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Comment by bryanhogan | Hacker News Reader

Obsidian is great and highly performant, even though it's using Electron. Electron is a huge advantage, faster development and the option to customise it easily with plugins.

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It's not highly performant, its startup time is a multiple of that of native apps. Nothing is easy about plugins, APIs you expose/maintain define that, not Electron, and those can be good/bad in any system. Electron gives easier access to UI styling, but then again, real "easily" comes from the structure/stability of your UI, otherwise your plugins would break all the time. Also, same as with APIs - e.g, Joplin is Electron, but you can only style on a desktop. Then, of course, there are plenty of Electron apps that you can't style at all and that don't support plugins.

I'm happy for devs' "faster development", but as a user I care about "faster use", which Electron blocks outright

Startup time in Obsidian could be better (we're working on it!), but performance is more than startup time. It's making interactions fast throughout the entire app. Obsidian is only three developers but we spend a lot of time shaving off milliseconds everywhere we can. Keystrokes, scrolling, querying, navigating large vaults, opening and parsing large Markdown files, etc.

In 2025 we made reduced startup time on mobile under 0.5s (used to be several seconds), made search nearly instantaneous and released Bases to make complex queries equally fast (much faster than Dataview and other pre-existing solutions).

I wrote a bunch more on this topic here:

https://x.com/kepano/status/2004008730720194759

Thank you for this work! I had tried Obsidian every year or so and the performance switching/opening notes drove me crazy in the past. I like it to feel instant and I'm more sensitive to UI performance than others. Just tried again, and it passes the threshold for me!

Obsidian just launched Obsidian CLI too, if that helps. And sync.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197267

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