Obsidian Editor - a Hot Mess?

[ryanjamurphy]

@ChrisUpchurch

One I don’t often see mentioned which is particularly annoying me at the moment is that Obsidian doesn’t seem to use the default macOS spellcheck dictionary; instead, it uses its own. Not only does Obsidian not recognize all the specialized vocabulary I’ve added to the macOS dictionary, but its built-in dictionary also seems much more limited than the default OS one. I’m (slowly) using “Add to dictionary” on everything it thinks is misspelled, but the process is rather tedious and annoying.

I thought this was fixed recently. You mean the autocorrect options from macOS System Preferences → Keyboard → Text? When I type the expansions I’ve got there in Obsidian, they work.

Although I realize it doesn’t help the end-user, @svsmailus, this is (was?) an Electron issue. Obsidian’s developers have been pushing Electron to fix it. (e.g., Expose `spellcheck_platform::CheckSpelling` API · Issue #22829 · electron/electron · GitHub)

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@anon41602260

The other day I made the mistake of activating the Minimal Theme Settings plugin, which, without making any changes to the settings, trashed my appearance settings. I cannot find any way to get back to what I wanted. Even uninstalling Obsidian and re-creating all the plugin and theme settings does not overcome whatever hidden style settings that plugin installed somewhere.

Odd. The only folder the plugin should be able to read/write to is in Vault/.obsidian/plugins/Minimal Theme Settings. Uninstalling the plugin and deleting that folder should’ve fixed things. You may want to reach out to the plugin dev directly on their GitHub repo!

More broadly, there has been some chatter about better appearance management settings. The Style Settings plugin is great and shows that there’s a better way. We might also see a “snippet store” eventually, maybe!

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@anon41602260

(I would never post this complaint on the Obsidian Discourse forum – I’ve learned from experience that the mods there will either say “not a problem” or delete the post. It’s a bit of a hostile forum, these days. It’s not really possible to address the devs anymore except exchanging techie tidbits in the Discord forum. Probably because there are two of them and thousands of customers, they’ve understandably put a mod-wall around themselves. Unfortunately, hot success can kill an app.)

I think parts of this critique are fair, but for what it’s worth, us mods have been discouraging people from @ing the Obsidian developers for as long as I can remember. If everyone is shouting, you can’t hear anyone. We therefore try to encourage folks to only reach out directly if there’s something critically wrong—e.g., data loss.

My experience moderating the Obsidian forum and Discord has been interesting. Managing the thousands of feature requests, help questions, and bug reports that flood in has been arduous at times. And keep in mind that we are only doing it for our love of the app—we are not Obsidian staff, just a small team of volunteers.

I’d like to think we’re best-in-class, though: I don’t know of any other app that provides a similar level of access and transparency in the development process. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to steal their ideas. Nonetheless, it is naturally frustrating when a feature you desire is not coming to fruition, or when bugs aren’t getting squashed. One thing I’ve learned from watching Obsidian and other apps develop over the past year, however, is that there aren’t easy solutions to these kinds of problems. As you’ve said, @anon41602260, success can kill. Adding developers to teams rarely speeds things up… In fact, every indie app that “goes mainstream” and starts to add HR seems to slow down. Moreover customer service teams become opaque dead-ends. I personally hate hearing “okay we heard you thanks for the feature request.” So, while there are challenges, I’d like to think we’re doing the best anyone can.