- All content stored as flat files on your hard drive.
- Organised by correctly named folders.
- Can embed images. Will link or autocopy them to the appropriate folders.
- Is great if you like markdown.
- Dark theme.
Honorable mentions:
- Infinite tab indentation synced in google docs, in google drive, since I already pay for google anyway.
- todo.txt
I'll echo others here; Obsidian is an amazing tool. For those who are curious about Obsidian, I recently created a YouTube video series for my graduate students titled "Tools for the Life of the Mind." [0] It covers some philosophical points about flow and focus, then dives into reading and note-taking and then covers a few tools like Evernote, Scrivener, Zotero, and Obsidian. Video 13 covers a workflow for migrating Zotero highlights and notes into Obsidian, which I found buried in the Obsidian forums. Completing this missing link has been a game-changer for my research workflow.
I'm with you here. I've recently discovered Obsidian, and have been really enjoying using it. It's probably been the tool that most matched my mental model (for me that was "personal wiki") of note taking and thought processing before I started that has also been easy enough to stick with.
I feel like it should be easy to make Obsidian the content editor for a static site generator like Hugo, but I haven't found a tool for that yet. (Maybe it's so obvious that one isn't needed, but I'm not a dev, just a normie)
I did this recently to start creating a public (but unlisted) developer log, à la Carmack .plan.
Obsidian has a community GitHub backup plugin, but you can also just manually push to a repo whenever you want to update the site. Then you can use that repo as a proto-CMS, and pull it in with, say, NextJS to create a static site. Anything with built in CI (Vercel, Netlify, GH Actions) should be able to detect the change to the CMS repo and rebuild your static site. Both steps are quite easy (took me under 10 minutes total).
That said, if you don’t need special control over your content/presentation, then you could alternatively just pay Obsidian $8 a month for their Publish feature.
Assuming you’re talking about notion: collaboration+sharing is what brings the real value to these tools. Enterprise is where the money is and they’re not going to pay for a wiki+project management tool without those two features.
For the last little while, I converged on a local optimum in note taking: writing Markdown files with VS Code. VS Code (with the Markdown Preview plugin) lets me type math equations in LaTeX and draw block diagrams using Mermaid notation.
Turns out Obsidian supports Mermaid and LaTeX in Markdown too. And it runs on desktop and mobile devices. And has an elegant folder-based interface.
I’ve struggled with other second brain tools, but Markdown files with LaTeX and Mermaid support somehow just fit the way I think and work —- that is, I like writing lots of prose but still have the occasional need to draw diagrams and to write math, and have the doc transform into something that is aesthetically pleasing.
Started using Obsidian last week. It's so easy and works how ever you want it to. Roam Research is nice, but it's geared toward a specific way of writing.
Also, the Syncing across devices they provide for $4/m right now is a steal and very effortless.
Of course you can take backups using Git, very easy.
I had used Obsidian - when it was all local file - for a while and switched to Roam because I could use it across my devices; going to try out Obsidian again because of the Syncing that's now available (and I was too lazy to get it set up with some stupid/janky rsync attempt on a box/drive folder).
Definitely liked Obsidian's ecosystem a lot more than Roam's so I'm excited to give it another shot now that my one missing - but needed - feature is now available.
I used to work with the Zettelkasten Archive and vim, but I think I'll switch to Obsidian. The graph and link autocompletion are the main selling points for me compared to my current setup.
I maintain a small open-source script[^1] to find clusters and orphaned notes in a Zettelkasten, and I find it's a good addition to groom my notes from the terminal.
I've been using TheBrain for about 5 years & am mostly happy with it. It is a bit pricey though! The unique visual is an almost most for me. I'm willing to try Obsidian, but I think I'd need TheBrain's unique visual to make it work for me.
Try readwise with the plugin.
You can annotate using Hypothesi.is on the desktop. Command Browser on iPad has direct sync with Readwise.
Then import your notes in Obsidian. I am not sure about the mobile
Lots of good tools out there, but Obsidian is the one I've settled on, for better or worse. I use the $48/year sync service. It does a perfect job syncing my files on my Linux desktop and laptop, my Chromebook, and my phone. Turns out Linux ARM (for my Chromebook) isn't as well supported by various apps as I expected, but their build is available and works perfectly.
Login to recommend Obsidian, too.
After several months of usage, I even created a regex plugin to enable me to build knowledge database even faster :
https://github.com/No3371/obsidian-regex-pipeline
Zim is great too. In terms of functionality, it does a lot of the things Obsidian does, but it uses its own wiki syntax and it's not pretty by any means. Obsidian has been much more effective at building community and growing the ecosystem of plugins.
Edit: And one pretty annoying thing - it's built on old-school technology that doesn't even support setting the editor width. That's quite a problem in the era of widescreen monitors.
I forgot to add that logseq is open source, the file encryption feature is built-in (you can opt-in or opt-out) and all the documents are saved locally in md files.
Obsidian don't have encryption built-in, they do have the encryption via community plugin. But it is only partial (I believe per note), not the entire vault.
