Dataview is incredible. Being able to query plain text notes and their metadata has been transformative for my workflow. It has allowed me to move virtually all my thought processing work into Obsidian. I am constantly amazed by how performant Dataview is.
I sometimes wonder if learning how to use Dataview inside of Obsidian is too technical to get mass adoption, compared to WYSIWYG tools like Notion that let you build databases with nice UI filtering. But the performance of Dataview is so much better, and the control you have over queries so much more granular, that it’s worth the learning curve. The Obsidian community is also incredibly good at helping new users learn, which makes me feel optimistic.
To help make things a bit more user-friendly I have been building an Obsidian theme called Minimal[1] which allows you to take Dataview tables and display them in a card layout[2]. I really enjoy that layout for certain types of information, while having all the underlying power of Dataview.
I sometimes wonder if learning how to use Dataview inside of Obsidian is too technical to get mass adoption, compared to WYSIWYG tools like Notion that let you build databases with nice UI filtering. But the performance of Dataview is so much better, and the control you have over queries so much more granular, that it’s worth the learning curve. The Obsidian community is also incredibly good at helping new users learn, which makes me feel optimistic.
To help make things a bit more user-friendly I have been building an Obsidian theme called Minimal[1] which allows you to take Dataview tables and display them in a card layout[2]. I really enjoy that layout for certain types of information, while having all the underlying power of Dataview.
[1]: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-minimal
[2]: https://minimal.guide/Block+types/Cards