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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

I really want to use Obsidian but it being closed source is a big No for me. I know I can keep all my files in plain text and move on to another platform buy the thing is: if a bunch of files and a FS were enough for me to keep my KB, then ofc I wouldn’t need something like Obsidian. The thing is I need something like Obsidian; a bunch of files lying around is not enough for me

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Technically, Obsidian is just a fancy 'browser/editor' for markdown files laying around. Should Obsidian disappear as a functional tool tomorrow, recreating the basic functionality (show, edit, manage links, follow links) would take a sufficiently motivated guy a few hours. If you need the 'petri dish' view, maybe a little longer. In such an event, I suppose enough people would be eager to build their own and OSS variants would emerge within days.

If you can stomach not working in Markdown, emacs' ORGmode exists and has all the functionality Obsidian has, and then some, open source, with a slightly different hypertext format.

Unless you are hellbent on one particular Obsidian plugin, you should be good.

That’s why Im not using Obsidian

One option to check out is VSCodium + FOAM plugin. When editing a folder of Markdown files, you can cross-link to them using Obsidian-style links.

Later, if you want to publish the files as HTML, you can use MkDocs.

What risk are you trying to avoid? You can disable updates.

Ideally I would like to stick to a single KB for the rest of my… life? So, the only option is going open source (either built by me or someone else). Imagine I start using Obsidian today and I love it. Updates keep coming and I love them. Two years from now they add something I hate, and from there more features that kill my workflow. What can I do? Sure I cn stick to the last version that worked for me but that means Im stuck with it “forever”. That’s not gonna work

To me the KB is the actual content and how it is laid out/its relations (which should be expressed in the filesystem or in plaintext). The client is more of a view/renderer. That feels like the right metaphor for my usage at least. I haven't updated for a quite long while, all my plugins still work correctly and I've had no trouble adding another one recently.

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