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I try to use Obsidian to write notes and journal entries. My vault is shared between three devices (desktop, mobile, and home server) via Syncthing. For a long time I've been wanting to be able to easily write notes if I'm using my work laptop.

I tried a few times to get an Obsidian image to run in Docker in my home server with one of those Selkies linux GUI images (like I have for Calibre). However I could not get this to work, and I also was a bit weary of running an Electron app in the tiny machine.

After some reading I dsicovered Silverbullet, which had just released its v2 version only a couple days before I started tinkering with this. Silverbullet has a very similar philosophy to Obsidian (markdown files based, local first), but unlike Obsidian, it runs in a web browser.

Getting it to run was pretty painless, and I'm delighted at how lightweight it is. Once I was comfortable with it, I pointed it to my Obsidian vault and let it run. It just worked and I could see all of my notes in the browser!

The only thing I had to change is that Silverbullet does not handle folders the same way Obsidian does: in Obsidian I have my notes in a folder named pages/, and Obsidian by default uses the shortest link possible to a file. So if I had a page linking to another page inside pages/, Obsidian doesn't write `[[pages/...]]`. This trips Silverbullet which will try to search for the file at the root level. This was easily fixed in Obsidian by making the links be absolute links, which is supported well in Silverbullet.

Now whenever I want to write something quick, I can connect to the homeserver using Tailscale and write with a live Markdown editor into my Obsidian vault. As soon as I save this, the note will be synced to all other devices that run Obsidian. Pretty neat!

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