PKM Weekly - 2025-05-25
A look at the latest Personal Knowledge Management PKM news from the past week.
Hi Everyone,
We are back with another episode of PKM Weekly. Let’s see what is in store for us today.
Obsidian
Databases in Obsidian
Do we need to say anymore? Bases is a core plugin that lets you turn any set of notes into a powerful database. With bases, you can organise everything from projects to travel plans, reading lists, and more.
It is only available to Catalyst members (insiders) at this stage, and checking out the official documentation for more info is worthwhile.
Lots of videos on how to use it are available on YouTube.
Obsidian Is a Bright Spot in a World Gone Mad.
OP posted a nice and simple post: It is so refreshing to have access to this positive product/company/community. That is all.
Whilst the appreciation post is nice, the comments are also worth reading if you have time to spare.
Sometimes, simple is the best way forward.
Ditching Obsidian and building my own
The flipside of the above is that several Obsidian users are looking for alternatives, and on occasion, even building their own.
This HackerNews post caught my interest as the number of people building their own apps and systems is crazy - there are many more than I expected. Also, the comments are a great source of insight into providing an alternative perspective on the reasons for moving away from Obsidian.
TANA
Tana Office Hours
A bit of a different Office Hours this week from the Tana team as Brage is OOO, so Olav stepped into his shoes - not a bad replacement, to be fair. Check out their discussions in the video to learn what things they are planning, how offline mode is going, new roles to working with Tana and other cool snippets of information.
The Tana Template Store (early version) is now live!
You can browse and install a growing collection of official Tana templates, directly inside the app.
To check it out, click Supertags in the sidebar and then “Browse templates.”
These templates help you go from idea to structure without building everything yourself. They’re a great way to learn by example, get inspired, and save time when setting up your workflows.
Read more here: Tana Templates
One Workspace vs Multiple Workspaces
Darren Brierton talks us through: How (and why) I use multiple workspaces in Tana.
The arrows indicate which workspaces can access one another’s content (the “allow content from” relation). My personal workspace can access all the others and they can access it. (None of my workspaces are shared with others.)
I have a separate “Work” workspace (which is not named “Work” but is actually named after my employer). The main reason for this is that I want some separation here. I work remotely quite a lot but I also work on site. When I’m in the office I switch to my work workspace’s “Today” page. It’s an open plan office and I don’t want people who glance over at my screen to see personal stuff.
Check out the full post and the reasons why Darren does the above here.
Logseq
Merge of DB repo to master - coming soon?
Tienson posted an interesting screenshot on X, which shows that the team has a deadline to merge the feat/bd repo with the master one.
Logseq beta 0.10.11
You can download the desktop and Android app from GitHub. This is a minor bug-fix release.
This release includes all changes from Beta 0.10.10 and fixes major regressions with it.,
Fixed Issues
Images and themes not working
Global search in blocks not working
NOTE: You may need to run the command
Rebuild search indexfor this fix.
Drag and drop of pdfs not working
Upgrade Electron to 36.2.0
The full changelog.
Root Page
The devs have been working on a Root Page / "Library" page to automatically collect namespace pages, which makes building hierarchy structures easier. Check out GitHub for full details.
Things are slowly taking shape once again.
Capacities
Why I Left Notion After 3 Years For Capacities
Irfan posted a video on Capacities after they moved over from Notion. In the video, he talks about: Discover why Capacities' unique object-based system, calendar integration, and spaces feature might make it the perfect Notion alternative for your productivity needs.
Everything is an object
For those who have not deep-dived into Capacities or are still confused by its approach, check this write-up that explains the app's philosophy and structure.
Capacities was built to work the way you think. You don’t think in a folder structure so we’ve broken free from that. In Capacities, every note you take is an object, not a standalone document. Think of objects in the way you would think of real-world things; books, films, people, places.
If you’ve been taught to work with digital files, this might feel like a big change, but once you start working with notes as objects, you won’t look back. It just makes sense: the book you’re reading and taking notes on isn’t just a flat document, but a book object living in an interconnected web of notes and thoughts related to it. Capacities is where you can see this web.
Full article here.
Orca Note
Orca Note release v1.14.0:
Bug fixes,
Card view optimisation,
Added template variables (date, time) - link for demo
There was a question on Discord regarding subtags and whether these were possible and it seems that the answer is yes, in a way. While there is no parent-child relationship between tags, there is an "inclusion" relationship, which works kind of like parent-child. E.g, Quantum Mechanics is included in Physics. See the screenshot for how to create this inclusion relationship.
Octarine
Octarine is looking to add AI capabilities so that you can interact with your notes. It will be really interesting to see how this is implemented and how successful Ask Octarine will be at getting the context from your notes.
OK, I was beaten to it - this has been released. Check the details in Discord.
The dev is also looking for responses on whether to implement an Obsidian Bases / Logseq DB type set-up. For more, check Discord.
NotePlan
The latest update improves a few existing features, like the Note Properties AI by introducing a way to add your own prompt, so you can instruct the AI better. Also, we have improved editing links and added automated backups.
Check out the full changelog for more.
Thymer
The devs have been working on automatically downloading and decrypting file attachments (like PDFs or images within any note/DB) in the background when they're not cached offline yet.
This way, it's there when we or our team member uploads something from another device, and you want to open it offline.
https://x.com/wcools/status/1925300533763731799
That’s all for this week. Thank you very much in advance for reading and I look forward to bringing you more PKM news next week.