I'm starting to get Obsidian
I've been on a never ending quest to find a note taking and knowledge management app that fits my needs, and one people tend to talk about a lot is Obsidian. I have tried it briefly a few times, but it never really clicked with me at the time. Partially because I didn't have much to actually put in there, but also because it just seemed really daunting and overwhelming.
I decided to try Obsidian again because while I've been using Silverbullet, it doesn't really do all that I need it to. I was trying to map out the world map for Super Rocket Bytes, the game I'm working on, and while I could get the Silverbullet Excalidraw extension, it really doesn't integrate that well besides just creating diagrams and embedding them on pages. I want the ability to place notes around a drawn diagram similar to Milanote, but without the whole uhh.... Milanote... thing.
The first thing I tried was something called Thinker. It's effectively a combination of Tldraw, a simple rich text editor, and a kanban board with predefined boxes for "To Do," "In Progress," "Done," and "Backlog." The kanban feature is nice but I would prefer to designate my own columns. I also think I like the idea of a kanban board more than... actually using them sometimes. The text editor is neat too, but I'm so used to Markdown at this point that I really don't like using WYSIWYG editors. It's designed to be very stripped back, just giving you the essentials, and overall it does that pretty well. But because of that, there's no way to switch the editor mode to a plain Markdown or similar format. I'm also not a fan of how it hides the filesystem from you. As far as I know, besides exporting images of the whiteboard view, there is also no way to export your stuff from the app which is a big deal for me. I do think it's a neat tool that should work for plenty of people, but those are both a pretty big deal for me. There is also a cloud version that seems kinda neat, but I want to avoid cloud apps and subscriptions where possible.
This did have me thinking. I really like the whiteboard feature in Thinker, which is literally just Tldraw with the added ability to place notes in your diagrams. I decided to install both Obsidian and Logseq to see which felt better with whatever plugins I needed for my whiteboard stuff.
I really wanted to like Logseq, partially because it was the FOSS option in this and I'm biased like that, but it also didn't feel quite right for me. As I mentioned, I don't like when software completely abstracts the filesystem. This is a problem even in the Markdown editor I tend to use, Deepdwn, where it flattens the filestructure and turns folders into tags on the files (WHY????). I like having my file hierarchy. Even in Silverbullet I ended up still creating files in subfolders and categories with tags that would group them together, which is also part of what prompted me to go out looking for something else. What I was doing was effectively just a cumbersome reimplementation of what I wanted: a normal filesystem. Logseq expects you to do something similar, where you have a homepage and link your notes together, as well as a separate tab showing all your whiteboards and an unorganized "all pages" view. The whiteboards in Logseq are also made with an older version of Tldraw that has less features and slightly different keybinds which messes with my muscle memory and is really light on some of the other fun diagramming features like... shapes (besides a circle, square, and triangle). Again, it's a perfectly good software, especially if it fits what you need, but it wasn't right for me. Obsidian time.
Previously when I tried Obsidian I wasn't completely sure what to do, because I didn't have a real plan for what to store there or notes to move over. This time was different. I started by working predominantly in their Canvas system, which is a very simple whiteboard-style feature. It works for most general simple things, but it's VERY light on features. The nice thing with it is that I can create a diagram in Tldraw with the Tldraw plugin and embed it in the diagram, connecting things between it. Again, not perfectly ideal, but it's a step up from what Logseq does. I would like if you could place notes directly in Tldraw diagrams, but the plugin doesn't do that. Excalidraw DOES, though I'm content with what I have and prefer Tldraw overall. I also IMMEDIATELY got rid of the graph view. No. That thing is weird and scary and makes it look so much more complicated to me as a newcomer. Finally, I also got a Kanban plugin so I could move any task lists for Super Rocket Bytes over, at least until I get bored start looking into new task management software or something. I can keep my entire project in just Obsidian, rather than using Thinker along with other notes in Silverbullet or something, because it gives me a normal filesystem for markdown files, diagrams, canvases, etc. As much as I prefer FOSS, the team behind Obsidian does seem to be pretty alright (and Canadian which is cool as a Canadian) so I don't really mind it too much.
Having been using it for a short bit now, it honestly barely feels like a compromise compared to most of the other stuff I tried. I've also set it up with Git rather than using Obsidian Sync (you can turn any built-in features off in settings, they're effectively just a set of default plugins) and have both a personal vault for my general notes and image board / inspiration canvases (like what Silverbullet was for), as well as a vault for Super Rocket Bytes stuff since that's a big project and I was storing little bits of that in with my Silverbullet space as well. For short notes to myself right now I'm literally just using Signal and texting it to myself lol. That works, and I seem to use it more because it's less of a pain than loading up a webpage for Silverbullet and hoping that Cloudflare doesn't decide it's time for me to authenticate through my zero-trust barrier again. All in all, I am starting to get why Obsidian is as popular as it is. I think I'll be sticking with it for a while.