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Comment by JSavageOne | Hacker News Reader

What is it that people love about Obsidian? (not trying to throw shade, genuine question as I never understood the hype)

Obsidian is not able to open a local folder on my machine stored in Windows Subsystem for Linux, which for me makes it a non-starter (my personal knowledge base is stored there).

I personally prefer the Notion UI but hate being locked into their cloud, so I created an offline-first Notion alternative [1]. Offline mode is totally free (no user registration required), and aiming to add cloud syncing tomorrow or so. Still in active dev so needs a lot of work, but wondering whether others might find this useful. Goal is to make it be able to seamlessly sync across multiple data sources, and also easily to publish files/folders (eg. can currently turn folders into APIs when synced to cloud).

[1] https://mindgarden.app

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> What is it that people love about Obsidian?

When Obsidian launched, there was already a lot of hype building in the note-taking community around Zettelkasten and Roam Research. With Roam, basically any word in your note could immediately link to another note, and you could see backlinks in your notes prominently.

However, Roam was both expensive and online-only, so when Obsidian came out and it was: a) polished, b) provided most of the functionality of Roam, and c) was offline and plain-text (also unlike Notion), it was an immediate hit.

The other special feature Obsidian offered was easy and powerful customization. The major settings are actually core plugins that can be enabled or disabled (like daily journal, tagging, or slideshows). Plugins and themes are easily discovered and installed from inside the app, which has led to a vibrant and popular plugin community. All you need is one plugin to be indispensable for users to never leave.

For me, it's comments like this from the Obsidian CEO (from this very post):

> The nice thing about storing all your notes on your device is that it makes it possible to move and edit your Markdown files in many different ways. That diversity of solutions is what makes the ecosystem of Markdown tools resilient over the long term.

I had seen similar comments in the past, and it just made me like Obsidian even more.

I've been using Obsidian for a few months now and loving it, and I had been meaning to find a way to support them financially in their endeavors. They share the same values that I do about the longevity of my notes :) I just purchased a Catalyst license.

It's a bit subtle and I didn't get it for a long time either. But the features are great: I want the content available as portable simple text, I love the text representation for the extras like graphs and math, I love the offline apps. Look through the community plugins to see lots of other cool ideas. I started using it this year and I've not been that excited about basically a text editor in ages.

- it's simple

  - (it's also customizable so it doesn't _have_ to be, but I happen to like pretty much the default features)

- it's free if you don't need their sync

  - I just save my vault on an iCloud drive, which is convenient to me, and publish to the web with my own tool

- it allows me to keep my files where I want them

- it's available on every platform I use

- the UI is not distracting, and is Good Enough™

> What is it that people love about Obsidian? (not trying to throw shade, genuine question as I never understood the hype)

Tribalism.

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