How To Use Obsidian Remotely With GitHub Codespaces | FOAM | Dendron | Logseq |

Key Takeaways

welcome back everyone if you're new here my name is brian jenks and today we are talking about obsidian and the options we have to edit it remotely and on mobile since discovering obsidian my entire life to be dramatic has been changed at least in respects of knowledge work and information retention the connection of notes and not just taking notes but making notes and what's been mind-blowing is the actual applications of this towards my work which i am a knowledge worker i am a research analyst and actually now i'm a research specialist so this has direct applications on my work on my personal interests my personal life business it's been a drastic change from doing things in onenote joplin evernote or whatever application you might want to put there it's been absolutely game-changing doing things in obsidian and something that i constantly have to remind myself is that it's new it's beta it's already this good and it's not even like to 1.0 yet there's so much more to come from this application and the developers and a lot of new features the ability to just edit things on mobile and ios it's just it's not there yet but doesn't mean it's not going to be coming remember when we were all pining for block level references and all the people who were rome expats were all just clamoring for block references we got that now and now it's we've gone so many miles ahead of that now one pain point for obsidian right now is that there's no mobile option there's no ipad option there's really no ios app or way to access things on mobile through the conventional means you know downloading the app we have it on linux mac and uh windows because you have flat pack for linux you got a dmg the disk image for mac and you got the straight up executable for windows so we can install it on every platform because it's electron but there's no option for ios or ipad so how do we edit things mobily or remotely and how do we do things like one thing that is commonly asked for is how are we going to do quick capture if you're on the go you want to remember about it to get a note well there's not really any option right now it would be really convenient just open up an app with you know on your phone for obsidian and just have a quick option to just hey grab this note id i'm going to get to it later but quick capture that note idea for now i've just been defaulting to using todoist because i can just use um the apple voice assistant i can't say her name otherwise she'll ruin my audio settings right now but you can just say hey remind me about this idea at whatever in todoist or just remind me in that case it'll use apple reminders if you're on apple but in any case you can use like an application like that to audio quick capture your ideas and sometimes i'll be driving and i'll just say hey remind me about this thing at 7 00 pm in todoist and it will leave me a reminder to get back to that when i'm you know home at my computer but what if you also wanted to edit your vault and you're not even at home or at your computer let's just say you're at work you want to quickly pop onto your vault and make some small changes or add a note or let's just say your work actually has some space in your vault and you do some work things in your vault you want to edit it remotely from your home your home machine where it's actually installed on where your vault actually lives how do we do that so there's no mobile app but if you use my git workflow that i will put a card up there for you and follow that to a t there might have might be some issues on mac os and dealing with cron but i also have a medium article for that git workflow that also has a link to that resource about how to actually make sure cron does work as it should to do the recurring scheduling i'll put a link to all of these reference things and urls in the pinned comment below with the timestamps but if you follow the workflow read the article follow those steps it is a little bit technical but it is it's because it's a workaround it's not necessarily something that's like this is the best way to do it this is a workaround but it's an effective one so using the git workflow you can sync your vault to github now you can also have it as a private repository so you can keep your stuff private which is exactly what i do because i got my journal in there i'm not going to like make that public so with that you can edit and sync your files on github so once you do that what are the options available to you how are you going to edit things you're just going to like manually painfully each little item in github and change a file and make a pull request for it and just how are you gonna do that are you just gonna pull the whole vault down to another machine and edit it that way yeah you could do that too but there are some options let's just say you work on a firewall machine you can't install software you can't install obsidian on that machine you might break a contract or break some rules so we can't do that so what are some options available so that you can remotely edit your vault with some level of effectiveness of the features we have in obsidian but without obsidian interesting stay tuned so let's say you are at work you are on a lockdown machine you have an it department you can't just be downloading software now technically on windows you can download obsidian without admin rights onto a machine but if you're a rule respecting and i.t process respecting person and don't want to do that then you're going to need some other option to edit your vault remotely plus your vaults on your home computer so how do we even get it so that you can edit remotely well we do have some options and there are things like obsidian publish but this doesn't let you edit this just shows you like the preview of your vault the the presentation the public presentation public facing notes that you have out here not necessarily something you're going to be editing in this is just like hey here's the nice shiny face but to actually get in the weeds and start editing things you're going to do something different i mentioned my github workflow video and the link will be up there and what it looks like is now i have this you know github repo and this is the repo for my personal vault every single note that i have for the most part is in here actually yeah every note is in here and this does contain my journal so obviously i am keeping this repo private this is why you're never going to see it because it contains you know certain private notes and things that i don't even obviously don't put on publish so my publish is publicly accessible but this is private and with this vault or this repo i actually have some options at my fingertips now so by using this simple simple script that you can get access to if you look at the video in my medium article about it with this simple script tossed into cron so a recurring scheduled job basically runs this every hour for me i get my github repo that is consistently updated every hour uh with every single minute change to every file in my entire vault with this means that now this vault can become a live copy of my my vault and all of my settings so the dot obsidian directory contains a lot of the files that run and contain all the information about how your vault and obsidian app is set up you know you have all the different config configurations key mappings what you have starred your templates workspaces all these different things basically i back up all of these things except the uh dot cash directory and i think one other thing but like mostly dot cash is what you want to avoid because that's just a bunch of junk you don't need and can cause some issues but with all the rest of this stuff synced what this means is if i have an obsidian installed on another computer and i pull this repo down to that computer and then open that vault in obsidian i'm basically going to be looking at exactly the same thing that i left when i left my house hypothetically so with this workflow you can easily just open up obsidian pull this repo down and now have access exactly to where you left off workspace the open note everything on another machine some issue with this third-party plug-ins the community plug-ins you're gonna have to turn those on because a new application it's going to default to off so once you turn all this on you're looking at the exact same thing now where this gets really powerful is if you can't install obsidian can't take advantage of all those native features well what can you do with this well it's on github so that means you can use some really interesting tools with code spaces what are code spaces you might be asking it's basically a cloud-hosted virtual machine running vs code basically you're running vs code but in the cloud and it's looking at your vault as the files that it's looking at so in that way you don't have to download anything on your computer because it's in the cloud so if i went to right here download the code i'm not downloading the code i'm opening with the with code spaces now i already made one because it does take a little bit to set up and load and when you do this what you're going to have to do is in your git it dot get ignore file you're going to need one you'll have to put in some a snippet to actually ignore python because this will actually download a bunch of python stuff in here venve so you're going to actually have to ignore this and a bunch of like included python files i forget if they're in here or not but right right here you can see like you know a thousand plus changes these are all python things in dot vend or the virtual environment um that's for code spaces so as long as you add that to your dot get ignore so you can ignore those changes uh you're going to be all set so i pulled up my dot get ignored just to show you a live example there was also another one python n 3.8 i'm not sure if that's an old thing but we also want to ignore dot van so i'm going to put dot venv in the get ignore file save it and now you can see that it's ignored everything so now we only have one change it's grayed out the one change is just the change to the dot get ignore file beautiful awesome so what happens if you make some changes in here and save it well you need to just like in git push those changes to the repo so com add commit push you're done now those changes are in the repo so i made the change to the dot get ignore so in the terminal here i could say get status and then ah yes the ignore file has been changed so git add dot get ignore so get status ah it's been modified it's staged we need to commit it now so hit commit dot m so the message is uh ignore python stuff okay done so if we did get status again there's nothing we're just ready to push so get push and it's done well it will be done so it loads that and now those changes are present if i go back to my vault and i refresh the page and i go to my git ignore file here we go hey ignore python stuff and we can see that hey.venve is now in the repository and so because i edited this file on the web on the cloud when my script syncs my local machine so obsidian on my laptop my vault with this repo it's going to pull those changes down to my repository my vault and say hey uh this was changed up there so now you're going to have those changes on your machine now and so in this way if you leave to go to work you're not working collaboratively with anybody so nobody's gonna step on anybody's toes with this so you can easily just hey i'm leaving my computer push my changes to github now i go to work or wherever all my latest changes are on github i can edit that vault in codespaces then when you're done you're ready to go home push all your changes to code spaces or push all your changes to github then you go home you pull those changes down and you're right back where you left off even down to the open note because you've got the workspace and all the dot directory data files in here so all that comes from just using and following my workflow that i made in the video and the medium article so now we're on code spaces we got vs code we got our files and other stuff in here by itself it's basically just plain text files not really good for much of anything by itself uh okay so what are we doing with all this how do we do anything with all of this here's the problem you're gonna need to install a bunch of extensions now if you're gonna install a bunch of extensions there are some other other things that might be better for us now if you're just gonna quickly edit something get something out and you don't really care too much not to be doing a lot of intense work and you just want to quickly put something somewhere this is a great way by itself nothing else just hey drop some stuff in there push it to github or even just manually edit the file on github but because we have vs code and it's using our vault that means we have access to two very awesome applications depends on how you define them it's a lot of extensions and how they work synergistically together these two options are foam and dendron you may have heard of them foam is actually where the obsidian developers got i believe this is where they got the idea for the block level reference hashes and the syntax for them there's a great youtube video from the phone developers talking about that but now if we open up phone when we look at the phone website it's a great tool inspired by roam research and all it uses is vs code and a collection of extensions on vs code to looking at this picture you know we get documents backlinks tag explorers wiki links syntax a graph view a preview view uh and then basically because it's in vs code even though these are just what you get with the foam extensions which is like four or five different extensions you can put any extension you want into vs code so all the swath of programming available extensions and things that make programming easier by manipulating and using text you can use those things snippet files with tab stops a to do tree so you can see every single instance of the to do word or fix me or anything like that follow up on items anything like that and even get lens for uh get history in vs code all these things are available because it's envious code so looking at foam how do we get this how do we do this well one thing you can do is if you're starting you don't even have a vault yet you could just make a vault by using the foam template now if you're going to migrate into foam with an existing vault you might have a little bit more of a growing pain i personally don't use either of these tools much yet maybe i might use them one day but i don't really use them at all these are just ideas so that if you want to do some things like this you can take advantage of them and foam has some great stuff to offer and we'll get to that in a little bit there's a lot of great documentation on here there's a template repo you can download maybe you can go through those files figure out which ones you don't need and then import your vault to that and then push it all to github and you're good to go and because it's on github that means you can also use github pages to publish your vault so if you didn't want to pay for obsidian publish for whatever reason and you want to use something a little bit more of your own control and completely plain text all of your own stuff hosted the way you wanted everything your stuff then you could do that take advantage of all the resources that github has to offer so that's like the foam homepage now phone here is the template repo there's not a lot of files there's a couple different things here to do inbox readme some attachments documents and then some you know meta stuff for like styling whatever but forking this will get you a you know use template it'll get you a template repo using foam and so with this you can easily take advantage of what foam has to offer some basic documentation and get started foam also has a lot of amazing features and there's a recipes page in here for their documentation of all the different things you can do with foam some of them are not fleshed out yet but one really cool one stuck out to me is a lot of people talk about this and it's nowhere near being done if it's even being worked on yet in obsidian is live collaboration so because you're using vs code and vs code has a live share option and it's basically meant for programming so if you do any sort of software work you know how intensive and how many tools there are around programming and the sphere of text manipulation for code and doing that stuff collaboratively so using those tools and extensions you can do that in vs code on your vault so if you have a shared vault for your workplace a team you can do live sharing and do version control on your documentation and take advantage of everything else in all these extensions lots of great features in here there's also a graph and custom styling through json of that graph so you want to change all the colors manipulate it have granular control of your graph styling you can do that and again tab stop code snippets so each of your templates can be completely done through vs code snippets and those snippets can actually have tab stops so you can tab through every single piece of information you want to fill in without having to move your mouse or do any sort of weird stuff combined with maybe vim emulation mode oh you're off to the races there because you got tab stops and you got vim text movements so there's a lot you can do you got back linking you got unlinked reference panes you have github pages for the actual hosting like there's the sky's the limit when you get to github github repos code spaces and the tools available in vs code and on github so following get workflow opens up a whole new world of possibilities for you if you want to open that door now on the other hand there is dendron now i tried to get dendron working once and i honestly just found it a little bit more complicated than foam was and you know that's just me being lazy because i already have something that works for me my workflow i don't really do any mobile editing i can't focus enough to do deep work on my vault when i'm not at home if i'm at work i'm working so i'm not doing work on my vault usually i might you know do my daily journal in like github or a code space to just like write down some thoughts as i go through the day but i'm not like editing and doing a lot of deep work in my vaults so i don't really use these tools these are for like if these might be applicable for you and useful to you personally i found foam a lot easier to get off the ground than dendron and it made a lot more sense to me than dendron but that's not to knock dendron i haven't tried it or gone through it enough to really have a robust opinion and knowledge of it but i do know of it it's on my radar and it is a again another application that looks through all of your vault now i say application but it really is a collection of extensions including a dendron extension for vs code that has a variety of features and they recommend a bunch of these different extensions for markdown notes shortcuts previews uh image handling when you paste images tags backlinks graphs and then some other things they recommend like bookmarks vim and gitlands and just a lot of other features again it's like it really is which of these might be better for you they're both pretty pretty awesome and for what you can do with them it's really just a matter of what are you trying to do and what would help you get to you know a completed state there's a bunch of examples of workflows and there's a lot there's actually a lot of documentation on dendron there's cheat sheets there's a discord server there's an onboarding video there's several different things in here if you wanted to dive into this more i'm not going to show you things because i honestly haven't dived into this too deeply if there's a demand i might do it but honestly this is just to bring awareness to there are options to edit remotely and mobily until those options are directly as supported by obsidian and by its developers so for now this is all just work around stuff for dealing with your obsidian vault so if you are interested in in these things these exist here you go if you actually really want me to go into detail on them i can look into that but i honestly don't use these these are just some suggestions and finally the last tool i'm going to bring up and suggest is actually logsec now logsec is a really interesting tool because it's inspired by rome research so it has the daily note it looks exactly well not exactly but it looks a lot like rome research there's a lot of features that are very similar now log set can actually look at an entire repo but what it's also can do is it can look at a particular branch so this is really useful so for me with my git workflow i just made a duplicate a copy branch specifically for log set because i didn't want to like accidentally nuke my vault so i actually made a branch for it to look at and now this is like you know my c plus plus note for my vault and you know we got graph view there's uh recent files and um help documentation content and there's daily notes um i honestly don't use this too much but if i was going to use something this is a good thing that just is simple enough gets out of your way and there's no extensions it's just it runs off of the github repo directly not even a code space not a vs code extension just right there so i have a branch called logsec and that's what it looks at and that's it you can make notes you can do daily notes and yeah there's there's more documentation this is actively developed there's a lot of things that these developers are currently doing and i have used logsec more than i've used foam or dendron but again i'm not really using any of these tools because i'm kind of happy with keeping it simple and doing what i'm doing but again options exist for mobile and remote editing if that is something that is of critical importance to you one thing you will have to be aware of using all three of these tools log sec included is that these three things will add files metadata and just other different files and things to your vault for them to run so if you use log sec you're going to have a bunch of extra files and different things added into your vault by the application tool whatever that helps it run and do whatever it's going to do so if you are suddenly bombarded with a bunch of new files you're going to be like where did all these come from it's because of what tool you're using and it's going to put its own files into your repository so just be aware of that if you use any of these tools so hopefully you found this video at least interesting or informative of just some options that you have as a workaround until mobile and ios or ipad os development actually occurs on obsidian to make obsidian a completely accessible application on all platforms until then there are some pretty robust and awesome options out there that you can take advantage of and play around with if you really want me to make a in-depth review on some of these tools you can let me know that in the comments or let me know like what you've done with these tools have you used them and what do you use them for what does it look like do you have a publicly accessible vault we can look at like let me know your thoughts your opinions and what you've done with these applications so a quick note before we go a big thank you to all of the patrons and sponsors who support this channel rito leonardo justin ed brandon klaus peppa alberto clark joel john john paul and jimmy thank you all for all of your support and assistance through all the time of this youtube channel donating and supporting this channel is not required by any means but everyone who does is highly appreciated the best ways to support the channel on an ongoing basis is github sponsors followed by patreon github sponsors doesn't charge any fees so i get the full amount you send to me and if you want to just do like a one-time thing as a thank you or whatever buy me a coffee or paypal works just fine again not required but a big thank you if you do that and with that i will catch you all in the next one [Music] you