Obsidian ➹

Obsidian is a very popular cross-platform note-taking application that allows you to use plain Markdown as a very flexible notes database and that I have somewhat begrudgingly adopted as a key part of my workflow during 2025.

I don’t exactly remember when I started using Obsidian daily—I suspect it was when I finally figured out how to use it with SyncThing on my iPad, but another (just as important) milestone I remember was when I got the Kanban plugin working, since that gave me a sensible cross-platform way to manage my to-dos across Mac and Linux (Reminders just doesn’t cut it in that scenario).

Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t like Obsidian. It is one of the many Electron-based nightmares that we have to run on our devices because, unfortunately, there isn’t anything demonstrably more developer-friendly (note that I didn’t say better).

In particular, I don’t like that it’s not open source, since despite not minding paying for software I think that anything I commit to using for multiple years should last “forever”. I don’t like how it approaches linking and metadata, and I absolutely didn’t like that it tries to tie you to a proprietary syncing service.

Despite all that, I use it daily on Linux, macOS, and iOS, and the combination of cross-platform access and the Kanban workflow fits my day-to-day needs perfectly.

• The Kanban plugin has turned into my master to-do list, and I never managed to get Reminders to work cross-platform in the same way.
• There is a plugin that allows me to have my Supernote Nomad notes show up in Obsidian, which is a nice trick. In fact, I can even run Obsidian on the Nomad itself.
• The Markdown editor essentially disappears when you’re editing, which I like because it lets me focus on the content rather than the formatting. Somehow iA Writer feels less polished, which is weird—I suspect it’s about it not being truly WYSIWYG.
• Obsidian’s secret power on mobile is the iOS swiping keyboard—I’m able to thumb type quite quickly with it, to the point where it’s just ridiculously easy to take an idle moment to jot down ideas.
• The Data Tables feature is stupendously powerful, and I am actively resisting using it too much because I know it will make my notes less portable.

There are enough rough edges that I still keep coming up against the same issues:

• Its WikiLinks can’t be relative, or link to a page/folder rather than an .md file.
• Electron is a resource hog and feels sluggish on older hardware, so I end up editing in Vim or another editor quite often.
• It cannot deal with front-matter “properly” (at least not the way I want it to), so importing this site into it never worked (and it is highly likely that it never will). That also means I can’t use it as a primary editor for this site directly, or, in fact, for a few MkDocs-based sites I maintain.
• It’s proprietary in key ways (syncing, mobile app limitations, not open source).
• The Canvas feature is a nice idea, but it is nowhere near as good as a proper mind-mapping app like XMind (or even Apple’s Freeform).
• The graph view is cute, but not really useful for anything other than showing off.
• Setting a common look and feel across platforms is tricky, especially on iOS where CSS tweaks are limited.
• Plugins are very brittle, and hit-or-miss in quality. After a few months of trying out various plugins, I have no clue as to whether my current set of plugins will be maintained in the future (a couple that I use already bear deprecation notices, and I certainly don’t want to maintain them).
• It really doesn’t understand about folders, or about “one note per folder with all attachments” approaches. With the right plugins you can just paste an image into a note and it will store the attachment in the same folder, but it still feels hacky.

I eventually worked out a set of alternatives and workarounds that make Obsidian usable for me:

• On iOS you can use Möbius Sync to keep a local folder and then use SyncThing to sync a single vault. You do have to be careful about it, since the mobile app is way behind the desktop apps in functionality and feels artificially gimped—for instance, you cannot pick a vault location at will, so you need to be creative with workarounds (this is even true if, like me, you’re used to iOS folder sharing).
• Thanks to the Linter plugin, I can enforce a set of formatting and metadata rules that make my notes consistent across platforms and editors, even if Obsidian itself doesn’t really understand them.
• I have a little script that takes an Obsidian note and moves it across to this site, where I finish editing it and publish it using VS Code. In fact, if VS Code had a decent live Markdown editor and a comparable Kanban editor, I might just use that instead of Obsidian altogether.

I suspect that some day I will take something like Foam and hack it into a workable notes system that I can run in VS Code, but for now Obsidian is “good enough” despite its many flaws.