I have tried Obsidian, Joplin, Logseq, Notion, Evernote, Onenote, Google Notes, Apple Notes, and various other markdown editors. I have ultimately found emacs’ org-mode plus git (for syncing, backups, and, well, version control) plus ripgrep/fzf (for searching and quickly jumping to a file/section) plus org-super-links (which provides automatic backlink insertion/deletion) plus gpg (for encrypting sensitive files/sections; emacs and org-mode support for gpg is superb) to be leagues ahead of the competition. Its mobile story is pretty sad though (There are some options, but by its very nature org-mode shines when it is run by emacs. And emacs isn’t too mobile-friendly. iOS also doesn’t let us run emacs directly (Ask yourself how an OS could be allowed to exist that doesn’t allow you to run GPL software.), and so SSH needs to be used.)
Emacs (and org-mode) reward investment and self-extensions, so if someone is adamant not to invest in their tooling, I would recommend Obsidian. Beware that Obsidian is a closed source tool and any investment you do make in it is likely to become obsolete in ten years.
Some examples of extended usages I have had with org-mode this week, to give you a taste of possibilities:
Managing my various irregularly recurring bills (no credit cards or any kind of auto money retrieval here)
Doing some NLP work, I marked up different words via a custom markup extension. This visualizes the words differently and lets me jump between specific classes of words (e.g., command verbs).
Doing some other NLP work, I easily changed the execution machine of the code cells in my notebook to a remote machine. Did I mention that org-mode notebooks support multi-language, multi-session notebooks, and that you can use Jupyter kernels or code your own backend(s) to support a new language?
Whenever I like the music currently playing, I go to a playlist file, and type some keyword which then gets expanded to the path of the music file being played (the path is received by communicating with mpv). I can then manage my playlists in org-mode, ordering them as trees, adding tags, etc. I don’t personally appreciate using cloud services, but I imagine a similar thing should be possible using Spotify’s API.
I have made some keywords color the line they occur in. This is surprisingly useful. E.g., @urgent will use a pink background and make the text bold and black.@great will make the background a light blue and the text green.
I have a lot of custom links; E.g., using [help:sth] will open the documentation of sth. I color some of the links differently than others.
I frequently paste rich text (e.g., from Chrome) as org-mode text (using pandoc under the hood to convert the HTML to org-mode text). This is extremely useful. I don’t remember which other editors have this feature; Usually, editors using binary formats do have an equivalent feature, but the ones using plain text do not.
I have custom link inserters for sites I use frequently, such as Github, Goodreads, Steam, Imdb, fanfiction.net, rotalroad.com, etc. Here is a Goodreads example (all of this gets inserted automatically, no manual entering of the data is necessary):
Beware that Obsidian is a closed source tool and any investment you do make in it is likely to become obsolete in ten years.
That seems really unlikely to me, as several plugin developers who write open source plugins for Obsidian routinely reverse engineer Obsidian’s internals (in order to improve our plugins). Obsidian, after all, is built as an Electron app (or Capacitor on mobile) in TypeScript, with AFAIK the only non-JS bits coming from open source projects (such as various Node modules and Electron/Capacitor themselves). Thus, the entire code base is merely partially obfuscated, rather then being a truly “closed” source app. It is only “closed” in the sense that it is against copyright law to create and distribute your own version.
So for Obsidian to disappear altogether, it would require both 1) the end of the current entity with ownership, and 2) that end to happen in such a way that a successor copyright owner exists to actively stamp out any attempts to create a community build—or an API-compatible clone.
That could happen, I suppose. But it’s hard to imagine what company would have deep enough pockets to do it, and yet also feel threatened enough by Obsidian to want to eradicate it.
I have tried Obsidian, Joplin, Logseq, Notion, Evernote, Onenote, Google Notes, Apple Notes, and various other markdown editors. I have ultimately found emacs’ org-mode plus git (for syncing, backups, and, well, version control) plus ripgrep/fzf (for searching and quickly jumping to a file/section) plus
org-super-links(which provides automatic backlink insertion/deletion) plusgpg(for encrypting sensitive files/sections; emacs and org-mode support forgpgis superb) to be leagues ahead of the competition. Its mobile story is pretty sad though (There are some options, but by its very nature org-mode shines when it is run by emacs. And emacs isn’t too mobile-friendly. iOS also doesn’t let us run emacs directly (Ask yourself how an OS could be allowed to exist that doesn’t allow you to run GPL software.), and so SSH needs to be used.)Emacs (and org-mode) reward investment and self-extensions, so if someone is adamant not to invest in their tooling, I would recommend Obsidian. Beware that Obsidian is a closed source tool and any investment you do make in it is likely to become obsolete in ten years.
Some examples of extended usages I have had with org-mode this week, to give you a taste of possibilities:
Managing my various irregularly recurring bills (no credit cards or any kind of auto money retrieval here)
Doing some NLP work, I marked up different words via a custom markup extension. This visualizes the words differently and lets me jump between specific classes of words (e.g., command verbs).
Screenshot: https://files.lilf.ir/tmp/tmp.5L6JeSJoCw.png
Doing some other NLP work, I easily changed the execution machine of the code cells in my notebook to a remote machine. Did I mention that org-mode notebooks support multi-language, multi-session notebooks, and that you can use Jupyter kernels or code your own backend(s) to support a new language?
Whenever I like the music currently playing, I go to a playlist file, and type some keyword which then gets expanded to the path of the music file being played (the path is received by communicating with
mpv). I can then manage my playlists in org-mode, ordering them as trees, adding tags, etc. I don’t personally appreciate using cloud services, but I imagine a similar thing should be possible using Spotify’s API.I have made some keywords color the line they occur in. This is surprisingly useful. E.g.,
@urgentwill use a pink background and make the text bold and black.@greatwill make the background a light blue and the text green.I have a lot of custom links; E.g., using
[help:sth]will open the documentation ofsth. I color some of the links differently than others.I frequently paste rich text (e.g., from Chrome) as org-mode text (using
pandocunder the hood to convert the HTML to org-mode text). This is extremely useful. I don’t remember which other editors have this feature; Usually, editors using binary formats do have an equivalent feature, but the ones using plain text do not.I have custom link inserters for sites I use frequently, such as
Github,Goodreads,Steam,Imdb,fanfiction.net,rotalroad.com, etc. Here is a Goodreads example (all of this gets inserted automatically, no manual entering of the data is necessary):That seems really unlikely to me, as several plugin developers who write open source plugins for Obsidian routinely reverse engineer Obsidian’s internals (in order to improve our plugins). Obsidian, after all, is built as an Electron app (or Capacitor on mobile) in TypeScript, with AFAIK the only non-JS bits coming from open source projects (such as various Node modules and Electron/Capacitor themselves). Thus, the entire code base is merely partially obfuscated, rather then being a truly “closed” source app. It is only “closed” in the sense that it is against copyright law to create and distribute your own version.
So for Obsidian to disappear altogether, it would require both 1) the end of the current entity with ownership, and 2) that end to happen in such a way that a successor copyright owner exists to actively stamp out any attempts to create a community build—or an API-compatible clone.
That could happen, I suppose. But it’s hard to imagine what company would have deep enough pockets to do it, and yet also feel threatened enough by Obsidian to want to eradicate it.