AI generated image by the author

From Notion to Obsidian to something else!

My search for a good knowledge base led me to Git, again!

When I started working with AI agents I used to keep my “brain” within a directory of my work computer (which is an Arch Linux machine). Back then I also used a Mac Mini, especially for working on iOS Apps with XCode.

To keep the “brain” available on both machines, I put them on my NAS and mounted the directory via NFS. Worked.

I had another machine sitting with me that I used on the run, a Macbook and there’s an MSI Leopard GP66 I use for Linux coding as well. Keeping all that in sync with a network folder isn’t easy and doesn’t work at all when I’m not connected to my home WIFI.

So I started using Notion and moved my brain there. I used the Notion MCP service for my AI agents (Claude, Gemini CLI, Codex, …) and this worked to my satisfaction. At first.

So basically I access my documents via Notion app or the web browser to make edits, explore certain status pages of projects etc. But it still felt like a split and Notion’s special page types also meant a kind of vendor lock-in.

When I watched some Youtube videos about people using Obsidian with Claude (and other agents) I finally started moving my “brain” (well, second brain! Just to be sure!) over to Obsidian and git.

I’m running a Gitea instance in my homelab so that was a no-brainer for me and using some hooks and scripts to keep the base-folder in sync over multiple machines worked so far. Until it didn’t.

From the beginning I thought Obsidian to be a brilliant tool, and it is! What really posed to be a pain point was the artificially complicated sync that it provides. You can get away with said hooks and scripts when you’re only using your Macbook or Linux machines, however when an iPhone or iPad enters the equation then it doesn’t work. There’s simply no hassle-free option that just works, except for you to pay for Obsidian Sync (which I also did).

Until I didn’t! ;) Along comes Tolaria! Tolaria feels very much like I would have build Obsidian. It’s open source and the Git-client is built-in!

Like Obsidian Tolaria uses a base directory as its documents root and you build from there. And whenever something changes (either via using the Tolaria UI or — and that’s really awesome — the cloned repo receives changes to the filesystem) it recognizes the open commits and makes it easy to sync with one or two clicks.

Image fromTolaria.md

So far I really do love it! It makes my second brain explorable and gives me the latest changes readily available via the Inbox and its Markdown editing features don’t have to hide before anyone!

The one thing I miss (a bit) is mobile access to my brain via iOS (my go-to phone is an iPhone 17). The official Github repository has some content about an iPad prototype so there’s some movement into going mobile.

You can check out Tolaria’s awesomeness on https://tolaria.md

If you find this article useful, I’d appreciate a clap or two so others will be able to find it more easily. Thank you for reading!

Best, Steviee