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Comment by Vingdoloras | Hacker News Reader

Cool setup, but the choice of Obsidian is kind of weird in this context (in an interesting way, see next paragraph). Instead of opening a subfolder of the Hugo project in Obsidian, one could just open the entire thing in VSCode or a similar IDE, enjoy a good markdown editing experience, AND use git integration and the integrated terminal (and possibly set up automated tasks) to run your local testing and deployment workflows.

Note that Obsidian's markdown editing experience is _different_ from (but not necessarily better or worse than) what you'd get in a typical IDE. So while the choice seems weird to me, it absolutely makes sense if the author prefers the feature set that Obsidian offers. Being supported by so many different editors is one of markdown's strengths, after all, and this kind of editor-portability fits right in with the other parts of "Fully Owned" from the blog post.

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I mean, Obsidian is just a markdown editor. You could keep an identical publishing setup and use any text editor on the planet :P

But I honestly despise writing raw markdown in an IDE. If I'm writing (not coding), I need it to be somewhat visual, which means I want WYSIWYG -- and Obsidian is an excellent markdown editor, even if you don't use the other features.

My reasons for not liking writing "raw" markdown:

- Long links take up too much space. I put it in text so it'd be hidden

- No syntax highlighting in code blocks

- Text wrapping/font is typically not configured for easy reading of text

- A ton of markdown features are for visual formatting. Highlighting, bold, underline, strike-through, inline code, etc. If you stay in raw IDE no-preview, you never get the visual benefits.

- When I'm using markdown, I'm often mostly reading, and doing some writing, but even when I'm writing, I'm re-reading what I wrote constantly. It's annoying to switch to preview mode. Writing mode in IDEs isn't a pleasant reading experience unless you do a lot of configuration. (depending on the IDE of course)

I mean, writing raw md is fine for tiny little things. But because reading & writing are so linked, I don't like separate modes for each. I want to write in the visual mode I read in.

I find it annoying that I can get stuck in a mode when I am editing and the app is trying to render at the same time (e.g. I write some backticks to make a code block and Obsidian tries to be smart and add the second set and it encapsulates a bunch of lines I don't want it to) but to each their own I suppose. Vscode for what its worth has a preview that you can keep open side by side to see the visuals as you edit.

> If I'm writing (not coding), I need it to be somewhat visual, which means I want WYSIWYG

<cough> You didn't grow up with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS with reveal codes on, did you? :)

Holy cow! 10 year old me learned word processing first with wordperfect. I looked for reveal codes in other processors for years after that and was always disappointed when I couldn't find it.

Young me was like "how can you edit a document if you can't see the codes?!" Still to this day I wish I had it in word processors.

Another benefit of using an IDE like VSCode for writing and publishing your blog is you can use the copilot AI to fill in the front matter details for you, easily add a table of contents, or add a cohesive structure of subsections. Don't forget the shift + CMD + v command to see see a preview within VSCode.

Hugo is a great choice for an SSG, I find it logical and intuitive. As for extending it with a CMS front end, I looked at Decapcms.org - formerly Netlify CMS - it gives you the WYSIWYG editor and you can hook it up to an asset management platform like Cloudinary for images.

BTW just checked Cloudinary pricing - generous free tier looks like plenty for most blogs.

This is what I do, mostly. I try not to rely on Obsidian for anything but drafts (just because it’s convenient and less distracting than VS Code).

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