Finally gave Obsidian a fair shake these last few weeks. I've tried it a couple of times in the past, but never moved anything there.

This time, I moved a bunch of stuff there to give it a proper try. After a solid, two week try I think it's not really for me:

  1. I don't love Markdown. It's fine and I write a lot of stuff in Markdown, but I prefer rich text. Obsidian has a nice mix (you have to use it to see what I mean), but it's truly Markdown-first.
  2. I still have iCloud sync issues that I can't figure out. I want to spend exactly zero seconds debugging issues syncing. I often want to quickly write a note when I'm out walking and Obsidian has failed me here several times because of sync issues.
  3. I don't care where images go, just handle it. Having to manage images yourself is weird. I don't want to do that.
  4. The main promise of Obsidian (the graph), I don't actually want. At least not right now.

These plus a couple of UX quirks and I feel like I'm mostly done with this trial. The bar is extremely high for Note taking apps!

For now, I'm back to Apple Notes with all of it's many, many, many limitations. If I experiment again soon, it'll probably be with Notion. That's the alternative I know best and I mostly find it quite good, with the huge exceptions of speed and search.

#00012 /
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