It is very easy to capture notes to Obsidian. With Kepano’s web clipper and a number of other quick-capture tools as well as porting my old notes from Evernote (which I had been using since 2007), I ended up with about 7000 notes in my vault. This is not a big number by any means - I have seen screenshots of vaults with factor of 10 more notes. It is enough, though, that without making an effort to revisit notes, I will likely have no memory of making them, and they will then have questionable value.

The Problem

I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021. When I started, Dataview was the best way to query my notes. I liked the use of inline fields, e.g. “Next::”, as it kept all of the information within the context of the note. I built a bunch of workflow around Dataview and these inline fields, and it has served me well. But…

I’ve noticed a lag in keystrokes when typing into pages with heavy Dataview queries, which includes my daily notes. Also Dataview is no longer undergoing active development. The developer is focused on developing a successor, “Datacore”, which offers much better performance, but a completely different way of defining queries.