Making Obsidian play nice with Logseq

[Luhmann]

I’ve been using outliners ever since the 1980s, when I was running Dave Winer’s MORE on a MacPlus in college. I then used: Omni Outliner, Workflowy, Dynalist, and Roam Research before moving to Logseq this week.

For a long time I’d wished that Obsidian had a decent workflowy-like outlining experience and when the beta desktop app for Logseq came out I saw a post saying that the two apps could work together. I now have it all set up and I’m absolutely delighted with the result.

The main reason for me to use Obsidian is that it allows me to have a decent mobile app on my iPhone. I also use the Readwise Community Plugin on Obsidian to pull my Readwise highlights. Hopefully one day there will be a logseq iPhone app and Readwise plugin so I won’t need these - but til then, here are some tips on getting everything to play nice together.

All of these adjustments are made in the Obsidian settings:

managing pages

• Files and Links > default location for new notes > in the folder specified below > “pages”

managing attachments

• Files and Links > default location for new attachments > in the folder specified below > “assets”

• Files and Links > new link format > relative path to file

• Files and Links > Use Wikilinks > off

Journal Daily notes

• Core Plugin > Daily Notes > On

• Daily Notes > date format > “YYYY_MM_DD”

• Daily Notes > new file location > “journals”

Tasks

• Create a page called [[logseq tasks]]

• create queries on that page in the form:

  • match-case:DOING

outlining

• Install “Outliner” and “Zoom” community plugins (note, I had to turn the Outliner plugin off on the mobile app because it wasn’t working.)

UPDATE: Please see these two followup posts in the comments for better handling of journal entries:

[Luhmann]

It is all working pretty smoothly, although sometimes I do end up with two versions of a Daily Note Page because of sync issues.

[twelvety]

Thank you for putting all these together! The only difference in how I do it is that I have my date format in both apps set to yyyy-MM-dd and I added this line to the Logseq config.edn so the filenames would be the same:

:journal/file-name-format "yyyy-MM-dd"

[Luhmann]

In the Outliner Software forums, user Lucas suggested another tweak (found in this thread on the Obsidian forums):

it may also be advisable to tweak how Logseq handles note titles. Logseq can be configured to get note titles either from file names or from titles at the top of notes. If you want to be able to create notes from within Obsidian and have Logseq read them properly, then it’s generally best to tell Logseq to get note titles from file names. This can be done by adding the following text to the file logseq/config.edn:

:page-name-order "file"

[ichmoimeyo]

Yes, I also use this setting to bring in my Google Keep notes after transforming them into .md files via Python.

[artemiosp]

Are you doing this automatically (with an automation)?
Could you pastebin your script?

[ichmoimeyo]

@artemiosp

djsudduth/keep-it-markdown

[Bakasan]

Okay, I am so embarrassed to write this- but I hope it helps someone

I was facing trouble getting logseq pages to appear in Obsidian. And daily notes wouldn’t sync. Oddly, I could read pages from obsidian in logseq & make edits

I needed to setup my logseq inside obsidian’s vault.

Everything seems to be working now… although I don’t like how folders like ‘assets’, ‘logseq’ are showing up in my obsidian note list now

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Edit: I still don’t understand ’ the match case doing command. Can someone explain this?
All I see in my [[logseq tasks]] is “Query match-case: DOING”

[Luhmann]

It is easier to just create a new vault in Obsidian and point it at your Logseq folder. You can easily switch between vaults…

[Luhmann]

Obsidian Mobile is now officially released for everyone. You can get it at https://obsidian.md/mobile

[anilerkan]

Great news. But how ? Non tech guy here. I have my notes in local but synced to google drive. Both logseq and obsidian work fine with local. But how do I point mobile app to google drive? Should I be downloading from google drive to my androids local? How would that sync?

[Luhmann]

I’m afraid I can’t help with an Android/Google workflow, but here are the official documents from Obsidian. Hopefully that will answer your question. (If not, I recommend asking more in the Obsidian Discord.)

Android app

[DavidS]

I use Obsidian’s own sync service which works very well across devices and mobile (although it is chargeable). While iOS allows Google Drive access directly, Android doesn’t so you would seen some sort of sync software on your device to keep local storage and GDrive in sync if you wanted to keep that. It may work well but I’ve not tried it.

I’m going to try it with LogSeq in the mix.

[Eli_Can]

Thank you for this post. It’s definitely helped to make Logseq and Obsidian work together.

I have followed your instructions to the T and I did run into an issue.

I use Logseq extensively for daily journals and meeting notes.

In Logseq, when I use the date picker to select a date - say, Aug 01, 2021 - the file is saved as 2021_08_01 and the text shows up as Aug 1st, 2021.

In Obsidian, when I click on Aug 1st, 2021, instead of taking me to 2021_08_01 file, Obsidian creates a new file Aug 1st, 2021.

Is there a way for Obsidian to recognize that the internal link Aug 1st, 2021 actually is 2021_08_01 and take me to that file, instead of creating a new file called Aug 1st, 2021?

[Luhmann]

Please see these two followup posts in the comments:

[ashish]

I have these added to my cdn:

My journal titles created by logseq do not seem to change:

Is there something I am missing?

[Luhmann]

Are these files created before or after you added those lines to your config? I don’t think it works retroactively. Personally I used this Mac app to change my old journal filenames.

[ashish]

After I made the change
Thanks for linking the app, made a note of that

[Eli_Can]

I have added that page name order line in config.edn and it looks like the date created in Logseq is still not recognized by Obsidian. Sorry if I am not understanding what the page name order does or how it helps.

[rmrvubl]

I try this one :date-formatter "yyyy-MM-dd" and reindex all pages