Obsidian Users Fighting Vault Complexity
Users are frustrated by the increasing complexity and maintenance burden of their Obsidian vaults. They face issues like slow performance, plugin management headaches, outdated documentation, and difficulty integrating desired functionality, hindering their ability to effectively organize and utilize their knowledge. This leads to wasted time and a feeling of being overwhelmed.
SOURCES (60)
“What do you mean your main page? Like "opens a specific file"on start up setting in the Files & Links settings for obsidian? I'm looking for something like what you did, but I want it to open a main page that show me a note…”
Oo thats a really interesting method, I’ll start doing that as well!
“So it will sync to my other devcies (via obsidian sync) without me opening the main obsidian app manually?”
“Those sound like solid suggestions. It’s great to see feedback being shared for improvements!”
“this literally was the biggest thing i missed when switched from gkeep, trying it now! great job!”
“Thanks, I really like the idea that my knowledge is only what I wrote myself. For yourself, do you have a ritual for going over your clippings, like a set time in the day or week?”
“Is it possible in any way to get Dataviewers and Metabinds to work inside of HTML thats put into a .md I know, its a bit unorthodox, but I really like the Obsidian environment and got pretty much all my notes and stats on there now. But I'm trying to get a dashboard/"sheet" working for some time now for which I've written this whole HTML + CSS for. But now that im satisfied with how its supposed to look, I realized the parser doesn't like combining HTML and anything Obsidia”
“I should add that this is on mobile and moreover on Android, the somewhat neglected platform (hitherto). Performance might be better on desktop and iOS, but I use Obsidian exclusively on mobile. I don't think I have a debug logging option, or at least I don't see it.”
“It's not forgotten. Obsidian is a small team of four developers and we're looking for an Android specialist but haven't found someone yet. But 1.13 included a bunch of Android-specific improvements and so does 1.14.”
Same, the periodic sync covers like 99% of use cases imo
“That's why I like the option to have everything in one top level assets folder for the entire vault. I only "clean up" the folder maybe once a year, if that. I'm much more a fan of meeting the organizational structure emerge on its own since - no matter how much planning you do - that's what's going to happen down the road anyways. 😂 As always, your mileage may vary.”
Here's a doc explaining it all... https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/a1edc3e1-d2ff-43ee-bff1-af7251d6bb9e
“The line that jumped out at me was "I made Claude Code smarter but I am still the same." That's the real thing here, and it isn't a clipping problem. Two things that helped me: One, I stopped treating the clip folder as a queue. It's a shelf, not a list to get through. Stuff sits there until a real question sends me looking for it. Nothing is ever "pending," so the pile stops producing guilt even when it's big. Vault bloat isn't really a thing either, as l”
“It should work well with Obsidian sync :) If you use multiple vaults, then you will have to open the in-active vault.”
“I see it as a global setting 😩 Going to try making the obsidian vault "make available offline" and see of that changes anything”
“Hi, after moving to Obsidian I really missed the Google Keep widget. I tried a couple of the ones that exist but none of them clicked for me. I wrote my own. It reads a folder I point it at and lists the notes. Tapping one opens it in Obsidian. It also shows when the vault last synced, which is the reason I built it really — I kept not noticing when sync had quietly stopped. Right now tapping a note only opens Obsidian. If there's interest I'd do it for other markdown apps too. https://g”
“Yup. I'm just gonna test drive the plugin on my own vault for a few days as testing, before making the first official release, and submitting it for review. If you have any feedback at all, I'd be more than happy to work on it! Thanks again for the plugin idea.”
Bingo, use Outline. I THINK Trilium and possibly Joplin have this as well.
“the solution to that is to model provenance. it is not a problem to capture a bunch of input, but that is not your knowledge. it should go to a separated inbox folder. in another moment, you will process this inbox, removing junk, paraphrasing important ideas, and organizing that in your vault. that is the moment of real ingestion of knowledge.”
“This is a nice step forward for remote access, but I would push on one thing: once you can chat with your vault from anywhere, the interesting question stops being retrieval and becomes trust. If the assistant surfaces three notes and stitches them into an answer, can you tell which sentence came from which note and when you wrote it? I have found that citing back to the source note (not just linking it, but quoting the line that justified the claim) changes how much I trust the answer versus a”
“As a GitSync user, thank you! After years of failed attempts, I’ve been going strong for about 6 months now thanks to your app 👏”
“Shout out to this major quality of life win: Editor: Pasting a list item onto a line that already contains a list marker (e.g. - [ ] ) no longer duplicates the marker. That's one micro-frustration of mine gone! :)”
“Yess exactly. A habit I made that made retention a lot better is NOT moving something I clipped out of the landing folder (clippings) until I wrote down the contents in my own words (or at least what I took from it/want to retain). Only after that I allow to stow it in my sources folder or whatever. The sources folder is a fallback library to read, but it is not my knowledge. My knowledge is only what I wrote myself in my own words. Sometimes this makes the clippings folder similar to a read-lat”
“I picked up Obsidian while writing a story and then it finally reached a point for me where I want to actually organize things by multiple spheres in order to keep track of stuff smoothly but how exactly do I make multiple spheres? Like 100 dots in that one circular group and then other 100 dots in second circular group and so on? And I accidentally found this plugin called Orbit is that it? And can the multiple spheres be named or? submitted by /u/Ericridge [link] [comments]”
“Feature hasn't been suggested before. [x] I have verified this feature I'm about to request hasn't been suggested before. Describe the enhancement you want to request like the title says, can you add a build in provider for unsloth studio? or can I make a PR for it? rn, its kinda in shambles, and model which supports vision doesnt even shows it supports vision, and its really not that great with the custom openAI endpoint we have rn.”
“I do have obsidian sync running, but Obsidian Git is powering my claude mobile connection. Github, Github actions, and then Cloudflare. I can now have AI agent chats with my vault while out on a walk.”
“Definitely. Has been working so far. Hopefully continues to do so. I have a habit of leaving projects unfinished.”
This is why random note opener plugins are helpful for discovery btw
“Claude remote takes care of 1, with a minimal setup. But 2 is something that makes sense as an advantage. I think Claude’s search should be pretty good for 3, unless the vault is extremely large. 4 is a good advantage, but I expect the other labs to copy Anthropic soon enough.”
“The changes on one device never seem to sync with any other device in the repo folder.”
“When I make a change on one device, the change does not seem to be reflected on any other devices?”
“That is awesome! I’ll definitely be coming back to this and may have questions later.”
“I am realizing that I tried to overcomplicate obsidian and my actual usecase isn't anywhere nearly complex enough to fully need all the plug ins I've initially added Congrats, you have ascended above the swamp of productivity theatre youtubers. Not many make it here. Enjoy your stay”
Not gonna lie. That last paragraph made do a literal spit-take
“Yes indeed. Ignis is actually the recent one that came out, linux-server.io also have an image of obsidian you could use in docker. the linux server one used to be super buggy and laggy for me, then moved to ignis - works like a charm. Phone browser is also nice, teeny issues but can work around!!”
“the print to pdf route is slower but thats kind of the point, makes you think about whether its actually worth saving”
“I used to do that, here's what's different: You can fire up a new session anywhere, anytime and still have access w/o remembering to attach the vault folder via disk. You have to keep your computer live to access the remote session. NoteMesh adds indexed search, bunch of other tools that are higher level than file-level access. You can access from multiple apps and agents. For both Claude and ChatGPT, you add the remote MCP config once and now it's available to everything. I really n”
“For those already on Git, has the version history ever actually saved you? lol never anything too drastic that i needed "saving" from, but definitely a few times where i've changed things up (moved notes around/changed some plugin settings) that didn't work as expected, so i was glad to have the backup!!”
“I’ve been using completely vanilla Obsidian for a little over two months for my worldbuilding vault, and I finally decided to start customizing it. I switched over to the AnuPpuccin theme and have been slowly tweaking the day and night color schemes to make the vault feel a little more like my own. I’ve also started learning a bit of CSS along the way, which opened up even more options than I realized were possible. I ended up giving the two modes their own identities while keeping them part of”
“Since Obsidian has web clipper plug-in, I have been feeling quite motivated to use Obsidian. To be honest, in the beginning it feels quite amazing, especially I started to use it with Claude Code to try to make my clipper saving being more organized. And then, I realized maybe like more than 50% of my saved posts on social media are all food related, like restaurant recommendations or recipes 🤓☝️I feel just a grasp of this made me understand myself better. And this is the part I love this plug”
“You don't have to dig very far to find the "how do I recover" questions on Reddit. My bad.”
“I’m going crazy trying to find information about this. The relevant search terms are commonly used for other Obsidian features, such as tags and the file explorer. Does anyone know how to add labels to the file explorer, like the “CANVAS” label shown for the untitled file? “Main” is an Excalidraw file, but no label appear. I could add it to the filename, of course, but adding a separate label shouldn’t be this difficult, right? I checked if untitled has any default tag inside that would bring up”