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Comment by sn41 | Hacker News Reader

I'm an ardent Emacs user for the past 20+ years. But I am considering writing a book, and the "throw things in anyhow, get things back" facility of Obsidian is quite useful for catching disparate thoughts to later incorporate into a flow in the final text.. Of course there is a mode in Emacs supporting obsidian-like facility, but does not feel as convenient - autocomplete never quite works as smooth as it does in Obsidian. For now, I am very impressed with the simplicity of Obsidian's usage.

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Nothing is ever "as convenient" in emacs, and I say that as a fairly die-hard user of OrgMode.

I'm pretty curious about my ability to migrate to Obsidian and away from Org/emacs, mostly for reasons of polish. I'm not ever going to become a lisp hacker, but I ended up in Org because it was the ONLY thing I could find that allowed me to keep notes and to-dos intermingled, while giving me a great ability to pull out and collate those to-dos in a dynamic view.

Obsidian can do that, too.

I went with Logseq because it can be configured to use org-mode syntax in place of Markdown, and I’m really happy with it.

Same, and the plugin ecosystem is quite big too.

Obsidian is good, but emacs UX and power are on a whole other level if you invest in it. I recently integrated and extended a presentation mode for my org files. It allowed me to reuse all my emacs goodies when creating slides, and all the content is easily searchable and linkable. It is even a great UX when presenting; I could very easily jump between slides to show the relevant slides when questions came up. It’s exportable to beautiful HTML, too.

> Of course there is a mode in Emacs supporting obsidian-like facility

Do you mean org-roam ?

As a wildly alternative workflow for writing a book, have a look at Scrivener.

Scrivener is pretty impressive, but its Latex capabilities are not as good as those of other formats. I found indexing and bibliography lookup to be spotty. Another reason I found it lacking was when having labelled equations to be later referenced, Scrivener does not seem to have an autocomplete for this.

I am writing right now my PhD thesis with Scrivener, and it's perfect, except (!) reference management is not working. My workaround is to have everything in Zotero, and manually put in the references, hoping I can convert later, in a big dirty manual step.

Wrote a book (93k words) in Scrivener, so can confirm.

Could probably have done it in Obsidian too but didn’t know of it when I was starting. Also compiling features of Scrivener (format the text into industry-accepted formats) is nice

What Emacs mode might that be? And are there more reasons it falls short, besides the autocomplete?

There is a simple mode available on melpa, called obsidian. The issue with it which I am facing is that if you link using markdown in actual Obsidian, it is able to find the link in whichever subfolder of the vault the target is in. But this does not seem to work with the emacs mode. It searches only the top vault path - so creates a new file when the file actually already exists in some subfolder. Maybe it is something I am doing wrong, I will read the source code and figure out/change the code.

You can use vanilla org-mode with ID links. Or you can define a custom link type in org-mode, where the sky is the limit. Or you use org-roam V2.

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