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I prefer PARA, which I implement some ideas of Zettelkasten into. Logseq sadly couldn’t do this well. It also just sadly lacks a lot of plugins and features I need/really want. Logseq is great, but so is Obsidian.
I think for some brains it just doesn’t click. How do you write a long form document? How would you write documentation? How would you write a blog post?
I tried for a while but I just couldn’t understand the concept of “Everything as an outline.”
Well I think the first thing is just simply that documents aren’t notes, so you wouldn’t write those things in Logseq.
What you are writing in Logseq is a zettlekasten, which is just a personal knowledge graph. And in a knowledge graph, everything needs to relate somehow to everything else, that’s why it has to be an outline.
So things can relate to the journal date they were written on, to their parent and children concepts, and to the links that they contain. Every idea has at least a relationship to the date you wrote it, but hopefully you can link that idea to more than just that relationship. You want to organically rediscover that next time you make a cake, that eggs are bad for your allergies, and be able to trace that you discovered that at this doctors appointment on this date.
Otherwise, how would you ever find anything? And more importantly, how would you rediscover it organically when researching other concepts in your graph?
Obsidian purports to help you create organized knowledge graphs, but it makes you plan your organization up front. Logseq lets it evolve naturally and organically, by giving you the necessary tools and constraints.
I’ve tried logseq for the last 6 months (no commercial license) at work, but while it’s really good for outlining, it’s lack of a tag function is what feels like a critical weakness to me. I realize structurally it’s different in concept. But making everything into bullets doesn’t always suit the task.
I would love Logseq for journalling or writing though.
Obsidian dev’s original project Dynalist is an outline based notes app that does have tags. She doesn’t update it anymore but I still rely heavily on it as my second brain.
I actually find the lack of distinction between a tag and a wiki link a breath of fresh air. So many other apps make a meaningless distinction between them and make you choose ahead of time a styleguide for how you plan to use both. Logseq makes a queryable style enforced and then you adapt to using it. Very different
Yes, but the syntax and documentation on the queries is obtuse as hell in logseq. Like it is ridiculous how granular you have a to get of you want to return all links within a time period or something. If I need to write SQL to pull notes, I should just use a database, lol.
The nice thing about tags as a distinct entity is it offers the option you can utilize if you choose. It gives you two buckets you can sort into and connect between. And it does make creating “topic groups” easier than manually linking them all to a tag page in logseq, imo.
Conversely, I would massively prefer of Logseq abolished support for hashtags entirely if they are functionally identical to wikilinks. Or combine them so the hashtags auto-convert to wikilinks or vice versa. But supporting hashtags in any manner when they are frankly not a “real” feature is more frustrating. Making topic links in Logseq is harder because of this.
Also, the existence of tag pages themselves is a confusong abberation given the above…
Logseq is a great tool, but very different in terms of what it is best suited to handle. I think I will revisit it for if I do a lot of writing, but for disparate ideas or notation it is good but could be better.
Just because other tools use # in other ways doesn’t mean they aren’t useful the way they are now in Logseq. It’s just a one character shorthand rather than four characters. I find tags as they are in Evernote and Obsidian exceedingly worthless for all but the most strictly organized individuals, not so in Logseq. Call them what you will.
A query is helpful when you need it, but rarely needed.
Use Logseq. It’s amazing IMO. And OSS
It’s a very, very different approach having everything as a bullet point though.
This is true of Markdown though, no? Which Obsidian runs?
Markdown has many more elements than bullet points
https://markdown-it.github.io/
Yeah but you learn it and it’s a far more organized approach
It doesn’t matter if it’s a “far more organised approach”, logseq simply doesn’t fit many types of workflows for note taking.
logseq is a zettelkasten program; Obsidian is a text editor
Embrace zettelkasten as your note taking workflow. It’s more organized 😅
I prefer PARA, which I implement some ideas of Zettelkasten into. Logseq sadly couldn’t do this well. It also just sadly lacks a lot of plugins and features I need/really want. Logseq is great, but so is Obsidian.
I think for some brains it just doesn’t click. How do you write a long form document? How would you write documentation? How would you write a blog post?
I tried for a while but I just couldn’t understand the concept of “Everything as an outline.”
Well I think the first thing is just simply that documents aren’t notes, so you wouldn’t write those things in Logseq.
What you are writing in Logseq is a zettlekasten, which is just a personal knowledge graph. And in a knowledge graph, everything needs to relate somehow to everything else, that’s why it has to be an outline.
So things can relate to the journal date they were written on, to their parent and children concepts, and to the links that they contain. Every idea has at least a relationship to the date you wrote it, but hopefully you can link that idea to more than just that relationship. You want to organically rediscover that next time you make a cake, that eggs are bad for your allergies, and be able to trace that you discovered that at this doctors appointment on this date.
Otherwise, how would you ever find anything? And more importantly, how would you rediscover it organically when researching other concepts in your graph?
Obsidian purports to help you create organized knowledge graphs, but it makes you plan your organization up front. Logseq lets it evolve naturally and organically, by giving you the necessary tools and constraints.
Thank you, that’s what I had suspected, so I’m glad I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
The way I like to think is through long form writing and personal documentation, so I guess it’s not a good match for me.
In Obsidian I have a script that lets me know any notes that aren’t linked to anything else, so it means I have everything interlinked.
I’ve tried logseq for the last 6 months (no commercial license) at work, but while it’s really good for outlining, it’s lack of a tag function is what feels like a critical weakness to me. I realize structurally it’s different in concept. But making everything into bullets doesn’t always suit the task.
I would love Logseq for journalling or writing though.
Obsidian dev’s original project Dynalist is an outline based notes app that does have tags. She doesn’t update it anymore but I still rely heavily on it as my second brain.
Interesting. I’ll have to give that one a shot later. Though I’m probably fine with Obsidian.
I actually find the lack of distinction between a tag and a wiki link a breath of fresh air. So many other apps make a meaningless distinction between them and make you choose ahead of time a styleguide for how you plan to use both. Logseq makes a queryable style enforced and then you adapt to using it. Very different
Yes, but the syntax and documentation on the queries is obtuse as hell in logseq. Like it is ridiculous how granular you have a to get of you want to return all links within a time period or something. If I need to write SQL to pull notes, I should just use a database, lol.
The nice thing about tags as a distinct entity is it offers the option you can utilize if you choose. It gives you two buckets you can sort into and connect between. And it does make creating “topic groups” easier than manually linking them all to a tag page in logseq, imo.
Conversely, I would massively prefer of Logseq abolished support for hashtags entirely if they are functionally identical to wikilinks. Or combine them so the hashtags auto-convert to wikilinks or vice versa. But supporting hashtags in any manner when they are frankly not a “real” feature is more frustrating. Making topic links in Logseq is harder because of this.
Also, the existence of tag pages themselves is a confusong abberation given the above…
Logseq is a great tool, but very different in terms of what it is best suited to handle. I think I will revisit it for if I do a lot of writing, but for disparate ideas or notation it is good but could be better.
Just because other tools use # in other ways doesn’t mean they aren’t useful the way they are now in Logseq. It’s just a one character shorthand rather than four characters. I find tags as they are in Evernote and Obsidian exceedingly worthless for all but the most strictly organized individuals, not so in Logseq. Call them what you will.
A query is helpful when you need it, but rarely needed.