How do you guys navigate through the notes?

General
1

Hi there,

I’m Markus from Germany. I’m an electronics engineer, photographer, was a web developer from 1997 to 2007, created a CMS and an e-learning platform back then, and I’ve had a pretty successful blog since 2005 (it started with photography, but now it’s mostly about Home Assistant, DIY, electronic tinkering etc.)

I was a longtime Evernote user (started 2006), checked out OneNote, Nimbus Note, Logseq, Joplin, Obsidian etc. etc.

Obsidian was fascinating, but the sync options beside the official sync, are not reliable, especially, if you’re on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. The major showstopper was, for me, that there is no browser-based version.

I have also found that although you can achieve a lot with Obsidian with extensions, you then spend more time on Obsidian than on the actual task: notetaking.

I’ve been trying out Silverbullet for a few days now and have imported all my Obsidian notes (which I had also converted from Evernote and Onenote) into SB (the Obsidian converter scripts work very well).

Since I don’t want to start using plugins again with SB (for now) to have certain functions (Treeview), I was wondering how you navigate through a large amount of notes?

In Obsidian there is the folder view and I have categorized my notes into a few folders to separate them logically for me. My idea would be to build a kind of dashboard as a start page that lists my folders, certain tags or to-dos with queries. Have any of you used something like this?

With a .silverbullet.db of about 200 MB, there are always error messages that the note has been changed somewhere else (although no other instance is open) or that the page could not be saved (trying in 10 seconds again). I have installed SB as a Docker container running in Proxmox in a LXC (SSD drives and the server is idling at 20% load).

Greetings,
Markus

1 Like
2

Well, at first I wanted to use the Treeview Plugin as my main source of navigation, as before Silverbullet I used a directory structure with text files only to categorize my notes.
However later on I realized, that I rather use a combination of tags, filesystem structure and simple searches for navigating.
One reason was, that the Treeview is some kind of “not-so-handy” when using Silverbullet on a smartphone.
I personally endet up just like you wrote: I have a “Main page”, where I list all my “main topics”. But each of my main topics is a subfolder in the filesystem, as well as a own page containing a query which lists all subfolders and all files underneath of “maintopic folder”.

In addition the “main” page has:

Hope, it got clear, it is a bit tricky to describe :slight_smile:

This way I have most of my notes just one or two clicks away.
The Treeview is still installed, but I realized, I use it not very often anymore :wink:

One caveat of Silverbullet is, however: Currently I spend more time with Silverbullet itself than with the notes (just like you mentioned with obsidian). But as it is so much fun (for me) to discover all the possibilities it opens through the scriptability (esp. LUA), it is no downside for me for now :slight_smile:

3

just registered today looking for ideas like this but my “10 most recent edits” is completely broken for me, it just displays the same 10 files regardless of other newly edited files. Suspecting something’s funky because my “new files” lookup provides a similarly broken list of files and I’m having a heck of a time finding any support on what’s wrong. Would you be willing to provide a copy of your lookups? For context, here’s what I’m using; believe I found these in the documentation.

page select name order by created limit 10
  render [[Library/Core/Query/Full Page]]
  order by created asc

  page select name order by lastModified limit 10
    render [[Library/Core/Query/Full Page]]
  order by lastModified desc
4

Sure, this is my template/query for last changed pages:

{{#each {page limit 10 order by lastModified desc} }}
* [[{{name}}]] ( _{{lastModified}}_ ) 
{{/each}}

Basically the same as yours.
However, you have the “order by” statement two times in your code.
I think the first one orders descending, so you get the oldest ones, the second is ascending. I think you end up getting displayed the 10 newest from the 10 oldest or something like that…

5

well now I just feel silly. I removed the extra “order by” and also changed my second to descending and now it displays as I wanted.

curious though, when I copy yours in I get errors:

Error: Parse error in: * [[not working yet]] ( _2025-03-05T08:50:04.589_ ) * [[Inbox/2025-03-05/08-47-43]] ( _2025-03-05T08:47:53.644_ ) * [[work content]] ( _2025-03-04T13:24:29.780_ ) * [[Inbox/2025-02-28/20-09-45]] ( _2025-03-04T13:18:24.655_ ) * [[notes/2024/03/2024-03-19]] ( _2025-03-04T13:13:58.703_ ) * [[index]] ( _2025-02-28T12:23:02.313_ ) * [[Inbox/2025-02-27/14-57-51]] ( _2025-02-27T14:58:32.425_ ) * [[Inbox/2025-02-27/14-52-57]] ( _2025-02-27T14:55:38.456_ ) * [[server crap]] ( _2025-02-25T08:58:01.114_ ) * [[Nextcloud installation notes]] ( _2025-02-24T12:53:26.911_ )

by the kind of errors listed here though, it looks like a me thing with somehow my files being named weird from my imports of MD files from my other notes app.

6

Hmmm… Do you use a template or a query section?

I’m using template and Just realized, that this was removed by pasting here.

So in fact, it should lokk like this:

```template
{{#each {page limit 5 order by lastModified desc}}}
* [[{{name}}]] ( _{{lastModified}}_ ) 
{{/each}}
``` xxx

(Just remove the “xxx”, I don`t know how to enter this correctly as the forum tries to interpret my code block intself :wink: )

7

formatting is important! That works, and it’s pretty too. Nice! I’ll have to do a little reading on the difference between template and query boxes.

8

If I may ask: how big is your space? A 200MB SilverBullet.db is pretty massive. How many pages and text do you have?

9

1888 Pages from 16 years with Evernote, Amplenote, Nimbus Note, Obsidian, Logseq, OneNote etc.
3400 items all together (images, PDFs).
I sorted and tidied up everything before importing.

10

Silverbullet isn’t Obsidian. Were you able to modify your Obsidian files to account for the numerous differences between the two apps? Pay particular attention to how links and tags are handled in each app. Also check out how templates are implemented in each and frontmatter such as tags you want associated with a particular page. Queries will be another concern here. There are a lot of details that will become gotchas if you simply paste your files from Obsidian to Silverbullet.

I came to Silverbullet from Logseq. I haven’t even attempted to transfer those files here until my workflow in Silverbullet stabilizes. I found that there were too many differences in how things were done in Silverbullet to just dump all my Logseq files into it. Since my Logseq workflow would not work in Silverbullet, I developed a workflow designed to be used in Silverbullet. As my Silverbullet workflow stabilizes, I’ll review the files in Logseq, determine those I want to transfer/copy and those I want to delete. Then I’ll uninstall Logseq. Today, I am using Silverbullet full-time and having a blast doing so. Good luck and welcome to Silverbullet. BTW… It is possible to implement a menu type structure in Silverbullet as well.

1 Like
11

My Obsidian vault was very “vanilla”. Some dataviews but no fancy plugins etc. The way the import script converted the Obsidian data was perfectly fine for me. Of course, folders etc. are missing, but the main thing is that the information is available.

1 Like
12

Why are folders missing? Silverbullet handles folders/directories beautifully. Anyway, there has to be a reason for all the error messages. I’m suggesting that it might be a detail in the files that hasn’t been dealt with. Shrug. Just a thought. Good luck and have fun!! :wink:

13

I’m new to SilverBullet, and I want to do exactly what you described. But I’m having trouble figuring out the query/template syntax to do all of this. Would you mind sharing your “main” page so I could try to learn from it?