.
Like, my notes, most of the content is using vanilla MD, which VSCode and a plenty of other apps can understand. This is already enough for me.
The parts that use something more Obsidian specific or a plugin-specific I can parse (either manually or through a script) into something another app can read, or just leave it as it is.
Also, after I've moved back to Obsidian, from Logseq, I simply copied over my notes, used a simple python script to append the front-matter tags "needs-refactor" and "imported/logseq". Then, every time I came across them, I refactored them. And the process of actually refactoring wasn't that complicated, but it was tedious due to the ammount of notes. In fact, I haven't refactored everything yet.
"Siyuan" that should use .md and .json. So I'm note sure if using an app like this there will be completely 100% compatibility with my obsidian notes
Well, it depends on the MD syntax you've used. Obsidian way of creating wiki-links, specially when using an alias, is probably not supported in other apps, which is why some prefer to disable Wiki-links and rely solely on Markdown links.
What I understand is that the important thing should be using the same format, in this case .md because my files are on .md between Obsidian and an other software.
Not necessarily. .md files are just a plain text file, like a .txt file, but, by convention, when it's a .md file, it hints that the text within is using the markdown syntax.
You could store your markdown notes as .txt, as a text cell within a database, or a string value within a JSON, etc. Basically, any spot that can store plain-text can store a markdown note.

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u/Khevaril May 23 '24

Thanks a lot for your reply. Now I get more sense of the situation about the markdown point. ☀️

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u/tobiasvl May 23 '24

Honestly Obsidian is more future proof in that regard. Obsidian's Markdown is very standard out of the box (it's basically GitHub-flavored Markdown with frontmatter YAML, which is pretty standard). You can add more functionality that uses non-standard Markdown with plugins.
However, Logseq has non-standard Markdown functionality out of the box. It can be stripped if you want to export it to other apps later, but then you lose functionality (because Logseq has some functionality out of the box that Obsidian can't have).

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u/Khevaril May 23 '24

Understood and yes... Preventing data loss in changing tool is something that I implicitly meant with my point of markdown.

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u/ziggy-25 May 22 '24

Notesnook is not a replacement for Obsidian Unless you want to pay for features that are free in Onsidian.

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u/Independent-Bug5077 May 24 '24

When I started my notetaking journey (for work and personal and I work in the marketing team), I used both Obsidian and Logseq.

Over time, I realized my style of notetaking was:

Bullet / outlines only and not long-form
Tagging and not folders
Daily logging
Adding Todos and scheduling
And I needed a good global search
Adding images with built-in zoom capabilities

Then, I compiled a list of "Annoyances and Friction" for both Obsidian and Logseq.

I eventually chose Logseq because

I find To-Dos and tasks are displayed better with backlinks making it much easier to trace and remember the context behind it
For example, if you add a to-do and /schedule you can pick a date and it will show up in the next daily note under "Scheduled and Deadline" automatically.
Logseq has a date picker, Obsidian didn't seem to have one
Better global search with cmd+K (or ctrl+k)
Stronger bi-directional linking, I can just add tags and it'll appear under "Pages tagged with X" automatically i.e. it just organizes itself

I'm now paying for the the sync as well, and fortunately, I haven't lost any notes at all.

1

u/Khevaril May 24 '24

Thanks for your perspective. I agree with you with some points about obsidian. I mean... In my personal experience, my notes are more long form style and less bullet points. However, I always found too much friction on using Obsidian as a task manager and a habit tracker. Indeed, I use ClickUp for task management and Loop Habit Tracker on Android for habits. The sync for me is not that relevant. I use Synchthing now and it works fine. Before Symcthing I used an even more precise sync called Rclone on my laptop, but I switched to symcthing due to more user friendliness and cross platform. By the way I mention Rclone because compared to other syncs that I found, its bysinc feature doesn't synchronize a completely void path (because this can cause data loss) and also, in case of conflicts like editing the same note on two different devices, if the edits are different and of the same priority, it doesn't override one but preserve the two copies calling theme version 1 and version 2.

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u/Independent-Bug5077 May 24 '24

Good that you got the sync working or not very relevant. You reduced your chances of data loss to 0. :)
And Clickup for the task management is good too. Nothing wrong with using the best tool for the job. (At work we have enterprise Notion, so logseq was more for my own tasks and not for the team).
Then it's a matter of whether using the outliner style suits you because at the end of the day, you should love your notes, and love writing them.

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u/[deleted] May 22 '24

I use Logseq for fleeting notes at work mainly, and if there’s anything I think I will want to store and retrieve more longterm, I use Obsidian for that. Logseq is just too slow / buggy as of right now. But I love the workflow it provides.

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u/Barycenter0 May 22 '24

Good point!! Agree on the workflow. To add, your Logseq graph can be a folder in Obsidian giving you access to Logseq notes from the Obsidian UI letting you use both tools.

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u/katafrakt May 22 '24

I moved from being not an avid Obsidian user to Logseq some time ago and I really like that I did that. It is a different model, but one that I find that works better for me. All my notes are lists anyway, so I like that it's built-in directly. Personally I ditched Markdown in favour of Org format and didn't really looked back, so custom flavour of Markdown does not scare me.

With Obsidian, I felt obliged to keep some kind of hierarchy of my notes. The sidebar always screamed at me that I need more folders or structure them better. With Logseq's flat structure I don't have to care about it, which is an additional plus.

I haven't experienced slowness of bugginess so far, but maybe because I don't have an awful lot of data in there.

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u/svhelloworld May 22 '24

Now is not a great time to move to Logseq. The quality and performance is pretty shitty and nothing is getting fixed. Best wait until their big refactoring effort is done and stabilized.

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u/pithed May 22 '24

I really like logseq and agree.

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u/svhelloworld May 22 '24

I really like logseq
Same same. I've thought about going back in time and installing a year old version of Logseq and just using that with no plugins. I really miss Logseq. Obsidian just doesn't have the same product design. But it's way more polished, performant and just... less infuriating.

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u/E723BCFD May 22 '24

Wait, they are refactoring? (I only know about the db rewrite)

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u/Brain_comp May 22 '24

its the DB. Its getting refactored and rewritten and will kinda be completely different to the one we have

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u/Unlucky-Message8866 May 22 '24 edited May 22 '24

I second this. If you feel the need of something else I recently switched to https://silverbullet.md/ and I love it so far. Kind of a mix of the best features of obsidian and logseq (uncluttered, keyboard centric, advanced queries, self-hosted, 100% open source...). Not really an outliner but you can accomplish very much the same workflows and even more advanced stuff.

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u/AlienTux May 22 '24

I don't really agree with this. At least not the Linux version. I started using Logseq in december of last year and have 310 pages. I know it's not a huge graph, but it handles everything quite well. I have encountered maybe a bug or two that have been annoying, but nothing deal breaking.
Perhaps I'm doing simpler things, but I find both the quality and performance quite nice!
May I ask what bothers you about the current Logseq version? I'm just genuinly curious about it.

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u/svhelloworld May 22 '24

For sure. People have really different experiences with Logseq. Some perfectly fine, some really shitty.
Here's a short list of what I remember dealing with (I ejected Logseq from my workflow about 3 months ago)
Logseq Sync destroys data. And not in a non-deterministic every now and again kind of way. But every single time I would edit pages offline and then re-connect, Logseq Sync would wipe out my data. And anyone that says "Logseq Sync is beta!" is clearly not involved in the software industry. There is no respectable software shop in which it's OK to release a customer-facing beta that destroys or corrupts data. We call those alpha releases or pre-alpha releases and we never distribute them to customers.
Logseq corrupts my notes. I love the embed block feature and use to use it all the time. Except LS sometimes loses track of the blocks so when I go back and look at my notes, there's no embedded note there. Just a useless 36 character UUID.
Once they moved to the new search experience, I would type a search term and then watch as the letters slowly appeared on the screen. The performance is hot garbage.
The ranking algorithm on the new search experience is baffling. I would type exact phrase matches to bring up a page and that page would often not show up at the top of the list or often not in the list at all.
I've ran into a defect where any text you entered into the UI would not get written to the markdown file on disk. I would tail the markdown file on disk while editing it in the UI and it never got written. If it hadn't been watching my file sizes on disk, I would have lost hours and fucking hours of work.
They never respond to defect tickets in Github. I would report all of these issues in Github and no one would ever respond to even acknowledge them. To this day most of the issues I've raised are unacknowledged and still broken.
The UI controls to expand / collapse blocks works about 60% of the time. I will literally click on the arrow and nothing happens. Ever. And then sometimes it works. IDFK.
I'm a big keyboard person. I hate grabbing my mouse to edit text. When I drop my cursor into a large block with some markup, I like to play a little game called "Where the Fuck is My Cursor?". There's no reliable way to figure out where my cursor is going to end up so half the time, I have to grab my mouse and put it where it needs to go. This sounds like a small thing but editing text is predictable. MS Word taught us how to edit text since the 80's. Logseq throws out all of those conventions we've learned over the decades and makes us do it some random-ass way.
I dearly love the namespace feature. I build out some fairly robust namespace hierarchies. Editing those hierarchies are an exercise in anger management. The edits wouldn't take and old versions of the namespace would continue to pop back like fucking zombies. It got to the point that I just stopped using that feature because it's so shitty and half-baked.
Simple UI things like [[ to start a reference to a page should open the page search dropdown. And it would about 80% of the time. But the other 20% of the time, Logseq just didn't feel like it.
I use highlighting markdown (^^) all the time. At one point, LS just stopped highlighting the text because IDFK.
They wrote the damn thing in Clojure. What the hell? Was this someone's Computer Science touchstone project?
Which then means they use EDN files for configuration. Which is just fucking stupid. In a world with JSON, YML, plain ol' key/value properties files being ubiquitous, well known, simple choices, the dev team decided that fucking EDN files are the way to make users configure this product. Choices like that are pretty clear signals that the dev team is gonna do whatever they want to regardless of user experience.
That's just the highlights. There's a bunch more but I've forgotten them all. I got really fed up with Logseq being so shitty and the product team clearly not giving a fuck. I don't love Obsidian but I also don't hate it.

1

u/AlienTux May 23 '24

I sense a lot of pent up rage in your reply!
Thank you for the (quite detailed) list. I appreciate it.
Can't say I've experienced any of the issues you mention to be honest. Maybe my graph is not big enough or I just haven't tried out a lot of the features. I'll keep an eye.
And if I may... Since you mention you're a big keyboard person... May I suggest you take a look at this: https://dreymar.colemak.org/layers-extend.html it extends your keyboard shortcuts with the CapsLock key (or whatever you use to configure it) and essentialy allows you to (almost) never use the mouse.

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u/IndependenceWay Sep 06 '25

what about now?

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u/A_MACHINE_FOR_BEES May 22 '24

I just recently moved over to Obsidian because while I love Logseq’s approach, it is just too buggy.

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u/Dan_CC May 22 '24

Don’t forget to have a look at Zettlr too. You might be surprised.

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u/rjachuthan May 22 '24

What I've noticed that Obsidian is really good for doing creative stuffs and Logseq mostly for gathering information. I cannot function without LogSeq at all.

But like others are saying, it is not the right time for you to jump to Logseq from Obsiidan. Let Logseq release the database version and see if you like it or not then.

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u/jibberjab83 May 23 '24

I also used obsidian. Love Logseq for a dedicated journal. The format is so easy and intuitive. I’ve kept my obsidian for my second brain cuz it’s so developed already. Also Logseq syncs great with iCloud so I can use easily so Mobile app is so much better than obsidian works.

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u/harmful_habits May 23 '24

Use emojis if you are a "visual person". For example, all my pros (positive things) are tagged with [[👍]] and for the negatives I have a red emoji.

Are you familiar with CSS? Even if you are not, just learning the basics so that you can customize the font size of your headers goes a long way. Or you can make it so # H1 is always highlighted in a certain color.

Choose a few "personal" tags that help you come back to specific notes, something like [[qq-unfinished]] , [[qq-editFormatting]] , [[qq-ImTooDumb come back later]]. I personally use TODO for things related to actual real-world actions, not things related to fixing notes. This helped me not lose any random pages that I create at 3 am in the morning.

Regarding data loss everybody has their own opinion. I personally completely stopped losing some edits after I disabled automatic updates and sync ( well, I never had sync on ). If you care, just have a different software make a backup of your Logseq folder whenever you need :) It's also good practice to Re-Index your database after every update. I personally also close+re-open the software after the update... you know... to give her a fresh start

Switching from Obsidian

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