Migrating from DokuWiki to Obsidian
kaeruct.github.io
kaeruct.github.io
By making a great product, they attract users. Usually the main argument against software like this is vendor lock-in. But by using open formats, there's always an escape hatch. If they decided to squeeze their users, I suspect a decent open source alternative would pop up very quickly. In the meantime, casual open source alternatives are very unlikely to catch up in terms of quality and features, because they don't have a funded team working on them full time.
On the flipside, Obsidian is incentivized to keep their customers happy, because their moat isn't so large as to allow complete complacency.
Overall some of the best aligned incentives I've seen. Though it does make me sad because I feel like we almost never see this good of balance in open source software.
Apart from no lock-in, another benefit of the open format model is that you can complement it with other tools. Since their code editor is not that great, I just open the vault folder in Vim/VSCode when it becomes cumbersome.
I think at this point, it's more about people not making unhappy. Development is already slowing down and focusing on fixing bugs, and the community seems to have shrunk to specific areas of interest. Which is kind of a problem IMHO, because we've already seen many add-ons becoming unusable and dying as a result of updates of the main-application.
Yes - because it's stable and powerful. So grateful they care about quality and are not becoming bloatware / chasing random features.
As for the plugin ecosystem, it was always inevitable that a significant portion of them wouldn't be well-maintained and wld become obsolete.
As an Obsidian early adopter and heavy daily user, I have only good things to say about the core software and the handful of high-quality community plugins that support every workflow and use case I desire.
Yes, but this is only good for the satisfied users. Users who wait for certain "promised" features, might slowly become unhappy over time. Other will simply not find what they need.
I guess a bit of the problem is that Obsidian exploded in interests far beyond what the devs imaged, and now they are left with multiple different groups which are all not maintained equal well.
> As for the plugin ecosystem, it was always inevitable that a significant portion of them wouldn't be well-maintained and wld become obsolete.
Then remove them. It's not good if you offer the users add-ons which are not even working anymore.
To write Markdown in DokuWiki, the "DokuWiki Commonmark Plugin" [0] is pretty great.
To use it, tips are:
- REQUIRED: On the top line of each page, put `<!DOCTYPE markdown>` (using the new toolbar button or typing it in). So that Dokuwiki knows the page is in markdown.
- STRONGLY SUGGESTED: In the Dokuwiki Config, set the `maxseclevel` to 0. Since the Commonmark markdown plugin currently unfortunately sort of messes up edit-section.)
That's basically it. Makes the Dokuwiki files that much more immediately-portable, in theory.
One of my biggest complaints though is Obsidian's tab management. Notes are always opened in whatever tab I am currently in, even if the note is already open in another tab. I know that I can just hold shift or ctrl to do a new tab but I forget to do that all the time and would just love a toggle to always open notes in a new tab, or swap to an existing tab that note is already open in.
The default quick switcher I feel is also very bare bones. I can't search by tags for example.
I would also love it if obsidian had native markdown table support similar to how the advanced tables plugin works. I know I can just use that plugin but it does not work in live preview edit mode which is what I prefer to use. I don't know if that's an Obsidian issue or a plugin issue.
I'd also like to see tree style tabs or just vertical tabs in general similar to vscode's open editors feature. I tend of have many tabs open and am constantly switching around.
Overall though maybe I'm just using Obsidian wrong or its just not for me, but out of all the note taking apps/markdown editors I've used, Obsidian is the closest to perfect that I've seen.
EDIT: I should add as well, I do appreciate that Obsidian allows for plugins and custom CSS. I'd rather be able to change the things that I don't like rather than be locked into the default functionality. However with some of these plugins being implemented in "hacky" ways as their description says while also not being updated in quite some time, I do wonder how much longer they will continue to work before an update breaks them permanently.
Not sure it would work for me, as a lot of time I have a random idea I don't want to lose while I'm not at my computer. And while I know it's just markdown and thus any text editor could open them on my phone, I do enjoy having something like Obsidian which works well on my phone and syncs files over git.
And since we have a WordPress site, Dokuwiki is about a 30-second installation away.
Looking into the project governance/maintenance it looks sturdy- while seemingly one person does a lot of the work, there's a community there. It appears to me, a newcomer, like a project that could last a very long time while being boring and doing exactly what it needs to, no more and no less.
As for the subject of the post itself; for a single person personal wiki, I'd also use Obsidian. I love that I can sync it to my phone with Syncthing, which is a mild pain but free!
It's nice to be able to have it publicly available and accessible from any internet connection.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
If they're going to maliciously break my workflow, then who needs 'em?
So I've switched to Obsidian, although I'm finding it a little clunky and I've also been playing Zoot.
I used to use DokuWiki about 15 years ago (~2008) to document the IT systems at a biomedical informatics department.
Dokuwiki seems like overkill for a single user.
Firefox on android, no dark mode.
Chrome.