#PKM proprietary/online products: exist
#Obsidian users: “better keep notes local and in a standard format!”
#Logseq users: “right, but also using #FOSS tools is important for the same reasons, Obsidian is not FOSS, on the other hand there is this new app called Logseq…”
Obsidian users: “it’s nice that everyone can use what suit them the best :)”
🤷🏻♂
@post I’m *really* liking Logseq, but for different things than I use Obsidian for.
I’m finding Logseq ideal for dealing with the messiness of daily life—for things I need to remember and refer to now and in the coming days but won’t necessarily need long-term, which is different from the way I use Obsidian.
Rather than alternatives, I now see them as complementary tools with different though overlapping capabilities—more like Photoshop and Illustrator than Photoshop and Gimp.
I don’t remember if I already asked you, but what’s the difference between Logseq’s Document Mode and Obsidian? I don’t see why one would open another app when in Logseq you can just press t,d to hide bullet points and write paragraphs of text in blocks like in any “longform writing” app.
That’s not the only reason I use #ObsidianMD. It produces cleaner, more portable markdown documents, and I can use folders, which are to organization what plaintext is to data. Just as plaintext guarantees that I can always edit my notes in any text editor, a basic folder structure means I’ll always be able to navigate them in any file manager.
About Markdown:
- I can write a page in Document Mode in Logseq using first level blocks as paragraphs and indented ones as lists;
- if I remember to press
t,oshortcut to expand all collapsed blocks thecollapsed:: true propertyis removed; - if I don’t reference any of those blocks I am free from
id::properties too; - I can remove the first two columns of characters from the file to turn first level blocks into paragraphs and get more “standard” Markdown files with a simple Unix command;
- I can concatenate that command to Pandoc that I use to export to PDF so I don’t need to actually edit the MD files;
This is more complex to explain than practicing, so for me there is not a reason to split data and workflows between two apps that would be a huge disadvantage.
About folders:
- Logseq frees me from having to choose a hierarchy, to stick to it and to decide where to place something;
- I can have as many hierarchies as I want to organize pages (and blocks and whatever) and the same element can be in multiple hierarchies;
- I can still organize MD files in folders independently from Logseq that will just respect my folder graph organization; this is useful if there is a set of pages I want to share between graphs (I can symlink a folder) or share a specific folder with other people etc.
