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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

I like to bring up my personal opinion and realization of owning an open format -- plain-text - content for your life-long textual contents.

I was once an Evernote user since its early days and a premium subscriber for many years. I have used many notetaking apps and bought enough of them – iA Writer, ByWord, Bear, SimpleNote, nvAlt fork of Notational Velocity, etc.

I have moved to a simpler notetaking and writing habit for my notes. I have chosen a simple plain-text life. The idea is to approach contents as data-first with tools on the top. I have grown to like the simple methods I use and the philosophies of managing the files and the directories/folders.

I wrote about it sometime back - https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/

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Have you tried Obsidian?

3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this: https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792

Key quote:

"These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last."

Seems to align with your philosophy

I replied to him with with my idea and article https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/1675905574624702465

From the article, “Right now, I use Obsidian to manage my notes. The beauty of this setup is that I can change tools anytime, while my notes remain free of any dependency.”

I tried obsidian but didn’t feel it was much better than opening a folder in VSCode, and as I am already used to VSCode, that is easier for me.

Same. Have you tried https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ ? It does some of the things Obsidian does, but is a VS Code Plugin. I really like that combination.

The tagging features and the ability to just paste a picture in a markdown file are the things that bring me back to Obsidian instead of VSCode

Have you tried https://www.dendron.so/ ? I think that was aiming to be a knowledgebase in vscode

Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

Notion provides more features, incl. publishing and syncing plus the kitchen sink and its factory, yet it doesn't have offline access.

For sync + publish, I have to pay 1.5x what Dropbox wants for 2TB of storage, or what Trello wants for a year, etc.

It makes no sense, at least for me.

BTW, Evernote's .enex format is just well-defined XML. You can parse and convert it into anything you want. It's a modest superset of Markdown.

>Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

You can sync for free using Syncthing or OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox free accounts.

Thanks! Does that work with the mobile app, too?

Yes, it does.

On ios you can only do icloud though

I tried using iCloud to sync for a year and went back to Obsidian Sync. I’m not sure exactly what the culprit was, but frequently, I would find my ToDo note (which was used the most) would be stuck and fail to sync for days. Rebooting the stick machine would clear the issue. I was using two Macs and my iPhone at the time.

For me it's fixed by rebooting my mac actually. Had that yesterday for the first time. You can check who's not syncing by checking the "Files" app.

because it uses icloud drive. and that syncs poorly and on its own schedule. it would sometimes take a day or so to get a file from my mac studio to my macbook. it is crazy how bad icloud is.

my wife and I share stuff within icloud and we both HATE IT SO MUCH. It's truly mind boggling how bad it is, and continues to be, in 2023. Photos sometimes sync, sometimes they don't. Cool. Sometimes rebooting the phone makes them sync, other times not. Awesome. Sometimes shared notes get updated, other times they don't. Sometimes shared note invitations just never arrive at all, for no discernible reason. Sweet. It took us 4 attempts to do a shared Home app invitation. The first 3 times it just never showed up.

We HATE HATE HATE icloud so much but our only other option is to switch everything to Android and I hate Google more than I hate Apple, so ....... we just stick with icloud and its absolute shittiness.

Switch to Microsoft? OneNote's entire file format is built to enable live collaboration. Their apps may be a bit clunky but they work.

It blows my mind that Apple can tell you how you're allowed to copy your plain text files from one of your computers to another one of your computers. If you look at the behavior sans the branding, it would not be hard to label it malware.

not sure we have the same definition of 'malware'. the problem isn't copying/syncing the file from one computer to another, that works just fine. but obsidian can't read outside its own app folder IIRC.

i sync files with dropbox to my ios devices all the time.

I define "malware" to mean software that intentionally subverts the desires of the owner of the computer (unintentional subversion is a bug or a miscommunication).

Apple arbitrarily restricts you from using your applications (obsidian) to read and write your data in a way that you can sync, to no fault of its own, your own, or the syncing service.

I strongly encourage you to try associating this kind of behavior with an unfamiliar organization as a mental exercise. How would you feel about that? Someone else restricting your access to your computer such that you cannot use your applications how you want, through no technical fault of their own? I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.

It’s not like it’s a dark pattern, hidden under multiple layers of disinformation and redirection. Apps have always been siloed on iOS and it has even got better as some apps can break out of the container model (PDF Viewer is a prime example). I bought an iPhone and an iPad knowing that. If it ever bugs me, I switch to Android (which, BTW, is moving to the container model). Which means Obsidian could have requested permissions for the folder to be placed somewhere else (Textastic can access random folders on the filesystem).

Even though my phone and my tablet is capable of being a general purpose device, it was not the reason I bought them. They have a specific purpose and they are filling it well. I wouldn’t buy a microwave and complain I can’t make cakes with it.

Apple is upfront about it and I knew what I was getting (and not getting). To be honest, i can barely ever use any of my software the way i want it.

Obsidian's sync service for example has dark patterns and is a lot closer to your definition of malware as they are hiding how their sync works (versioning, bugs they know but don't advertise, merge conflicts that destroys data etc).

> I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.

No. But I also don't know what "fix" means in this context? Not use Obsidian? As using Android is not an option.

Apple may be upfront, but a couple of years ago they pretty much suddenly destroyed Progressive Web Apps by disallowing a whole bunch of modern, open standard browser capabilities, all in the name of preventing tracking.

A lot of developers were just crushed by that. Imagine having hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing an app when Apple just destroys the ability to do it.

When a big corporation has monopoly power (and Apple is very close to that - only one equally evil competitor in mobile space), they do bad things, often thinking they are doing good.

[caveat - there is so far an unofficial way to get around their "we will blow away your saved browser data" that was discussed by one of the webkit developers on the webkit blog. But since it isn't an official Apple doc - do we trust it?]

I was one developer who was burned. I was developing, as a volunteer, a web app for a very large volunteer organization. Boom... now it may not be possible, or if I use the work-around, it may be possible until it suddenly changes.

You seem to be ignoring the whole voluntary aspect of using Apple devices. Are you being forced to using iOS at gun point? Up vote once for yes, twice for no.

There's a plugin that resolves this (https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save) and you can also use pre-launch shortcuts using WorkingCopy if you want to sync via git.

> Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

In the two years I've used Notesnook, my biggest issue is the slow syncing between devices: A change I make on the mobile app takes minutes to update on the desktop app, whereas a similar change on the Obsidian mobile app is nearly instantaneous. Additionally, Notesnook doesn't allow external editors, like vim or emacs, to edit files. Sure, you can extort files to Markdown, but those do not get synced anywhere. Obsidian gives a user the flexibility by editing files directly without the app.

Since when twitter allows posting 2172 character long message? Apparently char limit is now 25k for subscribers...

I am having a better experience using plain text over a mosh connection than using apps that sync files over the network.

The logic is that if I have internet connection available to sync, then I can also connect to my computer and use a tmux session with vim to edit my plain text notes. If I use the same tmux session in all devices, then the notes are always in sync.

I’ve been using the same OneNote notebook for 20 years. It automatically syncs across all my mobile devices, the web and desktop. It supports all kinds of rich text and images.

It’s way simpler than setting up manual backup and syncing of a tons of text file.

Write-up of a similar system. http://songseed.org/post/20120101.aa.saga.html

Sticking to plain text is like living in a cave - possible, but unpleasant. Why would you remove all the formatting and integration niceties of modern tech?

> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.

So what? Every relevant device can also read and write a bunch of more useful formats

I absolutely love plain text notes. Maybe you could understand that just because you think something is unpleasant and ancient, the rest of the entire human race might not agree? Shocking I know.

I can't stand any formatting whatsoever on my notes. I love plain text because it stays exactly as that: plain text. I don't want my dashes to be turned into spacers, I don't want my asterisks to be turned into lists, etc...

Not as shocking as you trying to speak for the whole human race, which evolved past no formatting while still living in the caves

TBC, those examples are from markdown, which is orthogonal to the plain <> styled text axis.

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