What is it?
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Obsidian is a free* notetaking tool similar to one note and such. It uses markdown for formatting and offers good extension support.
I've used it for free for about a year and I'm pretty happy with it.
*Some services are offered only for paid users, I think it's only online storage /sync but I'm not sure.
I've been trying it out for a few weeks and as far as I can tell you're correct. But it's also important to note that while you have to pay for the cloud services you can use your own just fine like drive or Dropbox.
Like the others were saying it's a note taking tool, it stores notes in a markdown format so you can better own your notes because it's not stored in some weird format and is just plain text.
It has a few extra features primarily from its community plugins but there's also the graph view and more recently added, the canvas/whiteboard view. Where the former provides a graph of how your notes connect when you inter-link them like your own personal wiki; and the latter aims to provide a 2D visual board to put notes, links, and other content and connect them.
Also like the others said backup/sync is a paid feature, but there are a few quite simple ways to sync with free services such as Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, or Syncthing (device to device sync)
Obsidian needs to improve how it handles resource files (images, etc). There are plugins that improve the situation, but they’re not reliable. With a notebook with hundreds of notes with most containing images, sometime tens of images, move the notes around to different folders and soon you have a big mess. Images in the resource folder that aren’t connected to any notes.
They're doing WYSIWYG tables but still show bold and italics as markdown, are you fucking kidding me?
I love this app so much but I just don't need it for anything. I open it to have a look at plugins then close it after realising I don't need to make any notes.
I wish I knew what to use it for. :(