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Comment by cube2222 | Hacker News Reader

I recently dived more into obsidian (coming from Bear) and I must say I really like it so far.

I'm not using the personal knowledge management bit too much yet, but as a note taking app it's great.

Moreover, the plugin ecosystem (which I've just started exploring) is excellent!

I.e. there's a plugin for downloading highlights from your Kindle books, which also creates referencable refs for each highlight and lets you easily embed them in other notes. Cool stuff.

It's also impressive that most plugins work on the mobile app too.

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My one gripe – and it's a big one – about Obsidian is that it just does not give one whit about trying to integrate with macOS. It feels like an Electron app that the developers just checked the "macOS" checkbox on; like I'm stepping into the captain's chair of a capable but ugly tugboat when I Cmd-Tab over. (Which is a shame, because it is a capable boat.)

Basic hotkeys are modal, somehow (Open Help from sidebar. Try to use Cmd-W to close). No interface tabbing support (this app is likely an a11y fire). No proxy icons. The menu bar is supremely basic – and they don't capitalize their own app's name ("About obsidian"). The command palette calls Finder the "system explorer." Somehow no print support, anywhere. Custom context menus abound.

Best one: close the main Obsidian window on macOS and try to figure out how to reopen it. (Reopening the app is one... there's one other way!)

Apple makes it difficult to develop apps from another platform (unique low level libraries like Metal, requiring a Mac for publishing). I think one result of this is that cross-platform app authors who aren't ALSO primarily MacOS users just kind of throw their code over the fence and hope it works. I can't blame them.

>My one gripe – and it's a big one – about Obsidian is that it just does not give one whit about trying to integrate with macOS.

This might get better soon.

@kepano, the developer of Minimal, is working on a new "default theme" for Obsidian. He said it "will follow many of the same design principles as Minimal, particularly in making Obsidian feel native across platforms. It will differ in that it will prioritize accessibility and affordances more than Minimal does. In addition the new default theme will make customization and theme development easier than before."

This is wonderful news to hear. Minimal is a fantastic theme once configured with it’s plugin.

The OS style theme options really do wonders for making it feel more native on macOS. It’s especially nice with dark mode enabled

Be sure to also check out the Prism theme, i personally prefer it over Minimal;

Light: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damiankorcz/Prism-Theme/ma...

Dark: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damiankorcz/Prism-Theme/ma...

Repo: https://github.com/damiankorcz/Prism-Theme

Not sure how much a theme will address this stuff, but I am glad people are paying attention.

I like Obsidian, but yea, there are some fundamental weirdnesses as a result of it basically being a web app. It'll never feel all that native.

For me though, much of the real issue is the iOS app. I feel like it needs some big modifications to how it operates in order to make quickly doing particular things a lot easier.

When I'm on my phone, the biggest thing for me is I need to take a quick note. I'd love to just open Obsidian, click a button to let me put a note in an inbox, then when I'm on my Mac I can sort the inbox like I would a task manager. I don't generally do deep work on my phone, I only really perform reference and quick notes type actions.

There is a guide for "macOS integration"

https://minimal.guide/Guides/macOS+configuration

As mentioned elsewhere, solves none of my list. This mostly moves stuff around and hides certain UI elements.

Use the Minimal theme, and apply the settings tweaks per https://minimal.guide

Feels pretty macOS-like to me.

This looks nice and solves none of the problems I listed. Frameless mode is, if anything, less native

Most of these issues are being addressed in Obsidian 0.16 :)

Is there somewhere one can view that work? I have to admit I'm skeptical, because most of the parent comment's complaints are pretty fundamental to how the app is built.

But I share their gripes, and it's similarly important to me. And I'm currently trying to choose a tool in this category to adopt.

Release notes can be found on the Obsidian forum[0]. Roadmap is on Trello[1]. You can also learn more via the official Obsidian Discord group.

The app will continue to be developed with Electron, however Electron does provide APIs for things like native menus. Making Obsidian feel native is a high priority currently.

The latest public release (v0.15) contained several improvements towards that goal: multiple window support, native fonts, native scrollbars, native app menus.

Currently in progress is a new default theme I am working on. I previously made Minimal[2] as a community theme, which was designed around the goal of making Obsidian feel native on macOS.

[0] https://forum.obsidian.md/c/announcements/13

[1] https://trello.com/b/Psqfqp7I/obsidian-roadmap

[2] https://minimal.guide

Awesome, thanks for sharing and thanks for your work!

Wow, didn't know about the Kindle plugin--cool!

Obsidian has really been a life changer for me, mostly due to Anki integration, and live mode with its support of mathjax which makes everything look so neat.

I've tried Dendron before: it's really cool, but the lack of live mode and the messiness of the notes (i.e. lack of clear hierarchy makes my head spin when navigating notes, though it's a feature not a bug for certain usecases) makes it so unappealing to me. But then again, I used it as a solely note taking app, as opposed to knowledge manager.

I've been paying for readwise plugin. I am able sync highlights from orielly books, pocket, web, kindle. It has a whole host of other options too.

https://readwise.io/welcome/sync

Also, forgot to mention, the excalidraw plugin is absolute magic, and works great with an iPad.

TLDR: You can embed excalidraw drawings/diagrams in your notes and edit them there. Moreover, inside of the excalidraw diagram you can use markdown and arbitrary obsidian references, so it composes both ways.

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