I think you want to talk about Obsidian structure?.. please confirm so weāre on the same pageš
Yalcin, Yes indeed, Iām referring to a suitable data structure for Obsidian. Since Iām an absolute Newbie with the app, I was fascinated by your āā¦ The smallest unit being the āfileā for Obsidian prevents it becoming a true outliner. I always struggle to explain this, but let me just say that it becomes clear only after you start Logseq consistently and realize the power of āblock basedā graph instead of the āfile based graphā philosophyā¦ā would you care to expand on that some more? Cheers.
Ah yes, now I know what you mean. First and foremost: This (outliner vs non-outliner style note taking) is always a debatable topic; no clear conclusion, some enjoy outliners, some donāt.
The outlinerās smallest unit of information is a block (practically a paragraph: A block is created every time you hit āenterā key). Smallest unit technically means a chunk of text that is treated as a sovereign unit (can be rererenced/linked to) by the software. From a semantic point of view the smallest unit is meaningful when you read it alone. Example: For a typical novel this usually means the smallest unit is the whole of the book itself: You do not understand much if you read a few paragraphs. A poem has much shorter smallest unit of information: You get the idea after you read a few stanza (a group of lines). For a dictionary, the smallest unit of information is the word + definition. You can take this small unit, use it anywhere and it is meaningful, does not lose any meaning when taken out of the dictionary.
For Logseq this is a block. For Obsidian this is a file.
There is more to the discussion but I hope this makes it somewhat clearer?
1 Like
Thank you. Your explanation makes the issue very much clearer. Of course, actual working experience with Obsidian will make my grasp so much better, so Iām going to choose a few items and create a Vault to see how-or-if larger or smaller files or chunks of information become intelligible when linked. Succinctness of the results will be the acid test.
Iāve felt encouraged in the past couple of years by the general reliability of DynaList, and the forthrightness of its developers. Of late its performance has become questionable because of the sheer volume of work Iāve put into it. Erica quite straightforwardly said that memory limits can be a problem, and suggested that I split my work into separate files. That has helped a somewhat, but DynaList continues to crash (never fatally) from time to time, and the poor cursor response sometimes is hard to live with.
Because of those issues and its less than mature linking, Iāve decided to give Obsidian a try. I wonder whether obsidian would be able to read an OPML or txt dump of my Dynalist file?
My thanks to you for your clarity. Regards.
1 Like
I remain with Dynalist as a pro user as well
Itās a very good application and I understand the economic issues (sigh)
I have started to use āreflect.appā - an outliner that shows promise and has current investment ā¦
1 Like
Obsidian has a dynalist import method. check their forums
Workflowy has dabbled with switching to markdown. I remember voting against turning rtf off.
Heptabase is quite interesting in this regard. Itās based on blocks. But the regular backups are just markdown files and a json.
I think Obsidian could have chosen to be block based, but still store data in markdown files. Instead it chose to be all in on those files. It makes extensive use of json itself plus YAML and I suspect most users use Dataview.
1 Like