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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

I started doing this for a while but quickly switched to Obsidian. Obviously it doesn't have the same features but it serves the same purpose for me at least. The data format is much simpler and portable too, I just store the vault in iCloud and sync it to my phone.

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I similarly moved from Notion to Joplin. My data, my server etc. For me the move was triggered by Notion being very slow, but later on, with the amounts of data I had in Notion, I started to worry about privacy etc as well.

I am in the process of moving to obsidian from Joplin. I like Joplin but the screen real estate is a bit much on smaller screens.

I just wish obsidian was better at lists, especially on the mobile client. It's really painful moving things around tab levels, reordering items, etc. I can't even manage a grocery list without it devolving into complete chaos and broken markdown. There are extensions that help but extensions on mobile are really bad (just an enormous toolbar to scroll through, no real UI... the whole mobile app feels designed to be used with a keyboard which defeats the point of mobile).

Since Notion is just plain text files, it would be lovely if someone could produce a better app for mobile that could work with those files.

It could be a fraction of the features, like just text editing and good lists, and you could always switch to editing markdown if you needed to.

s/notion/obsidian

In my experience lists are great but for reordering which can be awkward. Even there, there ought to be a plugin that makes reordering easier.

Have you checked out the mobile toolbar? It makes indent/unindenting list items easy.

Yeah the toolbar badly needs context awareness. If my cursor is on a list item then show me the list actions right there, not a global fixed list of things that never changes and almost never has what I need at the right moment.

Obsidian is great. My notetaking solutions went from

- raw text files

- raw markdown files

- + homemade server rendering the markdown live

- Obsidian

- Notion

I stick with Notion because it really is infinitely configurable. I rarely use 99% of the plugins but I have, in the past, used their API to populate the show the results of my experiments straight from my Python code to a Notion Table. Super convenient. I take regular (every six months or so) hard exports that I save to disk in case the company goes belly up tomorrow. I'm comfortable with it.

did the same but missed tasks and integrations so started working on https://acreom.com during covid. It's dev centric and data ownership focused, would love to get feedback.

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