Why I felt compelled, sadly, to abandon Obsidian

True, for Craft. But, in fairness, also true for many (perhaps most or all?) software that supports links between notes. Links between notes in Obsidian only survive if the software that is used as a successor to Obsidian recognizes the wiki-link formats that Obsidian supports. Most likely a link like [[see this note]] will be supported by another app because it is a common format. But [[see this note#heading ^056b7 | display text]] will probably not be supported outside Obsidian because none of the #heading tags, and the ^056b7 Obsidian-specific “block” tags, and the | display text tags are “standards” that others follow.

My point is, that the cross-linking / hyper-linking, whatever, that is the trend in note taking these days eventually reaches a point where user enhancement requests have led developers to add non-portable features. Like Hook – where everything is almost entirely specific to Hook. Hook dies; the relationships die.

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They have Craft links for linking to a document on your computer and web links for document sharing and web publishing. These cover two different things.

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I think there are degrees of compatibility and degrees of software-agnosticism.

A wiki link that uses ([[other_file.md]]) or contains ([[other file | other_file.md]]) the filename of the document to which it refers is much more portable than a link that explicitly requires a particular app (foo://) and/or a uuid that isn’t clearly tied to any specific document.

The former kind of link may be a pain to reconnect — but it’s possible, especially if (like most wikilinking) it’s really a relative path: filename.md if in the same directory, subdirectory/filename.md if in a subdirectory, etc.

The later may be impossible to recreate without the app and its internal database(s).

Edit: Just to be clear, this isn’t to say that one is better than the other for everyone and at all times. I much prefer a more transparent, portable link because I like using different apps for different purposes with the same set of notes. However, I do think the question of how portable a link is is less subjective. It’s just that you might consider it essential to have a more portable link than I do, or vice versa.

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Ideally, note taking apps would offer export options that would allow to fine tune the exported files so that users could adopt the exported files depending on their purpose.

As an example, to generate rather generic Markdown files that don’t depend on a certain tool, the app could (on export) convert a Wiki-style link:

	This has been explained in more detail in [[1FDF-YYWC-RSKA]].

into a standard Markdown (implicit) inline link plus a reference-style link:

	This has been explained in more detail in [1FDF-YYWC-RSKA][].

	[1FDF-YYWC-RSKA]: filename.md  "note title"

In case of MultiMarkdown support, if the original Wiki-style link has further features/attributes like e.g. a link type:

	The below thoughts further develop ideas from [[extends::based on::11C4-A7G2-HEKA]].

the exported MultiMarkdown file could add these as attributes to the reference-style link:

	The below thoughts further develop ideas from [11C4-A7G2-HEKA][].

	[11C4-A7G2-HEKA]: filename.md  "note title" class="extends based_on"

In a similar fashion, if a Wiki-style link has an alias or display text, this could be used as the note title of the exported reference-style link.

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Ah, interesting. I’ve just become a bit hooked on Obsidian (as a replacement for Bear, which I also like and used for years).

When putting external links into Obsidian, I’m usually highlighting the text, doing Cmd-K, and pasting the URL. But I admit that the results aren’t too pretty when you’re editing. My favourite key is Cmd-E, to switch to preview mode for making things readable. And yes, it’s true that Bear, Craft etc don’t require that, but this is the general case for anything that uses Markdown, and it’s worth it for me to get all the other Obsidian benefits.

Also, since my blog and my mail reader (Mailmate) both use Markdown, I like something where I can just copy and paste that! In other apps, I very seldom want to take any formatting with me when I go, so I’m more often jumping through hoops to get rid of it first when pasting from other apps! But that’s just me…

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Recently Bear has really let me down, I had a corrupt database and couldn’t access my notes, contacted support three days ago and haven’t heard anything back

I came across this and have given Craft a look, and so far I really like it. Not fond of the subscription cost, but the tool is very much what I have been looking for with 1/4 the learning curve of Obsidian.

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Be sure to check out the calendar integration and daily note feature. My most used and useful feature is create sub-cards/pages.

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Absolutely - sub-pages are such a simple yet elegantly powerful+well designed feature.

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