I've tried Obsidian and it is not for me. I really don't like the trend of apps being in Electron and there are much better native apps, especially on macOS (Bear, IA Writer, Ulysses).
Trying to understand - what is the feature that Obsidian got you hooked? Usually HN is very critical of Electron apps, but not on this one and I'm really interested why. :)
You're listing standard note taking tools, and I've also mainly been using Bear so far.
But when I have a lot of notes regarding a topic I start creating a lot of sections in a note, sometimes multiple notes, which are hard to navigate from one to another, etc.
So Obsidian for me shines when I have a topic or area when I need to have a lot of nodes, which are in some ways related to one another. Or even have a hierarchical structure.
My use case currently is developing OctoSQL as a side project and having to keep:
1. TODOs
2. Random non-categorized notes
3. Ideas
4. Notes specific to some in-progress features, so i.e. a note for optimizer strategies, a note-per-datasource describing the current state and todo's related to a datasource.
And some of those are best represented as a tree hierarchy, so I can start representing that using references in Obsidian, and easily navigate them using the graph view.
Bear is too disorganized for me to do that sustainably (most notes get forgotten and re-discovered a few weeks/months later).
For me: cross platform (the power of the app on iPad as well as Android is pretty amazing).
Custom templates: being able to run a CLI command and pull those. data directly into a note is glorious
Other thoughts:
- Easy refactoring
- My own cloud storage (syncthing and synology)
- Plugins
- Workspaces
The internal linking between docs is the best implementation I've ever seen.
I also like that it's just markdown under the hood.
It's not perfect. Multiple vaults can be clunky and if I want to share a vault with someone it's going to get complicated, but it's pretty slick at what it does.
You may not have noticed, but there’s a lot less criticism of electron these days. I think it’s gotten sufficiently performant that most people don’t care anymore.
Trying to understand - what is the feature that Obsidian got you hooked? Usually HN is very critical of Electron apps, but not on this one and I'm really interested why. :)