I Think I've Grown Tired of Obsidian 🫤

[Synchronicity]

I’m not the least bit tired of Obsidian. It’s still my most loved app. But once I got it looking and working the way I wanted it to look and work, I found myself more and more just using it as a tool. I’m still open to improving or optimizing it, and if I find there’s something new I want to do with it I’ll seek a solution, but for the most part I’m no longer actively looking for the new and shiny.

The point of highly customizable and configurable software is that it lets you tailor it to your own needs and preferences, rather than being stuck with whatever the dev thinks is best for you. It isn’t to constantly tweak and change it just because you can.

[Synchronicity]

That graph doesn’t reflect my own experience at all. I never liked Apple Notes when I was on the left side, and I like it even less now. Unfortunately, I have to use it sometimes for shared lists and notes with family members.

[SpivR]

I just use DT plain text or rich text files with the built-in editor.

Once you mentally block out the formatting or icon bar cross the top and any window framing or left-side stuff, all editors as really just a large blank area for typing.

In my case, I am only typing unformatted text or maybe some basic markdown, so a fancy editing environment is something I can easily give up.

I started using Apple Notes and Drafts as my initial capture app and then doing reviews and deletes before adding to DT, but in the last 6 months I’ve gotten used to just inputting directly in DT and saving the extra workflow steps.

[SpivR]

The main reason I avoid Apple Notes is that it is a proprietary file format.

Once burned by Evernote and the like, open file format is a minimum feature I will not give up for any reason and I will tolerate other limitations as a worthwhile tradeoff.

[cornchip]

I still like my version better!

[andy4222]

Any specific features you are missing?

Obsidian is what you make it. I’d recommend not visiting the forums and keeping it simple for your use case.

I recently moved to it and keep it super simple, disabled most plugins except having a plugin to download images when I paste them, move them to attachments and prefix their name with the note…that’s it. I sometimes view my notes on GitHub, since that’s what I use as a sync mechanism.

The biggest advantage of obsidian is portability of notes, and being able to view it anywhere. Plus you are in control of the data, unlike other services, so you can have private data in there as well.

If you still need to explore other options, Bear and Upnote are solid options with good features, speed, and allow some portability of notes. UpNote has a lifetime purchase, but Bear is subscription.

[Pupsino]

I also use DevonThink for most things and just don’t need the mental overhead of managing several different apps that all do one thing well. However, I did go the other way to you - at first I just wrote everything directly through DT’s editors, but now I’d say at least 50% of my notes start in Drafts before making their way to DT. For me this eliminated a tiny bit of overhead, because if I need to draft something (I see where it gets its name) I go to Drafts. It’s quick and easy to open Drafts, create a note, and then come back to it later to finish it off and move it to the right place, and I don’t have to decide at the time what I’m doing with the note. Plus I have my menus and theme set up exactly how I like so for me it’s quicker to do this (e.g. I have a markdown editing menu that has the actions I use regularly like quoting, headers, sorted lists, etc. and it’s all just a button click away).

[My post isn’t a criticism of Obsidian. I tried it but it just wasn’t for me, I handle lots of different file types and I want my notes filed with them, not in a vault separate from other content.]

[rms]

As @brookter says is what I do. If DEVONthink not running at the time (rare, but happens), using what ever editor I want I simply save in to DEVONthink’s Global inbox and when DEVONthink does start the file is automatically imported.

As @cwc quotes Steve Jobs "“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Important to understand and abide by this wisdom even with what we ourselves create.

[ryanjamurphy]

Here’s a draft of a blog post I’ve been thinking through in response to this kind of temptation I’ve personally felt about many apps over the years. It needs a good edit but I don’t think I’ll get back to it in the next number of weeks and it seems very relevant to this thread right now!

---

I buy a house.

The new house is amazing. It has so many rooms, and so much room. It’s got a nice fridge with a cool little ice maker. The island countertop is huge. The garage has one of those peg board organizers and all of my tools are so easy to find. It even has a little sewing room with a automatic sewing machine so that I don’t need anyone else to hem my pants.

I move in. I live there. I live there some more.

I see some other houses in the city for sale. Those houses look nicer than mine.

Our house has the same number of rooms, but there’s no room for anything. I can never find what I want in the fridge and the ice maker broke and I haven’t had time to order the part that I need to fix it. The island countertop is always full of toys and birthday invitations. I can barely open the garage door because of all the half-finished projects in the way, and besides, nothing is where it’s supposed to be on the peg board. I can’t hem my own pants, either: we put all of our saved search queries and tags in the sewing room. Besides, I never learned how to actually use the sewing machine.

I buy one of those other houses in the city.

The new house is amazing. It has so many rooms, and so much room. It’s got a nice fridge with a cool little ice maker. The island countertop is huge. The garage has one of those peg board organizers and all of my tools are so easy to find. It even has a little sewing room with an automatic sewing machine so that I don’t need anyone else to hem my pants.

I move in.

---

Tools like note-taking apps and task management tools feature a special kind of cruft: the detritus of old parts and ideas that builds up as someone works on projects. Cruft leaves you with the feeling that it needs to be intentionally and deliberately sifted through and recycled. What can you remove? You can’t just throw it all out, as it might contain important parts that are hard to replace! But you never have the time or energy to deal with it, so it accumulates, and sort-of gets in the way although you can kind of step around it if you know where to put your feet.

In software development, cruft can lead to technical debt and dependency hell. In knowledge/task management, cruft leads to knowledge management debt (“where should I put this? In the projects folder in my role folder? Did I tag it with the new-project and topic tags? Maybe I’ll just put it in one of my inboxes for now.”) and to-do dependency hell (“before I start on writing about this new idea I really should finish this reading to-do I had in this related project because it might be relevant and I need to know that before I start”).

The hidden problem here is that these tools typically feature a special, easy solution to cruft: just start using a new tool.

When you start using any kind of new knowledge or task management tool, there’s a sense of shine and wonder to everything. Yet the most important reason for this is not because the new tool is better than the old one: it’s simply because you haven’t moved in yet.

Crucially, this effect is more than “tabula rasa,” the blank slate. Yes, as you start using the shiny new tool, you’ll end up adding the projects you’ve been anxiously avoiding, the repeating reminder you keep pushing off, and the notes on that blog post you’re never actually going to write. Yet an even more sinister problem than crufty stuff is crufty softerware. Your knowledge and task management system contains to-dos and notes, yes, but it is also made up of the habits and behaviours and idiosyncratic use cases that you develop as you write those to-dos and notes. In those first moments of adopting a new tool, you forget about all of that cruft. However, even though it may take months or even years of use to build up new piles of crufty stuff and softerware, it will eventually happen — and this cycle is the engine of the industry.

Is it always a bad thing to switch tools? Of course not. Sometimes the new software is absolutely better than the old, and sometimes the new softerware you develop empowers you to do things more effectively or efficiently than before. But it is important to be aware of both the cost of switching and the reasons why the new thing feels better than the old. So, when you are tempted to switch, try to look for your own system design smells: are you switching because there’s too much cruft built up in the system around the new tool? If so, take a moment to reflect: setting up a new tool will probably cost you as much time and energy as cleaning up the cruft of the old tool. Which is the better expenditure of time? Only you can decide.

[Rob_Polding]

I dropped Obsidian in favor of DevonThink a while ago. The main gripes were the hassle of using images and tables, unintelligent search, the web app interface, and the lack of decent file support.

I use a lot of files that cannot be converted to markdown, especially files for iWorks. While there may be a way to use a plugin and hack Obsidian, it is not designed to handle anything beyond PDFs. I also found it to be worse on mobile than DT to Go (which isn’t perfect, but at least it feels native. It doesn’t feel like a website trying to be an app).

I ended up just getting on with work rather than tinkering with plugins, and the document processing capabilities of DevonThink make it a massive improvement in terms of useful features (without having to install plugins for each feature).

For capture, I use the Menubar DT app or the share sheet built into most apps. My notes workflow is normally Tot → DT on both mobile and desktop.

[AppleGuy]

Well said. Plugins are a great idea initially, but it got to the point where I thought – “what’s the difference between a more proprietary tool that lets you export notes to other apps vs Obsidian which takes a text file and has a bunch of code running around it to make the note appear or function well and above said text file?”.

It’s just trading complications in a way. Yes, the text file is easily exportable but like I said in my post, I’m not sure having 8,000 text files in a folder is super useful either if the structure and set up of those files relies on 15 plugins to link, display, make them function as expected.

[MacDependent]

I use Obsidian because NvAlt is dead. I don’t want to hear it about a replacement. We’ve been waiting so long for that replacement the wait has added a layer of “even if it comes out, it will be abandoned”.

[Topre]

No mention of Drafts as alternatives?

[Bmosbacker]

@AppleGuy

You can’t zoom in and move around on the page. It’s locked to a set view. Things like that just drive me crazy about it.

When I need the ability to move around and zoom in and out of handwritten notes, I use FreeForm. That said, the vast majority of my notes are typed, consequently, this particular issue does not materially affect my workflow.

[Synchronicity]

@andy4222

Bear and Upnote

Bear syncs over CloudKit, but UpNote syncs over servers the dev controls and is not E2EE. The dev can read your data if they ever choose to.

[Synchronicity]

@Rob_Polding

While there may be a way to use a plugin and hack Obsidian, it is not designed to handle anything beyond PDFs.

I regularly include other file types (especially MS Office files) in my Obsidian vault, and it doesn’t require any hacks. You just right click the file in the explorer and select “open with default app.”

I do also use Open With, a simple plugin that lets you add multiple app options for specific file types to the right click menu. For example, you can choose to open a PDF with Preview or Acrobat, or a markdown file in other editors.

[Synchronicity]

@AppleGuy

I’m not sure having 8,000 text files in a folder is super useful either if the structure and set up of those files relies on 15 plugins to link, display, make them function as expected.

That’s only true if you dump all your files in a single folder. Folders are the main way I organize my files in Obsidian. I also use other, parallel methods and plugins for organizing and slicing and dicing the content of my vault because they’re powerful and useful, but if they (and even Obsidian itself) disappeared I could still navigate my notes in Finder and use them in any text editor.

Links and backlinks are central to Obsidian, but wikilinks seem to be replacing markdown links as the defacto standard and are increasingly supported in other apps now, including iA Writer. And Obsidian’s implementation of hashtags and nested tags is pretty standard.

[chrisecurtis]

What I’d like is if the people who make notes apps actually understood some basics about writing and reading. It’s fine not to worry about any of that if your note-making is the very short “remind yourself later” type e.g. action points from a meeting, but if you are writing in order to think, trying to organise your research and make sense of something or clarify some ideas or thoughts you had, you are writing and it’s vital that you can properly read what you have written later.

There’s a lot that isn’t well understood about reading, especially on screens, but we have known for a very long time that the legibility of text matters and that cues like line spacing, serifs, margins, contrast between headings and body and so on can help. There are very few note-making apps that allow you to even set a line length (except by re-sizing the window) or margins. Markdown is a great tool for writing, but ghastly for reading - the * and _ and [ ] syntax is almost designed to interrupt the subconscious scanning of words.

Apple Notes could be awesome, and it nearly is, but why does it insist on using a font (with no other realistic option) that is great for user interfaces and legible in itself, but which I find hard to read anything dense or long in?

I’ve been down the Obsidian rabbit-hole a few times. The poor handling of media always stopped me going further.

My pet conspiracy theory is that the vast majority of note-making apps, like the vast majority of all apps, are built by developers and prioritise what they need: if I’m writing code, I like long lines, I don’t care about any styling of text beyond automatic syntax highlighting and I have absolutely no need to insert, display or manage images or other media. Oh and I’d better be able to do everything without lifting my fingers from the keyboard even for a moment. So many notes-related apps are focused in coding-adjacent type notes and not on the kinds of organic things that so many people need to think about and organise ideas.

[SpivR]

@Synchronicity

I could still navigate my notes in Finder and use them in any text editor.

I think the most interesting takeaway from this discussion is that macOS would benefit from adding more organizational techniques for the mundane file/folder structure.

Yes tags exist, but I think adding links/backlinks or symlinks a la DevonThink replication, would enrich the file system layer so all third party apps could benefit and the structure would be preserved when one changes apps.

Perhaps it is simply the UI of finder / macOS that needs more love, but I’ve never found macOS tags work for me and I don’t want to rely on unix-y symlinks, hardlinks, or other tricks on the edge or underneath macOS as that always seems to be kicking the can down the road to disaster.

[vsp]

@chrisecurtis

What I’d like is if the people who make notes apps actually understood some basics about writing and reading.

Tha’s a pretty simple summation of why I haven’t found a stick-to-it app for notes/writing.
Most of my notes I’ll want to read in some form in the future, and I want it to be easy/pleasing to read.

I’m currently using Obsidian (with Apple Notes for some stuff), but my needs don’t require a lot of non-text media or files to be directly associated with what I’m writing. I’m pretty thin on the plug-ins and customization – and don’t really bother with MOCs or extensive back linking because I don’t need it.

But I would like something a bit more streamlined for reading after the fact. And I don’t have anything in Obsidian that requires it to be Obsidian.

I’ve been kicking the tires more with Craft and Notebooks, but haven’t fully tried either out. In general I like both better for reading after the fact.

EDIT: By “pretty simple” I meant clear and concise. Nothing negative intended by it at all.