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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I tried it a few times but had to stop because:

1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/...

2. I had to install tens of plugins to give Obsidian the features I needed, which felt too hacky and unstable in the long term.

3. I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?

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> Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring

This is my main worry about choosing Obsidian for the long run. The devs seem very opinionated about a system that is meant to be customizable to each user's workflow.

Their Vim implementation does not support setting hard line breaks, making modal editing a little funky (every paragraph is just one long line and any action working on a line will work on the entire paragraph, such as "dd").

Came from Vim-Wiki (and Org-mode and some other short-lived note-taking systems) and I think the plugin hell of Vim/Emacs (or VS Code) is much worse than Obsidian. You can get by without any addons in Obsidian as it's built to be a notetaking system first, not a general text editor. You can't do the same with Vim (hence needing "Vim-Wiki" plugin).

I've also noticed that Obsidian hides text automatically inside of <div> or other HTML elements if they contain the property "markdown='1'", thereby blocking you from writing perfectly valid HTML inside of a Markdown file which was designed to be HTML-compatible.

Is the markdown=1 attribute part of the HTML spec? I can't find any indication that it is.

Attributes dont need to be in the spec, if I add an attribute mycustomattr="xyz" and it changes how the document is rendered, that probably violates the HTML spec.

Yeah, I wasn’t super-thrilled with their response. OTOH, I eventually came back to using it, my (arguably justified) snit in that thread notwithstanding.

I kept trialing alternatives like VimWiki, Joplin and Logseq, but everything else is even quirkier. Org-mode is about the only thing that seemed really competitive, but since I’m not an emacs person there’s a big ramp there for me. Plus, as with most of the alternatives, that loses Markdown compatibility entirely.

Re learn new hotkeys, that’s actually not been a huge issue. Most of them simply aren’t mapped by default, which is its own pain. I did a lot of bouncing between VSCode hotkey lists and the Obsidian hotkeys UI to align shortcuts. At least they do enable you to remap most every UI action. I haven’t used the built-in vim bindings, but supposedly they also work fairly well, fwiw.

For now, Obsidian + Obsidian Tasks just does way too good a job for my work journaling for me to completely ignore. Plugins do work around most of the more questionable behavior, though it does sometimes make for an inconsistent experience.

Agree. I generally dislike relying on a bunch of third party plugins. Over time they don't get updated and you're left with a mess.

This, and also since they're not built by one team/dev, sometimes they don't play well with each other.

sounds like we need an opinionated supported remix version? Seems like there are a few folks here who would get involved…

> I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?

This is what I used to do with Vim, but I had two problems: (1) I would often forget to `git push`, (2) I wanted to easily access notes on my phone.

Importing into Obsidian and paying for Sync made both issues go away.

Could write your notes to a dir in your iCloud folder or equivalent; bind keys to the dir in netrw or whatever your choice of filetree explorer plugin

Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understand the passion for our tools!)

#3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.

In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments.

I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.

All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.

Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.

As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.

But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.

Since the time of that thread, the dev team has grown, and WhiteNoise has joined the team officially in charge of bugs. I don't know the full systems they use in the background.

But I think I can definitely see where some of the burden of sorting and cleaning things up (following bug templates, or avoiding duplicate feature requests, etc.) could be abstracted away from the users, so that even if they can't be guaranteed any followup, they at least don't get the experience of being instantly shot down, just because we're trying to organize a busy forum.

For example, I really like how Linear App takes feedback. They have a button in the app, with a simple text-field prompt, "What if...". All the sorting and prioritizing is invisible to the users, but then somehow they even send a courtesy email to users after a related change has been made. That might be a function of team size vs. userbase size. No idea.

Definitely some room to improve. I'll pass this conversation on to the team, thanks.

For #2 could you share some of the plugins you needed?

Off the top of my head, things like "Paste URL into Text" (which VSCode Markdown supports out-of-the-box), an extension for being able to define shortcuts for heading 1, 2, etc., connecting to Zotero, converting links to Markdown before exporting PDF, exporting PDF using pandoc templates, "Zoom" in sections while hiding the other sections (it was a neat extension), etc.

What were the features that you needed from Obsidian?

What note taking system do you recommend ?

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