The Holy Grail of Neovim Note Taking 

😂😂😂 Where were you when I wrote the script??

😆😂🤣😅😭

That's the rub isn't it :)

Are you suggesting taking amphetamines?

Who are you calling senile?😊

If I’m very honest this is what this channel is all about 😅

That is very true but one thing often overlooked about obsidian is it can actually be used in a very sloppy way. Just slop ideas down anywhere with some tags and you can easily search it later. People try to over complicate things

@@jerbear7952 this is actually a great take which I agree with. Just note the small conflict - if you have tags, sure it’ll work, same if you have links, or a structure. One is enough. But given our “sloppy” nature 😉 it’s best if you have a few layers to make sure you can still be lazy by finding your notes in the future!

I've been working on setting up my environment to get it like this, and it really is beautiful and low friction. High friction upfront. I think @devopstoolbox ' s workshop will reduce the time required to get it setup though

Thank you so much!! 🫶

Oh man! Incredible! Thank you so much for the kind words! Feel free to come back if you want to discuss things 🙏🏽

🙏🏽

IMO it doesn’t have to be one or the other. They complement each other exactly because of cases like yours!

It is :)

I’ll take that as a compliment 😅

🙏

Thanks! I agree, covered Neorg in a video not too long ago but obsidian ticks all the boxes for me

Yes neorg is excellent. Aside from its usefulness, I think the project itself is interesting and covering ground well.

100%! Inline DBs in notion are killer! You do have “loom” that you can use in obsidian which is super nice. Notion are amazing with visuals but it’s just too much of a “product”. You don’t have control, it’s slow, they dictate how you access, and moving away to another system puts you in the mercy of their export capabilities. Not to mention the safety of my notes when they’re stored on my machine / cloud storage of my preference when using something like obsidian

​@@devopstoolboxnail on the head with notion. You can make it look super sexy but to get to that point is a pain in the ass. Then all the vendor lockin afterwards makes it worse.

There are a few plugins that you can use to sort of recreate notion databases. DB Folder and Projects.

😂 In my defense - I still want to be able to use obsidian’s UI for many reasons. If I’m only “stuck” in nvim that defeats the purpose

bruh!

the internet has some healthy people after all,....@@devopstoolbox

No (proper) mobile support is a big no for me :(

@@gusslx You use neovim on your phone? I have obsidian on my phone and it works great! Free sync with syncthing.

Oh wow! This is next on my list. I was wondering how / if I can actually create a useful task management system there

@@devopstoolbox Oh and there's also a really good Kanban plugin for Obsidian. My only gripe with Obsidian is that it's not a terminal app, but I strongly suspect that that's just me being a snob 🤔😝

@@neilclay5835 I agree 😅 Given that it’s just Md files I guess it’s just waiting for someone to pick the idea up

How did you do it?

Funny enough, since I couldn’t pack this into a video, I made a workshop. It’s paid content but I put a lot of work in it and you’re welcome to check it out and ask questions if you have any: learn.omerxx.com

Thank you! I don't have a dedicated guide but my entire configuration is open at dotfiles.omerxx.com. If there are specifics that interest you feel free to come back with questions and I'll do my best to help!

Vim motions + .vimrc file make obsidian as good as it gets at least for motions!

Thank you! I guess this is having nerd font installed and a terminal that supports them (I run wezterm). You’re also welcome to check out my config at dotfiles.omerxx.com if I missed anything!

@@devopstoolbox Thanks for this! Was looking for your config. Even with treesitter and a load of other vim plugins, I am missing some nice features displayed in your video.

@@ShortSnoph let me know specific ones I’ll try to help

Do you have cmp installed? If you do, the plugin integrates with cmp and triggers it, you can change the setting for how many characters actually trigger the completion, try opening two brackets and type two chars and see what happens

I did switch just a few months back when you noticed :) the hhkb is unmatched in typing experience, the Moonlander is amazing in the fact it’s split, orthilinear and configurable with layers macros etc. so I’m not going back but if I could put the topre feel ok the moon lander it’d be the PERFECT KB

@@devopstoolbox I would die for a topre feel on my UHK as well

Both are noice.nvim by folke, which rerenders the command line :)

Hi! Thanks. I’m running Wezterm with Catppuccin on macOS . The frosty glass though is an editing trick. That said, you can get it with wezterm config

thanks!@@devopstoolbox

Not really TBH. Does it offer the same suit of features making it accessible via Neovim, sync, Md, and the rest? Always interested in trying new stuff but I fear my second brain is too busy with finding a home rather than functioning as a notebook 😅

@@devopstoolbox logseq is like obsidian with more stuff out of the box, like task management and note queries. I don't know about using it with neovim, some dude made LSP(logseqlsp), you can try to make it work. Logseq has sync feature like obsidian sync, but app is file-based so you can sync with whatever you want. Also logseq has sick pdf annotation tool, i can't find obsidian plugins that are so good for pdf annotation

@@devopstoolbox I don't think it can, btw every single md implementation is custom, so even tho they are md not necessarily100% compatible, and they way logseq works it isn't compatible in fundamental ways with your way of using md probably.

@@Adrian_Galilea True, but the differences are usually subtle and if you make use of the fundamentals it’s generally ok.

​@@devopstoolbox In the case of logseq and the way it structures things I don't think this applies, which was the original question. I haven't researched this in depth tho, speaking from memory. I've been digging the rabbit hole for a while now, orgmode, asciidoc, markdoc, mdx... way too many options, still none that I fully like, I don't think markdown is enough nowadays, plus I don't like it's syntax, but it's totally fine. Such an interesting topic.

The original study was done on 2008 but for some reason the university removed the paper itself from their website. There’s lots of news and data around it: www.zdnet.com/article/americans-consume-100000-words-of-information-each-day-study-says/ www.blog.askwonder.com/blog/information-data-media-consumed-in-day-average?format=amp There was a more recent study, I’ll get the book references this week and try to get it for you

@@devopstoolbox thank you for those links. Was kinda hard to google it out

Nice! And yes, the plugin adds mainly that functionality. But having the power of using vim on the same workspace (bc it’s just Md) is so refreshing coming from notion…

Oh yes, for sure! And having Obsidian for reading / editing notes on the phone is perfect @@devopstoolbox

You can easily write a small python script to scroll through all the MD files in a directory and append/update a list of backlinks at the top of every file

@@sergioquijanorey7426 i'm guessing you use obsidian sync for that

@sergioquijanorey7426 I, too, like a leaner approach, so I’ve been using vim with the ‘zk’ tool, which includes ‘zk-nvim’, a nvim plugin that uses the its own ‘zk’ lsp to provide linking-including backlinking. Combine that with a markdown lsp and it’s a complete package. With ‘zk’ you can build templates, etc .. and with the ‘zk-nvim’ plugin’s API, if you know Lua, you can build some really neat workflows in vim. As an example, I’m a manager, and I take LOTS of notes for the 20 people I hold one on ones with. Each week, I invoke my custom command, which opens a new meeting note. With my integration, telescope opens and prompts me for a meeting name. It presents all unique meetings from the past, so I’ll effectively see one item for each person in the list along with one item for any other recurring meeting (staff meeting). Then I select the person, a template opens with the title already set to the person I’m meeting with. So, creating a new meeting note, is one binding to launch my custom ZkMeeting command, and only the number of key presses required to fuzzy search a name. It’s so fast. Then, I have another integration I wrote as I wanted to be able to quickly reference previous notes for that person. So I have another custom command to pop open in telescope all of the past meetings for that person with a preview, so I can quickly review my last week notes or older notes when talking to them this week. It’s the best note taking system I’ve had for years.

Tmux? 😉

Check my tmux video!

@@devopstoolbox Oh! I'm so used to my tmux status bar being on the bottom I didn't notice it. I still need to go back and redo my tmux config some weekend. I downloaded someone else's ages ago and have never gone through and set it up myself. I just finished fixing that same mistake with neovim. I'll check your tmux video.

This is github.com/folke/noice.nvim!

@@devopstoolbox Thank you, wow that plugin is more than I anticipated :)

Nope, I've been asked about it a few times here in the comments but can't say anything about it (yet)

Something about TeX, and with it LaTeX, which you'll see if you read Knuth's book TeX the program, is how careful he was in designing TeX so that any compliant build of TeX on any hardware will generate _exactly_ the same DVI output as any other. Things like using fixed point arithmetic with smallish integers to ensure that problems with different floating point formats wasn't a problem, and while he originally wrote it in Pascal, it deliberately used no advanced features of the language so as to make it relatively straightfoward to port to a non-Pascal language like C. Typst, on the other hand, I doubt is anywhere near religious about reproducible results as TeX. The thing is, I can take LaTeX I wrote in my postgrad days 20 years ago, and it compiles exactly the same today as it did back then. I can trust that LaTeX in 20 years time will still do the same. For scientific papers and such I think that is a very important thing. As for notes: you can embed simple LaTeX formulae. And if you want typeset results, LaTeX is a good way to go. But for quickly writing notes, often Markdown with \(formulae\) is much quicker to write. And conventions like [[double brackets]] for hyperlinks is nice. Obsidian is basically close to a personal wiki.

True! The dude is awesome. He also made a nice "getting to know vim" series recently. But the fact that I can't access my files with my mobile and being locked to a rather niche format was problematic for me. I still use it for single-project notes from time to time

@@devopstoolbox don't know why youtube keeps deleting my replies I guess it is because of a url m putting Try calendar.nvim from itchyny It will require gcp project with api access to calender and taska but then Google tasks and Google Calendar works nicely in neovim ......

@@devopstoolboxI'm not so worried about writing my notes from any device but having read access from my phone is essential. Have you considered generating a static website using hugo or pandoc and syncing it using syncthing or GDrive/Dropbox? I know I have :-) Just can't get it to work yet.

Of course! noice.nvim

@@devopstoolbox awesome! thanks so much. love it

An interesting stack! TBH while the mobile version of obsidian is great, I feel that icloud is slowing it down. If I had a faster alternative I'd consider it. Sometimes you just want to take a quick note without thinking too much or waiting for a platform. That's one of the key concepts in the second brain book - remove friction

@@devopstoolboxI don't know the details of the secondbrain methodology but if you want a quick portable inbox I suggest you reduce your requirements to simple text capture. Then I'm sure you can find a simple hack; some automation on your phone that takes a free text field and pushes it via folder sync/api/mail/... to an inbox on your PC for later processing. To me , this is so infrequent that I just take a not in my MS Todo app on my phone and then copy it when on PC.

@@d3lirious this is exactly what I was thinking

Haha! I mentioned in the video I believe- I still use Neorg from time to time for specific project needs but to build a system like a second brain it requires more firepower. With the Neovim plugin I think it makes it as good if not better than Neorg given the visuals and ability to combine Neovim goodies when writing. I even created a course going through the concepts and configs: learn.omerxx.com That said - these things are so personal, there’s really no one size fits all type of solution. But if you’re sold on Neovim and quick frictionless note taking and like having control sync, mobile control etc, I think Neovim and obsidian are really the holy grail 😉😉

Any tips on migrating a neorg repo to markdown @@devopstoolbox ? I've been using neorg export but I don't know how to apply to a whole dir structure.

ZSA Moonlander

Thanks! Not 100% sure but make sure you have the templates dir configured properly in the plugin, here’s mine: github.com/omerxx/dotfiles/blob/master/nvim/lua/plugins/obsidian.lua#L36

@@devopstoolbox Solved! The problem was that I did not put an slash before the obsidian path. Got it working right away

I feel like it's inevitable :) in the meantime feel free to see my configuration here: dotfiles.omerxx.com

Cherry blue, but got myself GATERON Milky Yellow Pro now which are miles better

😂😂

Interesting, haven’t tried or thought about it.

Interesting! You’re the first 🙏🏽 Waiting to hear how it goes!

So, this `[[foo#^Bar]]` works, but only via obsidian's UI. When I follow links from other notes I'm getting to the top of the note always. I'll explore this a little bit

@@devopstoolbox Thanks😘

Noice.nvim!

Everything sounds perfect expect for the last part. Funny as it may sound, copy pasting in and out of editors is the small friction that’s definitely breaking my habit in the long run and why I’d give up on the idea 🤷

Thanks man! I don’t think I ever tried doing it but I’ve heard many people did. I can try it out sometime and see what comes up though

@@devopstoolbox Thanks, I managed to have image.nvim working but it doesn't show pictures pasted via obsidian plugin.

Thank you! Are you referring to setting the sync via iCloud? Because that’s really the one bit you don’t see, the rest is in the video and pretty straight forward - after the plugin is installed it needs a workspace and that’s about it. About other sync methods - IIRC it works great with others like google drive so should be similar although I haven’t checked. Give it a go and let me know? The git integration will of course be similar

Syncthing has you covered. Completely free P2P folder syncing, works perfectly with android and Linux for obsidian

Noice.nvim!

You mean the appearance / colors or the actual templates for notes?

@@devopstoolbox appearance / theme / colors :)

Ah! I use "Obsidian Nord" as a theme :)@@czarnygwlef

Let me know how it goes !

Vim motions are incredible and adopted by so many tools, as a vim user I’m always on the lookout for solutions that have integrated or at least make the option accessible enough

Vim motions in Obsidian are nice. Half the time, though I use Neovim + MarkdownFlow plugin to edit notes in my vault.

@@philipcollier7805 same!

​​​@@devopstoolbox He was telling you that vim motions alone weren't sufficient for him and he wouldn't feel home just because a tool had them as an option.

@@heroe1486 sure I get that (that’s way most of the video is about actually using Neovim as the note taker) but to me, having vim motions in the UI itself makes a world of difference

I actually use feathers and ink! Don’t wanna pay all those evil computer enterprises building machines with text editors inside!

Great question! The workshop goes deeper into all the principles in the book like PARA and CODE, it includes my structure step-by-step and the way I’m using templates (with the templates themselves) and more things that are hard to pack into a short YT video

Noice.nvim!

@@devopstoolbox THANK YOU

I gotta be honest - I would LOVE to have a device purely for note taking. Can’t justify the expense and using a paper notebook (the one in the thumbnail)

The video was supposed to cover the setup :) What are you missing?

I havn't personally tested but this one is a windows fork: github.com/LGUG2Z/whkd

@@devopstoolbox thanks ...for the reply ..does.the skhd config will woek with minor changes in the dotfiles ?

@@subbunittala2012 not 100% what it means but skhd if run as a background service, is watching the config file and adapts to any change immediately

When you turn on vim bindings you should see motions in normal mode. If you’re referring to the key strokes on the black box in the video though, this would be Keycastr

Nope :) Started with kickstart.nvim back when I converted to lua, then added lazy. That's pretty much it.

Yep, mentioned in the beginning of the video! Moved to obsidian for my second brain (from notion). Neorg was, and still is sometimes my engineering notes taking format when working inside a git repo.

I’ve been asked and I’m not sure. Maybe it has a plugin, but I don’t have these requirements so it was never an issue

Install the obsidian git community plugin and set the snapshot to run every 60 minutes. You can find the plugin by browsing from within obsidian but just in case your can find it here: github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git

found it - ZSA Moonlander

Moonlander ❤️

🫡

It does! I know people are doing great with it, I'm not a fan

No problem with images on Obsidian! Images need your terminal to be able to render them but if you *really* want you can make it work. When I have a lot of visuals I just use obsidians ui

@@devopstoolbox thank you , just one more question ...if we move to another page swiftly using neovinm and obsidian (working as renderer) is open in the vertical window...does that action of the moving to another page will be reflected in the obsidian simeltaneous in real time ?

Of course: dotfiles.omerxx.com :)

WDYM by that?

🇧🇷

I love Takuya but I can’t really say how they compare as I haven’t used it. Have you?

It does as far as I know.

😅

Yep, makes sense. I understand it’s not for everyone, as someone who works in software and trying to build a second brain to support all aspects of life including work, it suits me very well. For my sketches and diagrams I have a plugin that integrates Excalidraw. Not doing anything complicated like you as far as visualization go. As with every tool - there isn’t one size fits all (surely obsidian doesn’t fit everyone’s style). YMMV

Quarto is fantastic Plz look into that

Why not Neovim then? You could also always just go raw but definitely having the entire thing around makes life nicer

@devopstoolbox I use neovim for coding. I like the markup experience for notes. Do you have any plug-ins you recommend?

@@princeofexcess I’m actually working on a video covering these as we speak. Don’t have a conclusion yet but stay tuned :)

I spoke about the process and how I can use vimrc for the motions, and when I want the full Neovim environment I use the plugin which is also covered, but honestly it’s docs are doing much better job than me at explaining. If this is about my file structure you check out learn.omerxx.com But I’m not sure that was it

Ahhh come on it takes 20 min to get markdown not 6 months :) If you just want to take notes just take them! Use notion or the likes if you want linking and it can serve you perfectly. If you like writing within nvim and use it as an editor you can have a perfect setup with it alone. I made this in case you feel it's relevant, taking you all the way in 90 min: learn.omerxx.com

200K+ viewers and you’re literally the only one who noticed… The article mentioned was a mistake made by the editor. The intention wasn’t meant to mention cells firing when navigating open fields, of course, but how our mind prefers grid designs and thinking (relational data structures, sheets etc)

Haha yep I know this one :) I released mine about a month prior and even commented on his video! I love his content

@@devopstoolbox "great minds think alike"? :) cheers

Ok, but? It does its job well and for the most part - for free. The markdown is yours, so they can’t really take your data away or lock it somehow… the only thing they can do is start charging for their free tier which leaves you with the freedom to leave. That said, over time, I started preferring many other paid services where the author / owner is dedicated to it doing it commercially/ full time. A paid service isn’t necessarily bad. Regarding the source code being closed or open - as long as it’s plug able I’m good.

I like and use Obsidian, but that’s def the biggest downside for me. It’s crazy to me that it’s not open source yet

@@raskolnikov3799 How is it a downside other than the obvious reasons? I mean, for daily use and practical purposes you get a free product, with one paid feature that you can easily replace on your own.

@@devopstoolbox haha I think I mostly just mean the obvious reasons. I don’t really care if it were to cost money, I just have a hard time trusting a proprietary app with so much information (a lot of ppl use Obsidian as a ‘second-brain’, entrusting it with basically every detail about their lives and research.

😂 If I just had the cheat code for RU-vid to do that every time…