Obsidian sounds great.
But my challenge is that I already “all in” with DEVONthink. Is there a use case where Obsidian is better?
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@arasmus … if DEVONthink is working for you, stick with it. No reason to turn things upside down unless there is a problem.
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MacSparky is cool with that. I really like his approach; Obsidian is for sure not for me. It just isn’t how my mind works. However DEVONthink 3 is: well in the sense that my use of it is totally idiosyncratic now.
I can’t even explain it any more to anybody else and I am not sure I understand it myself: including some very personal ‘smart rules’ that come and go.
I do find that a very ‘flat’ folder system works for me though over all. It is quite possible that had I started with Obsidian I would be saying the same thing in reverse though! I won’t be finding out though. I am so happy with my current set up. I think this is a growing problem for developers?
Sometimes one gets an amazing surprise: the current LaTeX support in Ulysses is the best example. So one can never be too sure of one’s own understanding of a sophisticated app and @MacSparky does get that point across, you don’t know what you don’t know…
I was tempted by Obsidian due to the MPU episode, but, on balance… no.
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This episode is now making me tempted to take the Obsidian plunge for the first time. Couple of questions before I do that:
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If you’ve never done Markdown, how much harder does that make it touse the app (I’m a lawyer so my text generation life has been 95% or more in Microsoft Word or Outlook for over a decade).
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Lots of the stuff that I would want to work off of is pdfs or Word documents I’ve compiled over the years on subjects that are relevant. Given that those documents aren’t in Markdown, would making them useful in obsidian require a lot of manual work document-by-document to start importing things?
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If your primary use case involves lots of pdfs, would DevonThink be a better solution (which I shudder about both because of pricing and the horror stories of the sync system sometimes eating data)?
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Markdown is pretty simple to learn for non-technical users. However, Obsidian is focused on plain text content and everything else is an afterthought. If you rely on Word and PDF documents, my advice is to store them in DEVONThink. Much better repository for stuff that is not just a markdown doc.
I personally just link to the files in DT from TheBrain, Tinderbox, Things, and previously Obsidian.
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And @DavidBeck, I concur. Another advantage of the DEVONthink is the ability to bulk convert files. I find this to be an incredibly useful feature.
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Devonthink is great for PDFs. Note this is not a binary situation. You can link to files in Devonthink. Devonthink can also index obsidian files.
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What @Nils_Kassube and @Bmosbacker said.
The important question is what you want to use Obsidian for. I think it’s a great tool for writing and linking my own research notes, but find it less potent as a repository for other reference materials or project documents.
Therefore I use both Obsidian and DEVONthink.
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Obsidian is where I write and store project notes.
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Obsidian is where I write and store my daily notes.
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Obsidian is now my task manager.
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Most of all, Obsidian is for notes that I write.
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DEVONthink is my repository for administrative documents—everything from legal agreements to professional credentials to tax documents to financial statements to important receipts, etc etc etc. These are stored IN DEVONthink.
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I store my project and reference materials in an organized hierarchy of Finder folders, usually specific to the kind of document and / or the apps I’ll use to work with and manage them. I index these folders in DEVONthink. For instance, I store PDFs of articles and research papers in a set of Finder folders at which I’ve pointed both Bookends and DEVONthink. I find DEVONthink the best tool I have to search a heap of reference materials and research documents for exactly the piece of information or topic discussion I need.
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I also index my Obsidian vaults in DEVONthink.
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I maintain more than one DEVONthink database. For instance, there’s one for some family trusts and estates that need ongoing attention and a separate one for personal tax matters. There’s another where I’ve indexed my research and project materials, e.g., my Obsidian vaults, my PDFs, my nonfiction ebooks, and where I also put bookmarks for particular websites I need to visit often for research.
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So, if I want to see where in my markdown notes, PDFs, and ePubs I might find references to, say, Susan Sontag’s assessment of Diane Arbus’s photography, I’d fire up a search in the DEVONthink database where I’ve indexed the relevant Obsidian vault and Finder folders of PDFs and ePubs and see what it surfaces.
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I don’t find DEVONthink a particularly congenial place to write notes or annotate PDFs, so I do that in other apps.
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I could probably do in DEVONthink what I do in Obsidian, but I prefer creating notes in Obsidian.
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I also don’t use DEVONthink as an “everything bucket”—not because it couldn’t be one, but because I find that a) I don’t get much value out of everything buckets and b) I’m at extreme risk of being a digital hoarder and I need to be very disciplined about what I yank down off the internet and save.
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Readwise Reader is where I put copies of things I need to read in the short-to-medium term with intention. It’s for ePubs, PDFs, articles, newsletters, and a very few RSS feeds that I need to work with in connection with a particular project or area of interest. I like having all of these documents in one place that I can get to on whatever device is at hand, but more than that, I really like that it feeds all of my highlights right into Obsidian where they can get processed into real notes.
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Markdown is easy and I like writing notes in it, but I wouldn’t even think of converting a multi-page or complex Word document into a markdown file unless 1) it doesn’t really need to be a Word document and 2) it can be “atomized” into shorter notes. I think reference materials should be retained in the format that best suits them. I’m not going to try to convert a spreadsheet into a markdown table, and I’m not going to try to convert a legal agreement or a footnoted research paper into markdown. (I will convert articles I find on the web into markdown, but mostly so I can archive them—and often enough I turn them into PDFs via Marked 2 anyway.) Markdown is for short-form stuff that I write.
I love DEVONthink, but I don’t think it’s your only option. If you don’t need DEVONthink’s “AI” tools (e.g., the concordance feature, which I adore) you might find that Eaglefiler (EagleFiler: Document Organizer and Mail Archiver for Mac) offers all the functionality you’ll need at a lower price and shorter learning curve.
Whew. That was more information than you probably need!
PS - I’ve never had problems with DEVONthink losing my documents.
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I’m glad to see all the talk about DEVONthink in this Obsidian Field Guide thread!
I tried Obsidian a while ago and was unimpressed. Probably because it was so markdown-centric and I’m basically a plaintext or RTF user. Anyway I just watched the Obsidian Field Guide sample hoping to get enthused, but 15 minutes in I got totally turned off.
So I went and downloaded the trial of DEVONthink. I previously did this about a decade ago and found it an ugly app at the time. The most recent version looks fantastic. I now expect to buy it when they next have a 25% off sale (I’m in no rush) and I can drop the savings on the purchase of the DEVONthink field guide.
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There’s a thread on the Devonthink forum discussing why some of the participants are moving from Obsidian to Devonthink. 
See My experience with Devonthink versus Obsidian - DEVONthink - DEVONtechnologies Community, if you’re curious.
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I just store Word and PDF documents in my Obsidian vault. I can link to them from Obsidian notes, and open them in their native formats. No need for DT or any other third-party solution.
I do use DevonThink to index my Obsidian vault, but so far have only found one use for it: Previewing markdown files to then cut-and-paste them into Google Drive, for sharing with clients. Obsidian read-only view isn’t quite as good as DT for that.
@tipper-bonylad You are a bad influence on my app-switcher proclivities!
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I f-ing hated markown, until I used it. Come on in the water is fine 
Libre Office and Collabora integrate seamlessly with Obsidian so all your Word documents are accessible. PDF’S are a no-brainer, they work way better than I expected.
NO, just NO. 
PDFS work fine in Obsidian. Reference my problems with DEVONThink after MAJOR issues.
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Interesting, My initial and still primary use is linking to other stuff. My own note taking is in it’s fledgling state but no where near my primary usage.
Perhaps you meant Devonthink here?
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Yep, I managed to hit my hotkey for inserting Obsidian and never proofread my response. Edited it now, thanks.
I’m a lawyer, too, and write all my case notes in Obsidian. Markdown is easy and takes only a couple days to get used to. I recommend using an Obsidian “Theme” (Settings > Appearance > Theme) that makes your bold, italics, and (importantly) bold+italics easy to see. I use the theme Blue Topaz. It’s not the most elegant-looking theme, but I keep testing it against other themes and it’s still #1 for ease of reading text, emphasized text, and headings.
Regarding PDFs and Word documents, I don’t use those in Obsidian. They stay in the Mac folder tree I set up for each case. (Perhaps I’m missing out by not integrating them into Obsidian, which I’m open to try.) I index our client files in DevonThink, and use DevonThink to search for info when I want to search more than the case notes in Obsidian.
DevonThink might be a good, integrated solution that wouldn’t require Obsidian at all, but I haven’t gelled yet with DT for anything beyond searching.
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I do put links in my notes to things that are somewhere other than my Obsidian vaults, but I don’t store anything other than my notes themselves in my vaults.
Markdown is easy to learn. There are a very small number of formatting symbols you need to know, for boldfacing, links, bullet lists, headers, comments, highlights, embedding images and that’s about it. If you’re doing anything fancy, like tables … well, it’s possible to do those things in Markdown but you’re really better off graduating to Word or Excel at that point.
And the advantage to Markdown is you’re not dealing with a word processor’s idiosyncracies.
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In my previous post, I got all lecturey and telling people what to do. I try to avoid doing that in forums like these. I don’t want to tell other people to abandon workflows that work for them.
I’m writing about why I prefer Markdown. Futureproofing is only a small part of it—I just find it easier to write in Markdown.
Now if only converting from Markdown to Word in Obsidian were easier….
Do you use the Pandoc plugin? That works well, but I found it a bit techy to install and configure.
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