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Comment by JonathanBuchh | Hacker News Reader

I’m grateful to Vim because it taught me that I can write plain text. Previously, I was under the assumption that I need to create a Word or Google Doc. I wonder how many others are in the same situation I was in…

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I never thought about this until you mentioned it but my love for markdown only came after I learned vim.

Vim is easily my most used application; I use it for my task list, to write notes when learning new topics and even to journal my personal thoughts.

Prior to this I used applications like evernote, google keep, google docs etc. I think the only advantage of those tools had was easy sync notes between devices but I solved that with syncthing[0].

[0]:https://syncthing.net/

I was opposite with Markdown—I started using it with Obsidian, then fell in love with vim. Now I love Markdown even more and use vimwiki instead of Obsidian.

> I solved that with syncthing

syncthing is great!

> vimwiki

I've been looking for a Personal Knowledge Base (?) for a while and have started using Obsidian. I love the idea of the tags, backlinks, and Graph view but the editor itself leaves much to be desired (besides the fact that it's not vi(m)); whoever came up with the default color scheme (medium/light grey on dark grey) needs to be shot.

So how do they compare? If I can do everything I want with vim(wiki) I won't bother with Obsidian.

I hear that VSCode is going to incorporate backlinks and will be a better Obsidian than Obsidian is.

Well it occurred to me after reading this thread that I could edit my Obsidian vault via vim. Of course, that's only for basic text editing capabilities everything else has to happen inside Obsidian.

Initially, I used vim emulation within Obsidian, but later realized that I didn’t need to know about backlinks very often—I just wanted a simple wiki, so I started using vimwiki. The main downside for me is that you can’t (to my knowledge) use folders without changing links ([[folder/note]] instead of [[note]] in Obsidian), so all my notes are in one directory with no subdirectories. I also don’t think renaming files in vimwiki updates links in other files like in Obsidian. Because I prioritize using my own vim config over many of the features in Obsidian, I use vimwiki. Whenever I need something that Obsidian can do that vimwiki can’t, I just open Obsidian. I love owning my notes in plaintext :)

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