this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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One of the things that attracted me to Obsidian was the flat, local file structure that (in theory) would allow me to use other apps on conjunction with Obsidian by accessing the same “vault” (aka, file folder on my computer).

In reality this has been a bit more difficult, as apps vary in terms of how they access files or use file names.

I do use Taio alongside Obsidian on my iPhone and that works well. But curious if there are other apps, particularly on mobile, that play nicely with Obsidian.

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[–] spencerwi 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mostly just use Syncthing for syncing the files, and otherwise I let Obsidian do the driving.

[–] nightscout 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I’m fine with Obsidian on desktop and I love that they have a fully-featured app, but the experience on mobile and iPad with the obsidian app is not the best UI experience. I also find it to be a bit buggy at times.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@nightscout @spencerwi
IA Writer works very nicely with Obsidian. The styling looks different, YAML is visible, and anything outside markdown won't be rendered, but it reads and writes perfectly (although I rarely find a need for it anymore). The iPad app has come a long way but yeah, it's not perfect yet.

[–] nightscout 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

That’s one app I really wanted to try to use but they don’t yet have a trial or monthly subscription option for iOS (supposed to release one). I didn’t want to pay $50 for it just yet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@nightscout @laroquephoto At $50, the mobile version of iA Writer has become way overpriced, especially if you’re only going to use it on an iPhone. Imo 1Writer is pretty much equally good (I own both) and last I looked it only costs $5. Fwiw, you can also sign into Dropbox with it, which you can’t do with iA Writer.

[–] nightscout 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, I agree. The developer said they were going to move to a subscription option for iOS, but that has not happened yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@nightscout iA Writer is a fine app (despite one thing that *really* annoys me) and I’m glad I have it installed on all my devices, but I can’t imagine ever paying a recurring subscription for it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@nightscout Makes sense. Another one that works well is Writer btw. Basically any text editor that can read and write to external folders on iOS/iPadOS.

Although Ulysses introduces problematic characters for some reason, at least it did just before I left it for Obsidian.

[–] nightscout 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ah forgot about Writer. I never tried Ulysses with Obsidian either. I have considered iA Writer because the UI looks pretty nice but haven't taken the step yet of actually paying for it on iOS. I also love Noteplan3, but that app doesn't use the filename as the note name, so it's not interchangeable with Obsidian.

[–] alxx 4 points 2 years ago

I love Obsidian LiveSync. It can be a bit 'hacky' at times, but when it works, it's great. Besides that I use the Git plugin for version control and backup to my local Gitea instance. Which is also synced to GitHub as my off-site backup.

[–] ramisedhom 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I hear about Fleeting Notes but I didn't play with it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Oh wow, I'm definitely going to try this. My current workflow (for two different worldbuilding vaults) is to make quick notes in Google Keep, and then clean them up and import them into Obsidian all together whenever I have the time to.

[–] nightscout 1 points 2 years ago

Wow thanks! I had not heard about this one. A very good option for quick mobile notes and it works seamlessly with obsidian. Thanks for sharing.

[–] Im1Random 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I use FolderSync (connected to Nextcloud via WebDAV) on mobile and the official Nextcloud client on desktop to sync my vault.

[–] dethb0y 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

This is really difficult to break down because it's (by nature) complicated. but:

  1. A custom python script that reads RSS feeds, picks out keywords, and posts them to a special file with a checkbox. This then monitors the checkboxes so it doesn't repeat a story (still happens but not as bad as without)

  2. A custom python script that checks a bunch of websites for things like when a new video is uploaded. This uses webscraping and is highly customized to each site.

  3. This one's pretty neat: I use Lynx to do a text dump of wttr.in THEN i use a custom python script to add the sunrise, sunset, and moon phases to that text file so it displays them. Since wttr.in goes down fairly often due to overuse, it's also got bypasses built in so it at least shows me the sun/moon info even if the site read fails.

All that runs every hour, though due to intentional design choices it varies the time slightly to avoid being detected for being to regular.

Then, once a day at midnight, it copies my entire vault to a backup directory and puts it into a dated backup folder.

Since the entire thing runs via a single shell script it's easy to start up when i do a reboot. very fire-and-forget.

meanwhile in Obsidian itself i have several panes set up - for the updates, the weather etc - that "bracket" my main viewing page + my calendar.

[–] grabyourmotherskeys 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I love that weather site, thank you for posting it. :)

[–] dethb0y 2 points 2 years ago

No sweat! I found it when i was looking for an (easy) way to display weather as text, and instantly fell in love.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Have you thought about running it in serverless architecture such as AWS Lambda. No reboot required ;) Would love to see script!

[–] 0485919158191 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Nothing really. I just use the Git Sync addon to store my notes to Gihub.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I use Working Copy with iOS to automate documentation with git! Highly recommend it: https://meganesulli.com/blog/sync-obsidian-vault-iphone-ipad/

[–] 0485919158191 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is great! The app is a bit expensive though but it beats paying monthly for obsidian sync anyways! Love it!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah. The fee structure ilI believe could be a one off. You get any new features for 1y, but after that it is another cost to get new features and that goes for another year. So not bad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Syncthing and the Custom Attachment Location plugin (which I don't think actually works on mobile, but then mobile isn't where I usually attach files).

This lets me browse my vault in a file browser nearly as easily as in Obsidian because the all note attachments will be in some_sub_folder/attachments/notename/.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Markor

Termux for bash, wget, sed, awk, python scripts and rclone for syncing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I used to use Dropbox but now I use Obsidian sync. So nothing else really.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I just sync it via Dropbox though I am probably going to move it to syncthing perma online via my raspberry Pi.

[–] onetrickpony 1 points 2 years ago

i use obsidian-git plugin on desktop, and on mobile i have a Cron job set up through termux to commit my local changes and fetch any remote changes every 30 min

it works well except for the fact that git objects get corrupt from time to time, so i have another script to re-init the project and fix the corruption :(

there is now obsidian-git as a plugin for mobile as well, but it doesn't support submodules, so I'm stuck with this glued-together solution