On a side note, the docs don't seem to mention if this is possible but does anyone know how to use a template or set a default frontmatter (like created date) when using the "new" button in a Base?
The solution I used before bases is eh... pretty hacky.
Default template will be added in an upcoming version.
codethief · 5h ago
FYI On HackerNews you can use indentation (by 2 spaces) to indicate code snippets, not ```.
abrookewood · 6h ago
I don't think they do that good a job of explaining what it is, but the Reddit post linked below included this comment which is helptful: "You know how when you search your notes for something, say a phrase? Well, Bases can basically hold a static search that automatically updates. And, instead of searching all over again, you just click into the Bases file and new notes are just there in the default table format.
On top of that, you can add other properties to the view, especially one like modified date, which updates every time you modify the file. This is useful for seeing which files you haven't looked at in a while. Old concepts often apply to new ones, but we sometimes forget to check back to make that connection explicit."
abrookewood · 6h ago
Another one: "Bases provides filtered and sortable table and card views of note Properties and Tags."
slightwinder · 5h ago
The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database". It's really just that, basically. It's a database-view, where the vault is the database and the rows are your files. There is a fancy GUI for creating views, and it seems there is the ability for live-editing data from within the view. Basically a more user-friendly replacement for the very popular dataview-plugin.
Maybe it's a bit harder to understand, as it's a more mushy than the usual relational database.
torium · 5h ago
> The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database
No, horrible job at explaining. What does it mean to turn any set of notes into a powerful database? What does it mean to "turn"? Does it mean that a file will become a database? Or does it mean that a file can be interpreted as a database? And why set of notes? If I have a single note, can I turn that into a database too? Are the records of the database files, or items in a file? What is happening when I type ![[Untitled.base]]? Is the file where I typed that a database now? Or does that text assume that the file named Untitled must be a database?
They do a horrible job at explaining it.
abalaji · 5h ago
This seems useful for folks who use Obsidian as a personal CRM. I got some queries with data view that I'm going to see if this can replace:
- When was the last time I chatted with this person
- What did we talk about
- Who haven't I spoken to in a while
raviisoccupied · 7h ago
I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it.
For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
dimitri-vs · 5h ago
It's not you, it's the productivity influencers making you think it's "supposed to be" more than what it is: a nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files.
I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing).
Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
dustincoates · 4m ago
While I agree that the zettle-nerds take it way too far, I disagree with this:
> Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).
Nathanba · 3h ago
> nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files
wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...
muppetman · 4h ago
There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them.
Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.
But don't install Obsidian and then spend hours adding addons. You'll get overwhelmed, confused and wondering why all the Influenzers are saying it's CHANGED THEIR LIFE. It hasn't.
cloud_watching · 4h ago
Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work.
It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.
safety1st · 29m ago
I just have a notes folder in Syncthing and it seems to accomplish the same thing. Or is there more to Obsidian Sync that I don't know about?
muppetman · 2h ago
This is one thing I love about it too, Obsidian Sync is very well done and great for moving text files around the place easily.
dtkav · 2h ago
Obsidian Sync is a really solid (and complementary) product.
UltraSane · 1h ago
I really hate that article. Taskwarrior is infinitely better than a txt file. A txt file is the worst possible option for task management.
pqs · 4m ago
Now I'm using Emacs Howm for task management. It is based on text files and it is great. Org-mode is also great.
dmje · 5m ago
Just use it how you want to use it. For me, a bit of structure is enough - too much and it becomes unwieldy. But don’t let anyone tell you it’ll either save your life or become your “second brain”, that’s all bullshit. Just stick with no plugins or a small and solid set of ones you love. For me probably the only absolutely critical plugin is omnisearch, but YMWV.
My other advice is that it’s fine to boot up new vaults for other things. I’ve got two main vaults - a sort of work KB and a journal. But then I’ve got a bunch of smaller ones - songs I’m writing, courses I’m making, writing. Don’t be told that you’ve got to get some kind of universal thing that does everything. This is also b/s and often pedalled by the productivity wonks.
Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files.
I found it useful for reading code in markdown.
crossroadsguy · 1h ago
If all you need is just daily/one-off notes/jottings then Obsidian is not at all something you might want to use. Because, as excellent and a powerful tool it is for right purposes, even w/o its horde of plugins, it will be an overkill for just note taking. My assumption is based on just this comment of yours but you might want to try simpler note taking apps - that just does one thing - note taking, nothing else. Preferably a plain text note taking app for your OS.
When I was looking for nv->then->simplenote replacement Joplin and Obsidian didn't even stay on the radar for more than a few mins.
bccdee · 38m ago
Idk—I use Obsidian all the time & I don't even [[link]] my notes, much less need a database feature like this. Regardless of how many features it has, it is also simply a good markdown editor at heart.
hifikuno · 3h ago
I was kinda similar when I first started using it. I watched heaps of videos and had so many plugins installed but I was never really sure if I was doing it "right". Then one day I got annoyed and uninstalled every plugin and just went back to basics. I only reach for plugins when I feel something is missing, but honestly the only plugins I use are Style Settings which let's me customize the theme a bit more and Calendar so I can have... well... a calendar.
I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!
AstroBen · 4h ago
Start with the problem you're trying to solve and use the features to solve it. Don't just try to cram its features into your life
Eji1700 · 7h ago
I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be.
A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".
Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.
Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.
Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.
Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.
Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?
I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.
I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.
Edit-
To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.
bitexploder · 6h ago
Remember, this is basically your own personal Wiki. You can either embrace and accept a rigid organizational structure or not. You are signing up for a lot of up front maintenance and design this way. The alternative is to heavily use links, tags, and other tools that make it easy to find data later.
For a personal knowledge base I think the latter approach saves time in the long run. I have clusters of well organized information. Well tagged and linked. I can always find my movie ideas, projects, and deep thoughts when I want them. I like the idea of just curating the clusters I care about. Just enough organizing. I then have a few highly connected entry points to my clusters. Often I find people don’t link enough in their Obsidian. It’s free and puts things in a more graph oriented layout that the tool can show you.
Edit: oh, also remember, these are text files. Grep still works. Also, we have very powerful CLI LLMs to summarize and categorize text data rapidly. Like “suggest 3 tags for this document based on <prompt magic here>. :)
Waterluvian · 6h ago
No “hey idiot” but for what it’s worth: are you making things too complicated? It almost feels like you’re a bit distracted by all the dimensions of data you want to track. Could this all be one page with a bulleted list, each one might have sub bullets if you care to record things like who shared it and other notes? You can just Ctrl+F for “wife” when you need that sub query.
al_borland · 6h ago
I’ve been using Obsidian at work for a few years now, and things like this are why I ignore almost all Obsidian content on the web. Everyone seems to create these really complicated setups, in the name of zettelkasten, that seem nearly impossible to maintain and use in real life. If I want to make a list of movies to watch, I use a simple checklist in one note and move on with my life. I keep Obsidian simple so it gets out of my way.
I tried going down the road like you’re talking about one for managing past, present, and future trips. It technically worked, but it was so fiddly that I hated using it. I just made a few folders instead.
I suppose now, if I wanted all the metadata you’re talking about, using a base would make the most sense. But I’d still need to be realistic about how I’m going to use it. Do I care enough about future sorting abilities to turn adding a movie to a watch list into a multi-field form, where I need to consider all these potential futures to fill it out, creating a lot of friction to the action?
azeirah · 6h ago
The default search is not great and the syntax of the dataview plugin is not amazingly well designed. Even the author of dataview admitted to that.
The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik
I think the difference here is that Siyuan is fully open source, which means you have more confidence here.
Thanks for bringing this history up, and I think everyone should be careful when downloading a new version for this product, or better build by themselves after checking out the recents commits with some AI tools.
TheFuzzball · 6h ago
Coming from Logseq... this looks ideal for me.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 5h ago
SiYuan doesn't have canvas. Obsidian Canvas is great for diagrams.
barbazoo · 6h ago
I can’t believe my eyes. Is that the self hosted notion alternative many of us have been looking for?
clickety_clack · 6h ago
I just use it as a personal wiki, so plugins are overkill for me. I was basically using it as a way to basically have txt files with latex and it fits the bill.
Ezhik · 5h ago
One of the best things about Obsidian is that even all this new stuff is done through built-in plugins and can just be turned off.
BenFranklin100 · 2h ago
You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more.
Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.
kid64 · 17m ago
Breakage is the best-case scenario. Mass data exfiltration is the bigger concern. The community plugin system is both an unacceptable security risk, and a necessary part of achieving even a baseline level of usability. Imagine the scale of theft that must already have taken place.. the targets may never even know. The fact that Obsidian falsely claims to audit this cesspool is hilarious.
(May 2025 was from when the donor-only beta was announced, the current thread is the official release many changes later)
bachmeier · 7h ago
I'll be checking this out. I've used Dataview in the past, and while it has some great functionality, it's a bit too clumsy for my taste and it has a learning curve. Hopefully this resolves some of those issues.
crashabr · 1h ago
How does it compare to the table view of a Logseq query? Is UI the main added value? Is it possible to build a base of content blocks rather than notes?
wjrb · 8h ago
Wow, I remember when this feature was planned/announced. It's great to see first class support for the Dataview-type workflows.
I hope the API has support to allow extensions---I see that it is on the Roadmap[0].
I'm particularly interested to see how this integrates with Canvas and other note types.
You can embed a base in a canvas, and you can list canvases in a base.
wjrb · 6h ago
Hey, thanks for the reply. Big fan of your work! Cheers.
jcutrell · 5h ago
I am curious about how this compares to dataview. As a dataview user, I'm not immediately seeing something bases does that dataview doesn't, but I am not a power user.
andyferris · 7h ago
So where does the data "live"? I was looking at the syntax, it defines predicates for filters and views and so on, but I don't see the "rows". There is this `file.name` and `file.ext` thing - but where do you set them? What type of file does it point to? CSV? JSON? Something else? The docs seem incomplete.
kepano · 7h ago
The rows are individual Markdown files and the columns are YAML frontmatter properties in those files.
There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension.
The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to a Markdown table or CSV.
Hmm... so I can't use this to render and filter a table with 10k rows without having 10k markdown files?
If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mermaid works, defined in a codeblock) that references a nearby CSV/JSON/etc file.
I often have a lot of .md files floating around "data" projects and a lightweight tabular renderer (with filtering, sorting, possibly editing) would be absolutely killer. Does such a thing exist already?
segphault · 5h ago
Yes, it relies on a Markdown note file for each row and the “columns” are YAML frontmatter and cached metadata for each file.
I am with you on this, I wish Obsidian would optionally allow you to use YAML or some other structured data directly in the fenced code block or base file.
I really, really want something that kind of takes an Obsidian-like approach to local databases, sort of like Excel/Airtable but with flat, human-editable text files that live on your filesystem with a schema driven property editor. It’s kind of a bummer that this gets so tantalizingly close but doesn’t take it to the logical conclusion. I hope they do it eventually or make it possible with plugins.
jordwest · 4h ago
I guess there is a convergence of ideas going on here because I've actually been tinkering on something like this, a Notion-database-like that just uses flat CSV files (and internally reads it into an in-memory SQLite for filtering, grouping and displaying) then schema files for interpreting the data and displaying it nicely.
It's currently still very rough and I'm just using it myself but hoping to open source it at some point.
andyferris · 5h ago
Yes exactly. In fact, I'd prefer it by built more like mermaid as a _markdown_ JavaScript plugin thing that supports different data formats (not just YAML frontmatter - bare CSV for example) and have it available outside Obsidian (the github .md renderer, VS Code Markdown Preview, etc).
aetherspawn · 3h ago
If you have 10k rows this isn’t for you, but 99% of use cases have less than 100 rows.
For example, book list, movie list, customer list, invoice list, asset register, key register… once you hit a certain point, obsidian probably isn’t the right tool anymore. But no reason to go to the monthly SaaS “right tool” at the POC stage.
Obsidian is the pre-step for a larger database: cheap, fast to customise, easy to backup (git), self supported. It’s probably not going to run a company, but it will suit an individual or small startup.
And 99.99% of discussions about scaling are premature optimisation (cit needed). A lot of people spend more time thinking about scaling then entering their data, which probably means the data is smaller than they think! ha
jskherman · 6h ago
I think what you're trying to describe is a Jupyter notebook but in a slimmer package. Maybe marimo or quarto? Maybe there are already notebook viewers out there (on GitHub?) that only allow view or edit without code execution, if that suits your needs.
wjrb · 6h ago
Have you ever tried the Dataview plugin?
It allows inline blocks in the `key:: value` format, as well as frontmatter-based data (sort of what Bases are doing) and probably even more.
avinassh · 53m ago
is there any easier way to manage bookmarks with Obsidian? With Bases, I would get a nice UI as well
setopt · 38m ago
I’m not using Obsidian atm, but my approach is simply to store them in normal notes. So if I have e.g. a topic.md file I’d make a section called `# Links` there which I can click on. That makes it easier to rediscover links in the right context.
(I’m currently using Org-mode, but the approach is the same.)
kepano · 50m ago
You could use Obsidian Web Clipper to save pages from your browser and then make a base that filters based on the folder or tag you use for your bookmarks.
A feature I have always missed in Obsidian is the continuous journal view from Logseq. How hard could it be to display the journal all on one page.
I even started just writing the daily journal all in one file because that gives me that but it's starting to get a little big.
mudkipdev · 8h ago
Is this essentially an official replacement for the Dataview plugin? Last time I used Obsidian was 2 years ago
LordDragonfang · 8h ago
Yes and no. It's not meant to be as "kitchen sink" comprehensive yet, but it's a like 90% replacement and it's a ton faster and more responsive. (And I suspect once extension support comes in the dataview team will fully change over)
alberth · 7h ago
This is slick.
Does anyone know what JS library (presumably) they are using to display, filter, sort the table?
joethei · 7h ago
For the grammar: Lezer
For the editor: CodeMirror
Everything else is custom as we generally don't use existing frameworks and the large amount of baggage they carry.
CodeMirror and Lezer we already used before Bases.
alberth · 7h ago
Any chance the entire table layout, filtering, etc will be open sourced?
I can see plenty of SaaS apps, especially indie made, that could benefit from such functionality.
hu3 · 7h ago
Neat! Does it use a library like React? Or perhabs Lit?
echelon · 7h ago
This is beyond slick.
I'm finally able to kill Notion (good riddance - I never liked it!), and if it can handle larger tables then I'll stop using Google Suite as well.
My last request of the Obsidian team is a better git plugin. Their official built-in sync product is fine, but I'd still like to manage my own versioning so I can use automations.
The currently available git plugin is extremely dangerous (!!!) if set up incorrectly. I would consider myself an advanced user of git, and Obsidian's git plugin has on several occasions blown away my history and notes. It has frustrating and opaque behavior for how it consolidates change sets and diffs.
dtkav · 5h ago
The Git plugin is great for single-device backup IMO, but not great for device sync or collaboration.
I've been working on making Obsidian "work for work" with a real-time collaboration plugin called Relay [0]. We use CRDTs for conflict resolution between users/clients and it also happens to remove a ton of headaches for device-to-device sync as well.
Our collaboration server can be run on-premise and we also just open sourced a Git Sync connector so you can do google-docs style collab via Obsidian+Relay but still have the merged documents end up in git (and plug into (Markdown + git)-centric publishing workflows like Mintlify and Quartz.
The whole Obsidian ecosystem feels really electric right now.
Can you expand on when the git plugin is dangerous?
LordDragonfang · 7h ago
I've never had it wipe anything before[1], but I do have a stretch of 200+ commits in my personal vault where my laptop and desktop were fighting back and forth on the contents of one setting file.
One caveat is that the obsidian android app DOES NOT seem to save files to storage until the note unloads, which can break things if you pull in the middle of making changes.
[1] Though I have had to fix my termux clone of the vault enough times that I now just nuke it and re-clone instead of bothering with git - but that's more of a "termux likes to break git" issue than anything
obsidianbases1 · 5h ago
For better/worse, I've noticed save seems to be triggered when moving to a new line. Plenty of times I've unloaded (swiped away the app) only to have a missing last line later when I get on desktop. Building a habit of adding a few trailing newlines seems to have mostly resolved this for me
Redster · 7h ago
I know this won't work for some and is no replacement for a good git plugin, but have you tried using an Obsidian terminal plugin to manage git and the git repos yourself?
HSO · 6h ago
Speaking as a superficial git user, can you say why not simply git init on the vault is enough to use it?
Why is a plugin necessary?
mynegation · 5h ago
Plugin commits and pushes the contents of the notes as they are being updated - from within the Obsidian app.
obsidianbases1 · 5h ago
I prefer not using git the plugin, but still commit to a repo.
Sometimes you'll have to push a big ugly commit.
But other times the manual diff review can save you from a headache, like if you have some obscure syncing going on, like syncing READMEs and other markdown files to external repos to manage all markdown with the same Obsidian interface.
Also if you need to maintain a high-standard for the contents of your notes while still utilizing AI tools, the manual diff review can prove invaluable in ensuring trusted resources don't turn into slop
sebmellen · 7h ago
If I were in their position I’d use TanStack Table.
galoisscobi · 4h ago
Great idea, but the feature is poorly implemented. Cannot select multiple cells/rows. I have no idea how to extend past 20 or so rows. I regret having started transferring one of my documents to Obsidian Bases.
redkoala · 5h ago
One thing I still need is the ability to paste screenshots in-line in notes easily, like how OneNote handles it.
obsidianbases1 · 5h ago
Admittedly, I don't know how OneNote handles it.
But as an Obsidian power-user, I regularly paste screenshots into notes
There is a plugin that allows templating the screenshot file name, so naming the pasted screenshot, using the same as the note where it's being pasted, and a timestamp, for example, is easy.
remram · 3h ago
I've been using the 'DB Folder' and 'Dataview' plugins, I'll definitely look into this new option. Does it work with Dataview at all?
johntash · 7h ago
Neat. I haven't been using Obsidian for a couple years now, but this will probably get me to give it another try.
dadrian · 8h ago
Are there any good LLM plugins for Obsidian, beyond just throwing Claude Code / Codex at your markdown folder?
eightysixfour · 7h ago
I put Claude Code in MCP server mode, then use it as an MCP server for claude desktop to interact with that folder. Works better for me since Claude Code desperately wants to edit things instead of chat sometimes.
gavmor · 7h ago
There's no decent RAG functionality, AFAICT, but the Text-Generator plugin has been fantastic w/ larger contexts and a template that pulls either/both links and backlinks into the inference query window.
Hands-down my most productive interface to LLMs for [years since GPT3.5] years running.
Noumenon72 · 5h ago
The fact there is no app to do "RAG on localhost for my own notes" really makes me wonder whether the tech works at all.
obsidianbases1 · 4h ago
> There's no decent RAG functionality
Do you have any examples of what decent RAG functionality might look like? And where the current plugins fall short?
obsidianbases1 · 6h ago
Copilot, Smart Connections and Text Generator are all popular LLM plugins in Obsidian
I hope more programs use ".base" files for database views – it runs a lot of workflows in Notion that would benefit from a diversity of implementations.
nylonstrung · 6h ago
I've used obsidian for years but if you want more db in your PKM then Siyuan is honestly a much better (albeit newer) option
It's also open source, unlike obsidian which is proprietary
UltraSane · 1h ago
I really want Obsidian with Neo4j as the backend storage and full cypher query support.
dottjt · 7h ago
As much as I like the idea of Obsidian, I just can't get over all the additional functionality that Notion provides due to the integrated nature of it.
In particular, I love how you select text/blocks in Notion and how every line is a "block". I really wish other editors did that as well. In fact, it's probably the main reason why I haven't moved away from Notion.
al_borland · 6h ago
Notion always felt painfully slow and fiddly. I have convinced myself that they have manufactured their entire perceived popularity through YouTube sponsorship. It seems like there is a better tool for every job.
dottjt · 4h ago
I agree that it's slow, but it's because of the amount of functionality it provides.
If you just want to take plain notes, then yeah. Notion isn't what you want. However if you want sprawling databases that all inter-connected, amongst a variety of different formats, then Notion is amazing for that.
shminge · 7h ago
That seems such a minor gain to me. Are you not concerned about notion a) being online only and b) not letting you be in control of your data?
I'm a strong proponent of File over App: who knows how long Obsidian or notion will exist - at least I know I can work with my Obsidian notes as long as text editors exist
dottjt · 4h ago
I am concerned about those things, but what I've personally realised is that it's more important to use a tool that you really enjoy using + provides the functionality you want, as opposed to a tool you hate using and doesn't resonate with you.
I hate making notes in plain text. It's too inconvenient, not to mention doesn't provide me with the functionality I want. On the other hand, I love organising things into databases i.e. Notion.
So either I don't take notes (net negative) or I take notes (net positive).
bachmeier · 7h ago
IMO they're for completely different customers. Obsidian constrains itself to working on local text files that you can sync yourself. Notion is just another complex website where you turn over all your data and they sell you AI services.
dottjt · 4h ago
The complexity is what makes it valuable to some people. Put simply, it does more than Obsidian.
Do you need that complexity? That's a personal question.
__jonas · 7h ago
Neat! Is the 'import from notion' functionality able to convert Notion databases to this?
kepano · 7h ago
You can import all the underlying data from Notion using the Obsidian Importer plugin, however I believe that Notion's Databases export only includes a CSV. So you'll need to recreate the views to be able to interact with them dynamically.
I've been using bases (in beta) for a month or so for the vault I keep for the notes for each of the (many) D&D/ttrpg campaigns I play in, and it's really made it a ton easier to get an overview of e.g. the many different NPCs we meet and interact with, and the relevant info (name/pronouns/pic/race/class/etc) all in one place.
The Obsidian dev team has been really responsive to feedback from those of us in the beta, and I'd encourage people to look at the changelog to see that in action (e.g. changing the syntax to be more object oriented, smoothing over UI issues, etc)
wjrb · 6h ago
I also made pretty heavy use of plugins to manage PCs, NPCs, encounters, items (!!), custom tables, maps, and setting details in a single campaign. Led to a lot of bug reports for the D&D-specific plugins, but Dataview worked like a charm.
Having a more Obsidian-native interface for managing all of that is. Like other commenters, would definitely watch a video of you sharing your Obsidian "build" for that use-case.
lolive · 8h ago
Man, you probably gave me the only use case that could push me beyond my basic usage of Obsidian.
[i wait for your YouTube demo. #PROOOOFIT]
LordDragonfang · 7h ago
Lol, I'm not much of a "content creator" (though I'd recommend wanderloots' intro series on bases[1]), but here's a quick gist of what I extracted from my for one of my campaigns:
This is a combined view of the players and npcs from one campaign with the portrait gallery in the second view.
I've got the official template plugin bound to ctrl-shift-2, so I just hit that to pre-populate the frontmatter whenever I create an npc/pc/etc note with the appropriate template.
Yes, but their kicker has always been that you own your data in a readable format even if you don’t use their app and can self sync it if you prefer. I imagine they’ll keep adding functionality of notion and airtable while still keeping this underlying premise
abakker · 8h ago
I create .md files programmatically based on my calendar. One day, I'll figure out how to take my copilot notes and paste them in automatically, but for now I know that a note and metadata are already there. its great to be able to do the front matter.
viccis · 7h ago
I haven't really looked into what Airtable does, and I shouldn't be surprised at how much AI nonsense I had to dig through on their website to get any real info, but I still was.
cyberpunk · 7h ago
It's a shit internet spreadsheet for managers who think they can use it to "no code" code some feature or other that some poor sucker has to painfully migrate off of sometime down the road.
patrickhogan1 · 7h ago
Obsidian is amazing
jdprgm · 5h ago
This would really benefit from a 10-15 minute video demo building up a simple example use case in a similar style to how dhh previews rails.
hereme888 · 7h ago
Yes!
No more need to evaluate AnyType or similar apps.
Obsidian rocks.
e1gen-v · 7h ago
Slightly off topic but why is everyone switching to these really wide fonts?
criddell · 5h ago
Why is this a core plugin? It’s interesting, but seems a bit niche. How do you decide if it’s a core plugin or a regular plugin?
flakiness · 6h ago
I hope Obsidian has a headless SDK running outside Obsidian that allows devs to read the vault and do various analysis and automation. With this kind of structured data there are a lot of potential use cases. The obsidian binary limitation is a roadblock there.
zekenie · 6h ago
Because the data is front matter you can get it into other systems pretty easily but an sdk for executing the views seems really key
threecheese · 4h ago
There’s a plugin that exposes a local api, which folks use for this type of access pattern. Obsidians sdk for plugins is not external, but it does exist and is used broadly.
The Reddit thread has some good discussion about the feature
https://old.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1mtxh52/obsidia...
The solution I used before bases is eh... pretty hacky.
```meta-bind-js-view {memory^inputText} as title --- const toShow = context.bound.title || "TKTK"; const str = `\`\`\`meta-bind-button label: New Project Idea - ${toShow} icon: "" hidden: false class: "" tooltip: "" id: "" style: primary actions: - type: templaterCreateNote templateFile: Templates/Project.md folderPath: Project Ideas fileName: ${toShow} openNote: true \`\`\``; return engine.markdown.create(str) ```
On top of that, you can add other properties to the view, especially one like modified date, which updates every time you modify the file. This is useful for seeing which files you haven't looked at in a while. Old concepts often apply to new ones, but we sometimes forget to check back to make that connection explicit."
Maybe it's a bit harder to understand, as it's a more mushy than the usual relational database.
No, horrible job at explaining. What does it mean to turn any set of notes into a powerful database? What does it mean to "turn"? Does it mean that a file will become a database? Or does it mean that a file can be interpreted as a database? And why set of notes? If I have a single note, can I turn that into a database too? Are the records of the database files, or items in a file? What is happening when I type ![[Untitled.base]]? Is the file where I typed that a database now? Or does that text assume that the file named Untitled must be a database?
They do a horrible job at explaining it.
https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/
I often want to answer questions like:
- When was the last time I chatted with this person - What did we talk about - Who haven't I spoken to in a while
For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing).
Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
> Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).
wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...
Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.
But don't install Obsidian and then spend hours adding addons. You'll get overwhelmed, confused and wondering why all the Influenzers are saying it's CHANGED THEIR LIFE. It hasn't.
I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134
My other advice is that it’s fine to boot up new vaults for other things. I’ve got two main vaults - a sort of work KB and a journal. But then I’ve got a bunch of smaller ones - songs I’m writing, courses I’m making, writing. Don’t be told that you’ve got to get some kind of universal thing that does everything. This is also b/s and often pedalled by the productivity wonks.
http://tangentnotes.com/
Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files.
I found it useful for reading code in markdown.
When I was looking for nv->then->simplenote replacement Joplin and Obsidian didn't even stay on the radar for more than a few mins.
I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!
A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".
Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.
Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.
Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.
Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.
Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?
I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.
I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.
Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.
For a personal knowledge base I think the latter approach saves time in the long run. I have clusters of well organized information. Well tagged and linked. I can always find my movie ideas, projects, and deep thoughts when I want them. I like the idea of just curating the clusters I care about. Just enough organizing. I then have a few highly connected entry points to my clusters. Often I find people don’t link enough in their Obsidian. It’s free and puts things in a more graph oriented layout that the tool can show you.
Edit: oh, also remember, these are text files. Grep still works. Also, we have very powerful CLI LLMs to summarize and categorize text data rapidly. Like “suggest 3 tags for this document based on <prompt magic here>. :)
I tried going down the road like you’re talking about one for managing past, present, and future trips. It technically worked, but it was so fiddly that I hated using it. I just made a few folders instead.
I suppose now, if I wanted all the metadata you’re talking about, using a base would make the most sense. But I’d still need to be realistic about how I’m going to use it. Do I care enough about future sorting abilities to turn adding a movie to a watch list into a multi-field form, where I need to consider all these potential futures to fill it out, creating a lot of friction to the action?
The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik
https://www.v2ex.com/t/534800
Thanks for bringing this history up, and I think everyone should be careful when downloading a new version for this product, or better build by themselves after checking out the recents commits with some AI tools.
Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.
Obsidian Bases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44058972 - May 2025 (13 comments)
I hope the API has support to allow extensions---I see that it is on the Roadmap[0].
I'm particularly interested to see how this integrates with Canvas and other note types.
[0]: https://obsidian.md/roadmap/
There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension.
The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to a Markdown table or CSV.
See also: https://help.obsidian.md/bases/syntax
If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mermaid works, defined in a codeblock) that references a nearby CSV/JSON/etc file.
I often have a lot of .md files floating around "data" projects and a lightweight tabular renderer (with filtering, sorting, possibly editing) would be absolutely killer. Does such a thing exist already?
I am with you on this, I wish Obsidian would optionally allow you to use YAML or some other structured data directly in the fenced code block or base file.
I really, really want something that kind of takes an Obsidian-like approach to local databases, sort of like Excel/Airtable but with flat, human-editable text files that live on your filesystem with a schema driven property editor. It’s kind of a bummer that this gets so tantalizingly close but doesn’t take it to the logical conclusion. I hope they do it eventually or make it possible with plugins.
Here's a little demo of what I've got working: https://youtu.be/LCR9pAc_xn0.
It's currently still very rough and I'm just using it myself but hoping to open source it at some point.
For example, book list, movie list, customer list, invoice list, asset register, key register… once you hit a certain point, obsidian probably isn’t the right tool anymore. But no reason to go to the monthly SaaS “right tool” at the POC stage.
Obsidian is the pre-step for a larger database: cheap, fast to customise, easy to backup (git), self supported. It’s probably not going to run a company, but it will suit an individual or small startup.
And 99.99% of discussions about scaling are premature optimisation (cit needed). A lot of people spend more time thinking about scaling then entering their data, which probably means the data is smaller than they think! ha
It allows inline blocks in the `key:: value` format, as well as frontmatter-based data (sort of what Bases are doing) and probably even more.
(I’m currently using Org-mode, but the approach is the same.)
https://obsidian.md/clipper
I even started just writing the daily journal all in one file because that gives me that but it's starting to get a little big.
Does anyone know what JS library (presumably) they are using to display, filter, sort the table?
Everything else is custom as we generally don't use existing frameworks and the large amount of baggage they carry. CodeMirror and Lezer we already used before Bases.
I can see plenty of SaaS apps, especially indie made, that could benefit from such functionality.
I'm finally able to kill Notion (good riddance - I never liked it!), and if it can handle larger tables then I'll stop using Google Suite as well.
My last request of the Obsidian team is a better git plugin. Their official built-in sync product is fine, but I'd still like to manage my own versioning so I can use automations.
The currently available git plugin is extremely dangerous (!!!) if set up incorrectly. I would consider myself an advanced user of git, and Obsidian's git plugin has on several occasions blown away my history and notes. It has frustrating and opaque behavior for how it consolidates change sets and diffs.
I've been working on making Obsidian "work for work" with a real-time collaboration plugin called Relay [0]. We use CRDTs for conflict resolution between users/clients and it also happens to remove a ton of headaches for device-to-device sync as well.
Our collaboration server can be run on-premise and we also just open sourced a Git Sync connector so you can do google-docs style collab via Obsidian+Relay but still have the merged documents end up in git (and plug into (Markdown + git)-centric publishing workflows like Mintlify and Quartz.
The whole Obsidian ecosystem feels really electric right now.
[0] https://relay.md
One caveat is that the obsidian android app DOES NOT seem to save files to storage until the note unloads, which can break things if you pull in the middle of making changes.
[1] Though I have had to fix my termux clone of the vault enough times that I now just nuke it and re-clone instead of bothering with git - but that's more of a "termux likes to break git" issue than anything
Why is a plugin necessary?
Sometimes you'll have to push a big ugly commit.
But other times the manual diff review can save you from a headache, like if you have some obscure syncing going on, like syncing READMEs and other markdown files to external repos to manage all markdown with the same Obsidian interface.
Also if you need to maintain a high-standard for the contents of your notes while still utilizing AI tools, the manual diff review can prove invaluable in ensuring trusted resources don't turn into slop
But as an Obsidian power-user, I regularly paste screenshots into notes
There is a plugin that allows templating the screenshot file name, so naming the pasted screenshot, using the same as the note where it's being pasted, and a timestamp, for example, is easy.
Hands-down my most productive interface to LLMs for [years since GPT3.5] years running.
Do you have any examples of what decent RAG functionality might look like? And where the current plugins fall short?
https://youtu.be/mZ8TJ59Hj28
https://youtu.be/7Rvl9Sl29Jk
It's also open source, unlike obsidian which is proprietary
In particular, I love how you select text/blocks in Notion and how every line is a "block". I really wish other editors did that as well. In fact, it's probably the main reason why I haven't moved away from Notion.
If you just want to take plain notes, then yeah. Notion isn't what you want. However if you want sprawling databases that all inter-connected, amongst a variety of different formats, then Notion is amazing for that.
I'm a strong proponent of File over App: who knows how long Obsidian or notion will exist - at least I know I can work with my Obsidian notes as long as text editors exist
I hate making notes in plain text. It's too inconvenient, not to mention doesn't provide me with the functionality I want. On the other hand, I love organising things into databases i.e. Notion.
So either I don't take notes (net negative) or I take notes (net positive).
Do you need that complexity? That's a personal question.
https://help.obsidian.md/import/notion
The Obsidian dev team has been really responsive to feedback from those of us in the beta, and I'd encourage people to look at the changelog to see that in action (e.g. changing the syntax to be more object oriented, smoothing over UI issues, etc)
Having a more Obsidian-native interface for managing all of that is. Like other commenters, would definitely watch a video of you sharing your Obsidian "build" for that use-case.
https://gist.github.com/LordDragonfang/d826cb686c64d582afbe2...
This is a combined view of the players and npcs from one campaign with the portrait gallery in the second view.
I've got the official template plugin bound to ctrl-shift-2, so I just hit that to pre-populate the frontmatter whenever I create an npc/pc/etc note with the appropriate template.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWhMzDKA7vJ4NDvVhlZMk...
Are things like Kanban views (a la notion) planned?
Interesting to see how well this scales.
No more need to evaluate AnyType or similar apps.
Obsidian rocks.