Hi HN! After months of private beta, Obsidian is now finally available for Android and iOS!
Obsidian is a personal knowledge management app that works on top of a local folder of Markdown files [0]. Because "local" often means your computer, for the longest time, it has been a pain to access these notes on the go.
Our original plan was to build fully native mobile apps. Instead, we decided to build hybrid web apps. Hybrid web apps gets a lot of hate, and for good reason. There's heavy performance penalty for running JavaScript. Animations are often janky. A lot of native capabilities are restricted.
We know everyone's favorite argument for using the web stack. "We're a small team, and it's just not possible to....". Sure, we're also just two developers, but that excuse gets old.
We see it in a different way. We leverage hybrid web apps not as a shortcut, rather, we use it to put power in the hands of our users. This has always been a key principle driving Obsidian's development.
Obsidian is one of the few apps out there that lets users customize every aspect of the app. Themes and CSS snippets let users completely change the interface. Plugins [1] let users augment the GUI [2], run macros [3], build databases [4], synchronize with other apps [5], and much more.
It's unprecedented for users to have access to this kind of power on their mobile devices.
We have a vibrant community of passionate users: lawyers, database engineers, dungeon masters, medical students, CEOs and CTOs under their alternate identity. You can find them on Discord and our forum at https://obsidian.md/community
Obsidian is the closest thing I've found to the Pensive from Harry Potter. It's a data recording format good enough for me to extract thoughts from my mind, represent them with enough fidelity to reconstruct later, connect them to the concepts that they are related to in my head, and then forget the thought completely so I can move on and process it later.
I was only willing to try it out because I had heard it mentioned [0] on CGP Grey's cohosted podcast, Cortex, in the episode they did on productivity software subcultures. Specifically I think CGP Grey was saying he didn't "get" Obsidian but had observed a fanatic fanbase around it of people who thought it was god's gift to note-taking because it represented the links between knowledge in a unique way. Apparently I'm one of those people because I went from installing it for the first time to writing all my new thoughts down in it in the space of 3 days.
I suspect the real reason I liked Obsidian right away is that long ago I used Microsoft Onenote as a freeform notetaking app to just spew unrelated thoughts into that I could organize later. Onenote's interface was good, but there was no way to port those notes in an exportable format to a new computer when the one with a Onenote license died.
You’re right it was on Cortex, clarification though:
Grey loves Obsidian, Mike doesn’t really get it though. Neither like Notion, even though it has a massive fan base.
There is a whole episode (maybe the one in question) where it comes to light that Grey has spent most of his life NOT making notes like most people do and instead just highlighting areas in source material and referring back to it.
Very funny episode given they were over 100 episodes into a productivity podcast at this point and had spoken about note taking extensively - without realising that one of them has a very different concept of the practice/process.
I spent a while trying Notion, seeing if it could be a good replacement for Evernote, and I had trouble with it as well. I can certainly see its use-case for teams, where the whole notion of homepages and things makes sense. But for the individual, it seemed too much. You're basically making a website.
My biggest gripe with it may have simply been the endless hyping and gushing that all the "productivity gurus" on YouTube and elsewhere did over it. Indeed, it seemed custom-made for YouTube productivity gurus, since you could make everything look so clean and beautiful and polished. It seemed the sort of note-taking tool for people who cared more about how the final result looked, than for people who wanted to quickly add or go over notes.
That said, I recognize that there was much there I probably never really used to its fullest-extent, databases being the fundamental differentiator between Notion and most other note-taking apps, and potentially very powerful.
The comparison to the Pensieve is so so so good. I had previously used Tim Ferriss' metaphor for writing: that it was to freeze thoughts into a solid so that you could sculpt it into whatever shape you wanted. But as you've already noticed, there isn't really a final form a thought takes, and a lot of it's value is in bouncing amongst other thoughts.
I know this isn't a very hacker newsy comment, but wanted to highlight how amazing your comparison is :D
> You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.
You can export as a .pdf, .xps or into most MS office doc formats like .docx
OneNote isn't great if you want to regularly export to a different format. Especially if you want to make your notebooks accessible to other non-MS software. Right now, I sync my notebooks between several different devices which is kind of a pain.
I'm a note-taking power nerd who has used all the buzzy apps on Macs. Obsidian is by far the best — it's become my personal journal, my knowledge base, a quick and dirty blog, a place to keep loose notes.
The development velocity of the (TWO PERSON!) team behind this app is ridiculous. They're constantly pushing updates, and seem to handle all facets of app development with aplomb.
>The development velocity of the (TWO PERSON!) team behind this app is ridiculous
This! I just checked their page for a "careers" button to see if they got VC funding and are raising a team. Nope, still just 2 people. It's not that they are able to move fast, it's that they are moving fast while making a product that looks good, does the job, and is snappy. Kudos to the (2 person) team!
I'll echo this as well. Not only the development pace is ridiculous for such a small team, they're very responsive to support requests via mail and Discord as well.
I had a small problem with the app once. I contacted them via email and it was resolved in a couple of hours and they were kind enough to offer different solutions -- solutions that didn't fill their pockets. (Needless to say, I'm sticking with their services.)
The fact that they can manage all that is almost a testament to how useful the app they're creating must be for them.
I too am just a happy user/customer and wish them nothing but success.
Agreed - and I love how the way that Obsidian stores its files is very transparent. Just a folder on my local drive. I've tried Craft, Notion, Bear, etc. but always had concerns about data portability when I scaled up to thousands of notes and manual exports became impractical.
Obsidian has really delivered in a crowded note-taking space by focusing on the fundamentals:
1. Privacy. You can roll your own syncing (or use iCloud, Dropbox, etc.), without the notes being stored on the note editors' servers, which is a huge win over Roam, Notion, Evernote, etc. After the Evernote fiasco from a few years ago (where they considered reading your notes for ML model training and got massive pushback), I value future-proof solutions that won't become a liability in 10 years if the company providing the note taking software gets desperate.
2. Markdown. Speaking of future-proofing, Markdown is as close as it gets to having interoperability with the notes. Obsidian is at its core just a Markdown file editor, which means your notes are stored as plaintext and easy to export. There is a bit of Obsidian-flavored syntax (e.g. bi-directional links [[...]]), but these are becoming standard in note-taking. Many note-taking apps claim export functionality, but at the end of the day they're not incentivized to give you your data in a format that will work with other editors.
3. Executing on features that have become indispensable for note-taking, and personal knowledge management specifically: bi-directional linking, block-embeds, query-embeds, unlinked mentions, graph view, custom CSS, note aliases, markdown diagrams (via mermaid), and a few others.
4. Offline support. If there's any kind of login or sync required to access your notes on your personal device, that's a dealbreaker for me. This seems to have been a regression lately in the latest batch of note-taking apps.
My entire personal knowledge base was in Evernote for a few years, and now happily migrated to Obsidian. The graph view is just a magical way to explore the knowledge that you've stumbled upon over the years.
The team gives away so much value in the core app for free. If you enjoy their product, consider supporting via the Catalyst plan: https://obsidian.md/pricing
> Speaking of future-proofing, Markdown is as close as it gets to having interoperability with the notes. Obsidian is at its core just a Markdown file editor, which means your notes are stored as plaintext and easy to export. There is a bit of Obsidian-flavored syntax (e.g. bi-directional links [[...]]), but these are becoming standard in note-taking. Many note-taking apps claim export functionality, but at the end of the day they're not incentivized to give you your data in a format that will work with other editors.
This is actually the reason I don't use Obsidian. It's built on markdown, but it is not markdown. Things may be different now, but when I gave up on Obsidian, there was no general purpose exporter - you either use their editor or you lose much of the useful information in your notes. This would not by itself be a big problem except for the fact that Obsidian is a standard piece of proprietary software. It genuinely solves nothing in regard to future proofing.
The notes are very much markdown files. There is a very small number of extensions the Obsidian developers created (e.g., a syntax for linking to a specific paragraph within a note) that are not markdown, but it's very easy to not use them.
I'm using the exact same folder of markdown notes in parallel with Obsidian, The Archive, 1Writer, Calca, TableFlip, Python scripts, and Keyboard Maestro macros I have written and everything works flawlessly together.
To me, the killer feature of markdown notes is not the future-proofing, but this kind of seamless interoperability.
If you wanted strictly markdown then you could just stick to markdown, but the set of popular features which extend markdown are developing consensus across the ecosystem, such that you can get most of Obsidian's functionality with less than a handful of popular VSC extensions.
In that sense Obsidian is just a fancy viewer for documents which can be edited in VSC.
And with regards to vanilla markdown (which would exclude the likes of Github or Gitlab, or the most popular extensions on VSC), personally, I wouldn't be satisfied with the exclusion of Latex which is already in widespread support across markdown supporting apps.
Community markdown is a moving target because John Gruber's initial vision is frozen in time whilst the demand for innovation is ballooning. It's unfortunate because the trademark for markdown is in some ways in the same ballpark of value as the community buy-in for the technology.
On the open source front you get zettlr.com, a pure markdown WYSIWYM editor with image preview, pandoc integration for exporting groups of pages into whole documents, support for Zettlekasten workflows, and academic references management.
It's a one-man effort by a guy who created it for working on his PhD, but it's quite robust and usable despite a few small flaws (who should be corrected in version 2.0, likely coming during the year).
it's close enough that you can write your own parser to some other format with a little bit of hacking, in fact that's what I did to port my notes from obsidian to logseq a while ago.
Of course it's a little bit of trouble but I imagine most people won't want to switch their notetaking apps that frequently.
+1. I found Obsidian a few weeks ago and it really is everything I've been wishing for in a "note taking" app. I put "note taking" in quotes because I've moved all my writing into it, too--it's wonderful to have notes so close at hand while I'm working, and Markdown is the gold standard for exporting to every presentation format I care about. It's the only richly featured writing app I've found that seems to understand how overbearing WYSIWYG editing and proprietary file formats/cloud garbage just get in the way of productivity.
The only shame with the mobile version is that (last I checked) it doesn't have Dropbox support, which makes it more or less useless to me. Hopefully it's on their list.
> My entire personal knowledge base was in Evernote for a few years, and now happily migrated to Obsidian.
Can I ask what your use-cases were for Evernote, and how well they all migrated to Obsidian?
When I think over my Evernote usage, for me it really boils down to three things:
1. Evergreen notes, like lists of books to read
2. Wiki-ish knowledgebase for work, like how do I get data from this server, or whatever
3. Digital shoebox: the place to throw old receipts, tax returns, contracts, whatever. Mostly throw it in and forget it, but useful for the 1% of time when I need to find something and it's magically there.
Numbers 1 and 2 could easily be moved to Obsidian, but I don't know if 3 would work.
My Evernote usage is a lot like yours. Ever since the Windows client switched to being a web app I've been planning on moving to something else but it's hard to find something that ticks all the boxes from me.
I still use a web clipper because pages go away too often.
I want image OCR because it's nice to search for something and have a snapshot of a whiteboard come up.
I want a native client on iPad and Windows. I would prefer local storage if possible.
Basically, I want Evernote from about 7 years ago.
Does the Obsidian app auto update? I ask because that would be an avenue for future evil acquisition co to introduce mandatory syncing. They could introduce an update which downloads from your custom setup and uploads to their servers.
Their privacy policy also allows them to use personal information for the purposes of
> recommending products and services that Dynalist believes will be of interest and provide value to you
There's a toggle for whether you want updates. You can also download the installers for each version onto your local machine if you want to revert or stick to a particular version.
Is Markdown a viable format given its many many flavors and quirks? I suppose you can just stick to the common features, but then the feature-set is pretty basic.
Almost everything else fucks with my copy&paste-ables, and is a forced WYSIWYG with no escape hatch (or recently removed it) and no dark mode, and doesn't support markdown at all, so yes the market definitely exists.
I love using Obsidian and it is where all my notes live.
Last year when I was searching for wiki-type note taking tools, I stumbled upon many of them including Roam Research, TiddlyWiki, and then Obsidian. Obsidian is what I chose because of how it stores my data - markdown files.
And it does not lose any functionality even if it uses markdown. Bidirectional linking, block references, heading references, a beautiful graph - Obsidian features almost every feature you need.
It is also very customizable. You can use custom themes and build your own plugins to work better.
Though the only thing I think needs improvement is the outlining ability - it does not feel very intuitive in Obsidian. This is the reason I use LogSeq along with Obsidian.
Now this also shows why interoperability is necessary, I do not have to worry about any data lock-in. I am free to use any notes editor along with Obsidian.
I've heard good things about the LogSeq/Obsidian interoperability, but out of curiosity, have you tried the Outliner plugin for Obsidian? I haven't gotten a good sense of how the two differ.
I have used Outliner too. There isn't exactly a difference between using them both. I prefer LogSeq because of the UI/UX that it provides for outlining. I would like to fix myself to a single app one day if possible, but for now Logseq and Obsidian work well for me.
Offtopic: It is such a nice co-incidence to meet you here on HN. I found you on YouTube yesterday while searching for Notion swipe files and then followed you on Twitter today. :).
I have bagged on Obsidian a lot because of all the "me too" "Roam-like" "Second Brain" apps which followed Roam. After trying Obsidian a few times, it seemed not to offer much beyond all the others in that group.
I got past that by not looking at it through the Roam lens. I realized Obsidian is the tool I wanted to build for myself. I see it as a view / management layer over my MD files. Also, the features have been fast coming and some key additions have made the tool much more useful. And I really like my MD files.
Obsidian is really nice, and quite powerful, especially thanks to plugins. It's also moving fast, the developers are very active. I used it for a while to move on from org-mode, but kinda lost interesst because of certain excentrics it has.
One specific problem that killed it for me temporary is the lack of support for multiple vaults, to the point that there is not even a truely centralized global configuation. Everything is saved in the vault itself, including plugins. Vault is the name of the data-directory, basically your workspace. For someone using multiple vaults (work, and private stuff) on multiple systems, this really kills any motivation to use it. Did this change in the meanwhile? I losly follow the changelog and haven't seen anything yet regarding this things, but maybe I just missed it.
Other than thoise specific problems, it's awesome how activate and vibrant the community itself is. There is a very active forum and discord-server, and many awesome plugins coming from the community are available. Obsidian has really the potential to leave org-mode behind and become a serious alternative for the rest of the world.
> One specific problem that killed it for me temporary is the lack of support for multiple vaults, to the point
> that there is not even a truely centralized global configuation. Everything is saved in the vault itself,
> including plugins. [...] Did this change in the meanwhile?
You can invoke an overview, that lists the last five, or so, Vaults, you used. From there you can switch. But that is all. The configuration, and, yes, the plugins (yeez!), sadly, are still installed on a per Vault base. What I have done is to set up an empty Vault as a template, configure it the way, I would have my master preferences, and when I create a new Vault, I start by cloning that. It's not perfect, but better than nothing.
Another thing I dislike is, that the Vault can not go into a (programming) project's folder as a sub folder, but considers the project folder as the Vault.
Perhaps-interestingly, I like this about its config and would view that feature as a bonus. It makes it easy to really tailor a given vault to a purpose, without having to consider layered configuration and how that might propagate.
I want to use Obsidian but the only thing that keep me off is the lack of encryption support. That is why I am staying with Joplin since it offers a full encryption. Obsidian does have a plugin for the encryption but only partial of it.
Joplin does not encrypt notes at rest. Only data being synced is encrypted; when it gets to its destination it’s available unencrypted in an SQLite database. Any program running on your computer can read your Joplin notes at any time. The developer has come out against implementing encryption-at-rest many times throughout the years. Their suggestion is that you use another form of encryption, like veracrypt. Notably, this makes using Joplin with encryption-at-rest impossible on iOS.
I tried this early on, but it seems there are vault-specific parts that become weird when used outside their original vault.
I'm also not so eager to regulary waste time for hacking tools. Updating the settings in all vaults each time I update some setting or plugin in one vault would be quite a pain.
Aside from the other praise people have given Obsidian it is also by far the fastest electron app I've ever used by a lot. Curious if the devs have any insight how they have made it feel so performant.
Everything changes when you ditch the network and store the database locally (markdown files and json metadata).
I used Notion for years before Obsidian and the speed alone is a reason to never go back.
On a related note, I also consider Linear to be quite fast and responsive especially when you learn the keyboard shortcuts. And to achieve that responsiveness, they load the whole database (or deltas) at startup.
The secret to development is to just follow classic programming patterns instead of new school "best practices" that are rife among the kinds of programmers who are creating Electron apps, and you should be good. In fact, JS is insanely fast, so you don't even need to do that. (Netscape 6, which came out 20 years ago, had tons of its parts written JS, down to the AOL Instant Messenger client it shipped with. It was essentially the forebear to every Electron app you see today, except it was supposed to run on computers with 64 MB of RAM, CPUs measured in hundreds of megahertz, and this was all fully interpreted, not JITted.) NodeJS development is so bad that you can appear to be nimble just by not sucking as much as the status quo. "You don't have to be faster than the bear..."
A second thing you can do is not rely on a bunch of bloated, poorly written libraries just because they're popular—another "best practice", of a different sort. I.e., pretty much the opposite of this advice, ironically:
I'm not working on Obsidian, but I'm also building a desktop app with Electron now and a non-obvious performance tip is to offload things from the main process to a separate child process and use something like node-ipc to communicate. Especially if you use sqlite3 to store data (even though it has an API with callbacks, it's blocking).
Readit News
Obsidian is a personal knowledge management app that works on top of a local folder of Markdown files [0]. Because "local" often means your computer, for the longest time, it has been a pain to access these notes on the go.
Our original plan was to build fully native mobile apps. Instead, we decided to build hybrid web apps. Hybrid web apps gets a lot of hate, and for good reason. There's heavy performance penalty for running JavaScript. Animations are often janky. A lot of native capabilities are restricted.
We know everyone's favorite argument for using the web stack. "We're a small team, and it's just not possible to....". Sure, we're also just two developers, but that excuse gets old.
We see it in a different way. We leverage hybrid web apps not as a shortcut, rather, we use it to put power in the hands of our users. This has always been a key principle driving Obsidian's development.
Obsidian is one of the few apps out there that lets users customize every aspect of the app. Themes and CSS snippets let users completely change the interface. Plugins [1] let users augment the GUI [2], run macros [3], build databases [4], synchronize with other apps [5], and much more.
It's unprecedented for users to have access to this kind of power on their mobile devices.
Now, it's reality, thanks to the web stack. Get it at https://obsidian.md/mobile
[0]: https://obsidian.md [1]: https://obsidian.md/plugins [2]: https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin [3]: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater [4]: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview [5]: https://github.com/renehernandez/obsidian-readwise
---------
We have a vibrant community of passionate users: lawyers, database engineers, dungeon masters, medical students, CEOs and CTOs under their alternate identity. You can find them on Discord and our forum at https://obsidian.md/community
We're also launching on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/obsidian-for-mobile
I was only willing to try it out because I had heard it mentioned [0] on CGP Grey's cohosted podcast, Cortex, in the episode they did on productivity software subcultures. Specifically I think CGP Grey was saying he didn't "get" Obsidian but had observed a fanatic fanbase around it of people who thought it was god's gift to note-taking because it represented the links between knowledge in a unique way. Apparently I'm one of those people because I went from installing it for the first time to writing all my new thoughts down in it in the space of 3 days.
I suspect the real reason I liked Obsidian right away is that long ago I used Microsoft Onenote as a freeform notetaking app to just spew unrelated thoughts into that I could organize later. Onenote's interface was good, but there was no way to port those notes in an exportable format to a new computer when the one with a Onenote license died.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/CGPGrey/comments/ihkqjp/cortex_105_...
Grey loves Obsidian, Mike doesn’t really get it though. Neither like Notion, even though it has a massive fan base.
There is a whole episode (maybe the one in question) where it comes to light that Grey has spent most of his life NOT making notes like most people do and instead just highlighting areas in source material and referring back to it.
Very funny episode given they were over 100 episodes into a productivity podcast at this point and had spoken about note taking extensively - without realising that one of them has a very different concept of the practice/process.
My biggest gripe with it may have simply been the endless hyping and gushing that all the "productivity gurus" on YouTube and elsewhere did over it. Indeed, it seemed custom-made for YouTube productivity gurus, since you could make everything look so clean and beautiful and polished. It seemed the sort of note-taking tool for people who cared more about how the final result looked, than for people who wanted to quickly add or go over notes.
That said, I recognize that there was much there I probably never really used to its fullest-extent, databases being the fundamental differentiator between Notion and most other note-taking apps, and potentially very powerful.
Deleted Comment
I know this isn't a very hacker newsy comment, but wanted to highlight how amazing your comparison is :D
OneNote has been free for the last few years.
> port those notes in an exportable format
You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.
Not in my experience. The online, UWP, feature-reduced version that comes with windows is gratis, but ... .
The proper desktop version requires an office license. It then is "gratis" on top of the cost you already paid for office.
You can export as a .pdf, .xps or into most MS office doc formats like .docx
OneNote isn't great if you want to regularly export to a different format. Especially if you want to make your notebooks accessible to other non-MS software. Right now, I sync my notebooks between several different devices which is kind of a pain.
Only if you store your notes in OneDrive.
The development velocity of the (TWO PERSON!) team behind this app is ridiculous. They're constantly pushing updates, and seem to handle all facets of app development with aplomb.
No affiliation, just a happy user!
This! I just checked their page for a "careers" button to see if they got VC funding and are raising a team. Nope, still just 2 people. It's not that they are able to move fast, it's that they are moving fast while making a product that looks good, does the job, and is snappy. Kudos to the (2 person) team!
Scaling up teams is to deal with scope, not speed, and usually leads to much slower progress as processes and procedures are layered on top.
I had a small problem with the app once. I contacted them via email and it was resolved in a couple of hours and they were kind enough to offer different solutions -- solutions that didn't fill their pockets. (Needless to say, I'm sticking with their services.)
The fact that they can manage all that is almost a testament to how useful the app they're creating must be for them.
I too am just a happy user/customer and wish them nothing but success.
Well in general, isn't the velocity inversely correlated with the number of people in a team?
Deleted Comment
1. Privacy. You can roll your own syncing (or use iCloud, Dropbox, etc.), without the notes being stored on the note editors' servers, which is a huge win over Roam, Notion, Evernote, etc. After the Evernote fiasco from a few years ago (where they considered reading your notes for ML model training and got massive pushback), I value future-proof solutions that won't become a liability in 10 years if the company providing the note taking software gets desperate.
2. Markdown. Speaking of future-proofing, Markdown is as close as it gets to having interoperability with the notes. Obsidian is at its core just a Markdown file editor, which means your notes are stored as plaintext and easy to export. There is a bit of Obsidian-flavored syntax (e.g. bi-directional links [[...]]), but these are becoming standard in note-taking. Many note-taking apps claim export functionality, but at the end of the day they're not incentivized to give you your data in a format that will work with other editors.
3. Executing on features that have become indispensable for note-taking, and personal knowledge management specifically: bi-directional linking, block-embeds, query-embeds, unlinked mentions, graph view, custom CSS, note aliases, markdown diagrams (via mermaid), and a few others.
4. Offline support. If there's any kind of login or sync required to access your notes on your personal device, that's a dealbreaker for me. This seems to have been a regression lately in the latest batch of note-taking apps.
My entire personal knowledge base was in Evernote for a few years, and now happily migrated to Obsidian. The graph view is just a magical way to explore the knowledge that you've stumbled upon over the years.
The team gives away so much value in the core app for free. If you enjoy their product, consider supporting via the Catalyst plan: https://obsidian.md/pricing
This is actually the reason I don't use Obsidian. It's built on markdown, but it is not markdown. Things may be different now, but when I gave up on Obsidian, there was no general purpose exporter - you either use their editor or you lose much of the useful information in your notes. This would not by itself be a big problem except for the fact that Obsidian is a standard piece of proprietary software. It genuinely solves nothing in regard to future proofing.
I'm using the exact same folder of markdown notes in parallel with Obsidian, The Archive, 1Writer, Calca, TableFlip, Python scripts, and Keyboard Maestro macros I have written and everything works flawlessly together.
To me, the killer feature of markdown notes is not the future-proofing, but this kind of seamless interoperability.
In that sense Obsidian is just a fancy viewer for documents which can be edited in VSC.
And with regards to vanilla markdown (which would exclude the likes of Github or Gitlab, or the most popular extensions on VSC), personally, I wouldn't be satisfied with the exclusion of Latex which is already in widespread support across markdown supporting apps.
Community markdown is a moving target because John Gruber's initial vision is frozen in time whilst the demand for innovation is ballooning. It's unfortunate because the trademark for markdown is in some ways in the same ballpark of value as the community buy-in for the technology.
https://trello.com/b/Psqfqp7I/obsidian-roadmap
edit: they've moved it to the "working on" column
It's a one-man effort by a guy who created it for working on his PhD, but it's quite robust and usable despite a few small flaws (who should be corrected in version 2.0, likely coming during the year).
Of course it's a little bit of trouble but I imagine most people won't want to switch their notetaking apps that frequently.
The only shame with the mobile version is that (last I checked) it doesn't have Dropbox support, which makes it more or less useless to me. Hopefully it's on their list.
Can I ask what your use-cases were for Evernote, and how well they all migrated to Obsidian?
When I think over my Evernote usage, for me it really boils down to three things:
1. Evergreen notes, like lists of books to read
2. Wiki-ish knowledgebase for work, like how do I get data from this server, or whatever
3. Digital shoebox: the place to throw old receipts, tax returns, contracts, whatever. Mostly throw it in and forget it, but useful for the 1% of time when I need to find something and it's magically there.
Numbers 1 and 2 could easily be moved to Obsidian, but I don't know if 3 would work.
I still use a web clipper because pages go away too often.
I want image OCR because it's nice to search for something and have a snapshot of a whiteboard come up.
I want a native client on iPad and Windows. I would prefer local storage if possible.
Basically, I want Evernote from about 7 years ago.
Their privacy policy also allows them to use personal information for the purposes of
> recommending products and services that Dynalist believes will be of interest and provide value to you
I'm not going to wait for the "one true format" while something good enough is here.
Yes, perfect.
Last year when I was searching for wiki-type note taking tools, I stumbled upon many of them including Roam Research, TiddlyWiki, and then Obsidian. Obsidian is what I chose because of how it stores my data - markdown files.
And it does not lose any functionality even if it uses markdown. Bidirectional linking, block references, heading references, a beautiful graph - Obsidian features almost every feature you need.
It is also very customizable. You can use custom themes and build your own plugins to work better.
Though the only thing I think needs improvement is the outlining ability - it does not feel very intuitive in Obsidian. This is the reason I use LogSeq along with Obsidian. Now this also shows why interoperability is necessary, I do not have to worry about any data lock-in. I am free to use any notes editor along with Obsidian.
Offtopic: It is such a nice co-incidence to meet you here on HN. I found you on YouTube yesterday while searching for Notion swipe files and then followed you on Twitter today. :).
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I got past that by not looking at it through the Roam lens. I realized Obsidian is the tool I wanted to build for myself. I see it as a view / management layer over my MD files. Also, the features have been fast coming and some key additions have made the tool much more useful. And I really like my MD files.
Exactly this.
One specific problem that killed it for me temporary is the lack of support for multiple vaults, to the point that there is not even a truely centralized global configuation. Everything is saved in the vault itself, including plugins. Vault is the name of the data-directory, basically your workspace. For someone using multiple vaults (work, and private stuff) on multiple systems, this really kills any motivation to use it. Did this change in the meanwhile? I losly follow the changelog and haven't seen anything yet regarding this things, but maybe I just missed it.
Other than thoise specific problems, it's awesome how activate and vibrant the community itself is. There is a very active forum and discord-server, and many awesome plugins coming from the community are available. Obsidian has really the potential to leave org-mode behind and become a serious alternative for the rest of the world.
You can invoke an overview, that lists the last five, or so, Vaults, you used. From there you can switch. But that is all. The configuration, and, yes, the plugins (yeez!), sadly, are still installed on a per Vault base. What I have done is to set up an empty Vault as a template, configure it the way, I would have my master preferences, and when I create a new Vault, I start by cloning that. It's not perfect, but better than nothing.
Another thing I dislike is, that the Vault can not go into a (programming) project's folder as a sub folder, but considers the project folder as the Vault.
https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/requesting-encryption-of-l...
Org being so feature-rich, I decided to tackle a subset on iOS, so I built https://flathabits.com.
I'm itching to build a similar thing for personal task management, since I currently rely on Shortcuts emailing myself org-formatted TODOs.
I find that it supports surprisingly large parts of org mode.
I'm also not so eager to regulary waste time for hacking tools. Updating the settings in all vaults each time I update some setting or plugin in one vault would be quite a pain.
I used Notion for years before Obsidian and the speed alone is a reason to never go back.
On a related note, I also consider Linear to be quite fast and responsive especially when you learn the keyboard shortcuts. And to achieve that responsiveness, they load the whole database (or deltas) at startup.
A second thing you can do is not rely on a bunch of bloated, poorly written libraries just because they're popular—another "best practice", of a different sort. I.e., pretty much the opposite of this advice, ironically:
<https://youtu.be/X61wRmfZU8Y?t=223>
https://medium.com/actualbudget/the-horror-of-blocking-elect...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16616374
https://archive.jlongster.com/secret-of-good-electron-apps
Also you may want to use Svelte rather than React.
I'm curious myself if the Obsidian team has anything to share about this.