Obsidian ➹

Obsidian is a very popular cross-platform note-taking application that uses Markdown and that I have tried, time and again, to use for myself. However, I keep coming up against several issues:

• It is Electron-based, and as such unwieldy and slow at times. This also means that its cross-platform experience is based on minimum common denominators, and that the UX has a number of shortcomings.
  • The iOS editing experience is atrocious (at least for me).
• Syncing is a proprietary (paid) service, and although I can try to sync content myself (using SyncThing, for instance), it has never quite worked out.
• Despite being able to handle Markdown content, it breaks down completely for my use case:
  • It cannot handle front-matter the way I would expect it to (and how my site, MkDocs and plenty more tools do)
  • It really doesn’t understand about folders, or about “one note per folder with all attachments” approaches, which is the only practical way I’ve found to scale beyond 1000 notes (I’m way past 10000).
  • Its WikiLinks can’t be relative, or link to a page/folder rather than an .md file.
  • It blows up whenever I try to import my content into it
  • It requires plugins and tweaking to handle media files sensibly

• Quartz, a static site generator that can directly publish Obsidian vaults. It’s beautiful, but suffers from the usual PWA stupidity of downloading a contentindex.json with your site’s entire plaintext to facilitate search, so it likely scales as badly as Obsidian…