Just had a look at it. It's ok but there are some serious limitations in comparison to Obsidian which would make it unsatisfactory for me:
- No command palette
- No block inclusion
- Notes appear to be stored in databases rather than just as markdown notes on the file system. Backup of markdown notes seems to create a flat group of folders with randomly generated file names.
I'm confused as to why you find Obsidian not matching most those criteria. I heard about it here last week, and just installed it finally tonight, but as I understand it. It's just a bunch of markdown files in a folder on the local disk. That seems.pretty easy to access/convert, is private, is lightweight, and is future proof (I could write something in Perl to generate the graph in a night most likely).
I don't know anything about the others, since I haven't really used a note system before, so I can't comment on them. Your system seems to violate a few of your stated concerns though (is it cross compatible?), so I'm confused as to why you find it better.
The deal breaker with obsidian for me is that it is not opensource. It's great that it's at least using a markdown derivative format.
I am using Emacs Org Mode and quite happy with it. You can link different files, include images, embed and view LaTeX, encrypt your notes with GPG and much more. I think it will stand the test of time better than Obsidian which is something I care a lot for note taking and journaling.
I use Obsidian for quite a few things, but I view Obsidian and Evernote as different apps functionally.
I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient.
For text-only notes Obsidian is great. For web clips, emailing notes in, multimedia, I just find EN much easier than trying to jam everything into a text editor.
Fwiw (maybe not much :-)), for me the the killer feature of obsidian is the combination of markdown + inline image rendering + local storage. My notes are typically screenshots + text. Being able to drag and drop a screenshot into a note is primarily why I use obsidian.
I've moved from Evernote to Obsidian this year and like it so far. It reminds me of code editors, it was clearly inspired by them.
The markdown notes and attachments are just plain files on my disk, they can be backed up and synced across devices. On Windows and iOS the iCloud sync works well. The notes are available offline on my phone which is a must-have feature.
I don't use many plugins, but it's great that the app is extendable like that. I've written a small syllable counter plugin myself and it was pretty easy to find my way around. Unfortunately the official docs are... lacking, so poking around other people's code was the best way to see what's what.
For Mac - I use Noteplan. Obsidian has some amazing feature but it is soo complicated. I find Noteplan has a more simple user interface and most of the features. They can work together because they both use local markdown files.
I've tried quite a few notes apps, Standard Notes is the one I always end up going back to. Obsidian is a solid choice though. The main issue I have is that notes apps always try to grow into full-on documentation or collaboration platforms. That's not only unnecessary, but it always over-complicates the most basic operations which is what you do most of the time.
Some of the time, I am tempted to go back to my original system which was just a local git repo full of Markdown files and opening the folder in Atom / VS Code.
The main reason I use Standard Notes at all is the encrypted backups to email and sync across devices. I don't think there's much more functionality required other than a decent Markdown editor for note-taking.
I've tried to use Obsidian three different times, and I always end up going back to Standard Notes. I love Markdown, I love note-taking with Markdown, but I really just want something that's clean, simple, and fairly basic. I'm very fluent in Markdown and am not trying to do something crazy to munge into a Markdown representation, and I also don't want to deal with a complex plugin architecture to get things done.
Before I used Standard Notes, I was mostly satisfied with a private Github repo, containing Markdown files and NeoVim.
I just shifted from Logseq to Obsidian over the last couple of weeks. One of my reasons for doing so is that while Logseq does technically store your notes as local markdown files, there's so much added on top of that, that I can't really open my notes folder in Typora/[markdown editor of choice] and have a smooth experience reading my notes. The underlying format might be open, but there was still lock-in. Obsidian seems much better for that - there'll always be a tradeoff between features and portability, but I do prefer Obsidian's balance.
I use Obsidian pretty regularly. I started in earnest about 6 months ago, and I've been really enjoying it.
I like it because it's a wrapper around a folder of markdown files. I really my notes being just a folder of markdown files, so that's the selling point of Obsidian to me. I can open my notes in VSCode just as well as Obsidian, if I'm editing. Obsidian gives me some nice functionality (backlinks, hotkeys for different notes formats mostly, and just being a separate application from VSCode), but it could disappear tomorrow and VSCode would take over as my notes.
I setup a cron job to `git add .`, `git commit`, and `git push` every day, so I have my notes in a github repo that I can pull down if I ever need to switch devices. Or if I just want to look at my notes from a device, I can just browse the Github repo.
I use it for two different things:
- a daily log of my work for the day, including notes of what I did, and where each branch left off. All of my "four little things to finish this jira ticket" end up in the daily log.
- notes on various personal projects. For example, if I am looking for a contractor to prune a tree I create a note for that. I put in all the contractors I'm contacting, their bids, etc, into the note.
> The thing is with your brain, you don't actively spend time searching and traversing your "notes" consciously. Generally your mind brings things to be recalled just as you need it.
Maybe your mind does! My mind will often come back with: "there were _definitely_ 5 little todos that you needed to do to finish the branch, and I have 3 of them here ready for you. Maybe do a `git diff` to try and remember the other 2?", or "Hey, I was looking for a contractor to prune the tree. I called three of them, I think. Maybe four. Who knows. A couple sent in bids, but I don't remember which ones. Let's check gmail and see if we can find any there?".
So, personally my use of notes isn't to stop my brain trying to _come up_ with a task to complete. My notes are basically an index for when I want to resolve a task, to all the information I need to pick it up again. Or, alternatively viewed, it's the context when I put a task down, to help resume the task when I context switch back to it.
Tried Obsidian for a while, loved a lot about it, but....mmm.
Obsidian out of the box is a bit limited; plugins are great and add tons of features, but then you start hitting issues with plugin maintainers abandoning plugins you rely on, or needing to make a decision between three different plugins that all do the same thing slightly different. Depending on your use case and expectations that may not be a big deal, but I really missed not having what I personally saw as core features not being officially supported.
(Also, FWIW, the sync service is a bit pricy for what it is. I get that it's how they're trying to monetise it, but...I would have preferred another pricing model, even if the total cost was just as high.)
I've personally switched to Trilium Notes which I'm finding nicer. One element I particularly like is that it has first class suport for notes being able to exist at multiple places in a tree simultaneously. I know it's a very personal thing, but for me personally being able to file notes in multiple locations "clicks" in a way that tags didn't.
I use obsidian right now. I do enjoy the convenience of markdown files, do you have any specific use case where the graph DB would be superior to them? Would it stop scaling at very large notes? Furthermore, the biggest painpoint for me is sync and cross-platform support. I have to use dayone, a journal app on iOS, because the experience (of actually writing thoughts) of any other app is just too inconvenient for rigorous daily usage.
I think it depends on what you use notes for. Just a scratchpad of random, mostly ephemeral ideas or simple folders? Notes is probably good enough.
Obsidian is designed for those people that want to minmax their note taking and find reasons to increase productivity by providing robust linking and search capabilities within any document. The photos in the OP are a good example of how many people use Obsidian.
That said, I'm not an expert (never used it personally), but that's how I understand it.
- No command palette
- No block inclusion
- Notes appear to be stored in databases rather than just as markdown notes on the file system. Backup of markdown notes seems to create a flat group of folders with randomly generated file names.
- No plugin/extension capability.
- No graph view
- No daily note template support
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