I have been using Logseq for just over a year to maintain a daily journal, but I’ve been eyeing Obsidian for the last couple months as my note-keeping needs have expanded past daily journaling.

Logseq has had a long-standing problem with the version of Electron used by it being EOL, which finally prompted its removal from Nixpkgs on security grounds this week and accelerating my migration to Obsidian. The below is a short list of things I did to make Obsidian more comfortable as a daily journaling system.

Moving over content

I made the following changes to the files in my Logseq graph when moving to the new Obsidian Vault

  • assets and pages got copied over as-is
  • The journals folder got renamed to Daily since I wanna do notes for longer durations as well, and all the files inside renamed to replace underscores with hyphens since it looked like that was more common in Obsidian.

Plugins

I enabled the following core plugins:

  • Daily Notes: Automates creation of daily notes
  • Templates: Allows you to create reusable templates
  • Backlinks: Shows references to the current note

Looking around other people’s experience with this migration path I also found the following community plugins:

  • Periodic Notes: Enhanced daily/weekly/monthly notes
  • Natural Language Dates: Type dates like “tomorrow” or “next Monday”
  • Tasks: Advanced task management
  • Dataview: Query and display info from your notes
  • Templater: More powerful templating than the core plugin
  • Git: Self-managed sync for vaults

Side note: I greatly appreciate the fact that Obsidian defaults to vendoring plugins in the Vault itself so if you’re tracking the .obsidian folder in Git, you get a fully reproducible Vault regardless of what machine you open it on.

Configuration changes

In Settings → Daily Notes:

  • Date format: YYYY-MM-DD
  • New file location: Daily/
  • Open daily note on startup: Enabled

In Settings → Hotkeys:

  • Open today’s daily note: Alt+D
  • Create new note: Ctrl+N
  • Toggle edit/preview mode: Ctrl+E
  • Search in all notes: Ctrl+Shift+F

Pending changes

What I’ve done so far is just the result of 30 minutes of looking around, and there is still a bunch of currently broken stuff that needs resolving.

  • I used internal links of [[this format]] pretty liberally in my Logseq graph as a tag system, which will need migration to Obsidian’s tags mechanism.

  • Some of my pages refer to daily journal pages using a humanized date variant which Logseq automatically converted to proper links, which does not work in Obsidian.

  • There seems to be no automatic tagger for Obsidian similar to how logseq-automatic-linker works.

Despite these issues, I think the move to Obsidian will end up being a net positive to my note taking process. Please let me know on Mastodon or the comments here if you have any tips to improve things.