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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the main strengths of Obsidian, which I have been using lately and I’m extremely happy with: everything is just Markdown files in some folder on disk. Zero danger of lock in.

You can have a disk hierarchy if you desire, or trust that search will find you what you are looking for. For me search works fairly well and if I need something extra I can just grep/sed/awk.

Plus it has the features that a simple text editor will not have: displaying images, live preview, relationships between topics, etc. It even has a Vim mode!

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I use org-mode the same way. I have a flat directory with many small files, inspired by Zettelkasten and by simple wikis. No server, no dependencies.

This also works well for small organizations. Both GitHub and GitLab are able to render org files, with some minor limitations. Hence, a simple repository full of org files is already a wiki. Even local links just work, with zero dependencies.

It's possible to transform org files into HTML with some CI task to get support for all org features. But I have found this a bit of an overkill. I don't need most org features. The basics are already great: outlines, timestamps, hyperlinks, tables and footnotes.

You can achieve more or less the same things with Markdown as well.

There’s also org-roam, which introduces the bi-directional links that systems like Obsidian have. Just make sure you’re on v2.

This is truly the era of the memex.

The only problem with org (which may not be a problem for some folks) is that if you want to be able to edit org files with the least friction you need to use Emacs. I tried the org extension for VS Code and vim in the past and they just weren't quite the same as editing org via emacs.

This is exactly why I switched to Obsidian after trying a few others like Bear, Notion, and Craft. Let me see the files on disk! Don't abstract it away or hide it from me.

It's just unfortunate that the proprietary apps have IMHO much nicer UI/UX. Why can't we have both!

On Mac I use Ulysses. I get the benefits described here while still having a fast, native app with excellent UX.

I have Mac for work, and Linux for personal and an Android phone. That means Ulysses on Mac, ThiefMD on Linux, and Markor on Android, all synced with syncthings. Native apps on different OSes is the best solution I've been able to come across.

A single cross platform app would be preferable, but the last time I used Obsidian it was slow, heavy, bloated, with a pretty ugly UI, likely in part due to running on electron.

I use Ulysses too, but I it could be faster. I haven’t tried them in the latest versions, but in the past I’ve had issues with even medium-sized files with lots of formatting.

The look of Obsidian put me off too but after I got into it I realised the whole theme is totally css-able. It's really easy to make it your own.

I do agree though, they do themselves no favours with that ugly black / purple website. They need a much better, much prettier default.

All that aside, I'm delighted with my switch to Obsidian. Just an amazing tool, and total reassurance that it's just markdown with all the benefits that brings. So glad to be rid of Evernote...!

I've always liked Obsidians design or/and haven't thought of it as bad. We've all seen way worse looking applications.

Serious question: how do you square your third paragraph with your first? That is, if you're using Obsidian's features like [[square bracket link syntax]], or #tags, or inline images, aren't you effectively locked in to editors that support the same set of features?

It’s still all plain text.

Best practice for tags is just include them in the plain text file, and inline images in Obsidian is like Derek said — just keep them in your folder structures just like your text.

Not really -- you're only locked in to the extent that Obsidian makes those things easy

If Obsidian went away, I'd still have a bunch of text files that I understood, and I'd know that I could find things tagged with #foo by using grep, that the [[links]] just mean to open links.md, that an image should be opened in a browser, etc.

Additionally, it’s pretty to extend most Markdown parsers with extended syntax. The worst thing that happens is you have to fork a parser to add extended syntax…which isn’t so bad.

square bracket syntax is fairly well used in wikis. While there are varying degrees of user experience if you step away from Obsidian, it's still readable. You can go and convert the links to []() either inside Obsidian with a plugin or later with a script.

You'll be able to get access to it in 20 years, even if not in a shiny UX friendly way. Which is more than can be said for some of the really old notes I took in proprietary pieces of software.

And easy linking and bi-directional linking. Once you experience these two features it’s very hard to imagine notes without it. That’s the main reason I couldn’t go with the authors workflow of just plain text files.

I do wish they had a cheaper commercial tier that maybe didn’t offer priority support or something.

$50/year puts you next to some good developer tools, that already do markdown pretty well, and I just don’t see the point of writing notes if they’re not also for work.

I’m sure it’s worth it once you have 100s or 1000s of notes by i somehow feel like it’s a bit of a too big pill to swallow in the beginning.

You can use it free, mate. Just sync your markdown files via your favourite provider, or your own WebDAV, e.g. Nextcloud, or use a free sync plugin. There's even git plugins if you're a fellow nerd that wants version control.

According to the license, you can't use it commercially without the commercial license, and I think the license is very clear that work related notes are included in commercial definition:

> You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it for revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company that has two or more people. Get a commercial license for each user if that's the case. Non-profit organizations do not need commercial licenses.

https://obsidian.md/eula

Interesting!

But then I consider $50 not that much for a software that helps you earning your salary. And it becomes tax deductable this way.

If it doesn't help your work or a free markdown editor provides you the same value, you have your answer.

As I use it for my job I consider it worth the 50 bucks. I still would prefer it to bee FOSS, though (and be willing to pay, anyway) - as then I knew even the software might be still around when the company behind it is gone.

A lot of utility with obsidian comes from the plugins from the community (e.g. excalidraw) and even though they might store their stuff also on your disk as text files, the utility of that eco system is gone as soon as one switches (or changes, or requires a different file format for the text files or whatnot)

Obsidian is great. I use Syncthing to share my "database" between all my devices. I can do some quick edits/take notes on the go and when I get home the changes are already mirrored to my desktop.

Been using obsidian for two weeks and the tagging / linking to documents is top notch, saving it to my internet drive at work brings out the best of all worlds

Obsidian looks interesting, but how do you sync between devices? Their sync service seems really expensive. On desktop I guess you can use git/Dropbox plugin, but what about mobile? I take a lot of notes on my Android phone.

I currently sync with FolderSync on Android. That syncs a Google Drive or Dropbox folder to your phone. Then use that folder with Obsidian

I love Obsidian, but I'm now beginning to move many of my documents to Notion for sharing with a team.

I really wish Obsidian, or something like it, worked well for teams. Maybe it's on their roadmap, I'm not sure.

How is notion? I heard it was slow?

Also, is real time collaboration a game changer or a gimmick?

I used to think the former, but was questioning it recently.

What would be lost with syncthing + obsidian for your team or maybe something that does autocommit like fossil for probable conflicts?

It's faster now, I haven't been bothered by speed yet.

But yes, realtime collaboration is a critical feature for documents that can be used during meetings (and IMO ~no meetings should be held without documents).

The other critical feature is comments, which I assume Obsidian does not have support for (they would be very nontrivial to represent in markdown).

For posterity, I got pretty annoyed by the clutter of "Type / for commands" and stuff, and used this Stylish theme to clean things up a bit:

https://gist.github.com/rattrayalex/2e4f934045aabc4caeeab249...

It's still painfully slow, and the WYSIWYG editing is very clunky.

The real time is not as real time as, say, Google Docs. There's a lot of lag.

Have you tried Athens Research? [0]

It is open source and everything is stored locally but not in markdown files. You can self-host the desktop app to share notes.

[0]: https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

I went to visit https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/ and got "Only browsers based on Chrome/Chromium are supported" on Firefox. Lol.

Wow, iOS Safari gets the same message. Interesting choice…

That doesn't seem designed for growing teams – for example, it doesn't seem to have comments.

They are still in beta currently, focusing on small teams right now so there is hope for comments.

yeah, likewise, I have been using markdown and folders of files for ages, started to use Obsidian and it provides a nice editor for that, and yes, it even has a vim mode!

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