The cult of Obsidian

This article from Fast Company has a bit of a click-baity title (I don’t know if Obsidian users are really “obsessed” with a piece of software), but it’s a pretty good round-up of why I really like Obsidian. I actually wouldn’t even describe my own usage of Obsidian as a “note-taking app”, and more as a “personal wiki” app. But of course, many people use Obsidian differently.

Anyway, I like that Obsidian has some grassroots origins and lets you just edit a bunch of text files that you can otherwise manage any way you see fit, as opposed to some venture capital-backed startup that uses “the cloud” or some proprietary format or whatever else. It’s extensible and pretty well written — in fact, it’s one of the rare Electron applications that doesn’t feel and behave like a giant turd. It feels light and fast. It does almost everything I need, and the rest is handled by an absolutely vibrant plug-in ecosystem.

In fact, I have one very simple plug-in myself, Remember File State, which does something that I hope Obsidian will eventually do itself: remember where you were in a file when you reopen it. Duh. At the time of writing, there are more than 5000 people using it.

I personally support the development of Obsidian by paying for their Sync service, which has been 100% reliable over the past year or two. You can of course achieve the same by syncing your notes via Dropbox or iCloud or whatever (Again, it’s just a bunch of text files! That’s the point!), but I like to send a few bucks to people who make good software.