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Between Obsidian, Roam, Amplenote, and Reflect it has certainly been a golden age for note taking over the last few years. It's hard to remember that it was onl

Between Obsidian, Roam, Amplenote, and Reflect it has certainly been a golden age for note taking over the last few years. It's hard to remember that it was only 5 years ago that second generation note apps like Evernote, Notion and Bear were the only viable options unless you wanted a 1st gen app like OneNote or Workflowy. What might be most interesting about the new set of fast moving note apps is that all seem to be built by teams of 3 or less people. Obsidian seems to have ascended to the top of the heap with a team of three and no apparent VC funding. Anyone that roots for small companies and passionate programmers should appreciate Obsidian proving that the best tools don't have to be built by the biggest teams. More the opposite.

Vrondi 4y ago
I'm still waiting on one of these upstarts to implement the most essential features of the "first gen" apps, like inking/handwriting.
- AB1908 4y ago
  There's an excalidraw plugin that helps with this to a degree.
  - monkmartinez 4y ago
    This plugin misses mark big time. I tried it and tried it again. Trying to love it... just couldn't compare with OneNote.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Likewise. I love Obsidian, I love my Apple Pencil - and the Excalidraw plugin just does not get me there, unfortunately. Goodnotes, Apple notes, and OneNote still leagues better for Apple Pencil support.
    - bostonvaulter2 4y ago
      I absolutely love this plugin. But I'm probably using quite differently from you since I barely use the pencil/draw tool at all.
- tryptophan 4y ago
  Not everyone considers that essential. I had onenote once, realized my handwriting was shit, and never tried to hand write notes again.
  - lillecarl 4y ago
    Handwriting I find completely useless, but drawing on a display can be quite OK even for me
    - angryasian 4y ago
      theres a plugin for that - https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        Unfortunately, I find the delay unacceptably high with this extension compared to first class support from apps like Goodnotes, Onenote and Apple Notes. Still love Obsidian - just wish drawing on it was a viable option.
        gyrovagueGeist 4y ago
        Yep, Obsidian's latex support makes it almost ideal for writing math notes.. but because you can't quickly drop in quick sketches from a stylus (something like the Bear notes app.. which misses too many other features) it kills Obsidian for this usecase :(
      - bostonvaulter2 4y ago
        That's a great plugin! It even lets you create links to docs from within the drawing. And you can embed one part of a drawing in one note and another part in a different note. I also highly recommend checking out the creator's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/VisualPKM https://www.youtube.com/c/VisualPKM
- _iyhy 4y ago
  There is one in Apple ecosystem. That is called Muse
  - gumby 4y ago
    Thanks!
- Ruq 4y ago
  Try the "Excalidraw" Plugin for Obsidian.
  - HellsMaddy 4y ago
    I think the Excalidraw plugin solves a different problem. It’s great for creating diagrams, especially with a keyboard+mouse. What I’m looking for, though, is something like Apple Notes on iPad, where you can seamlessly write in your notes with your Apple Pencil. The Excalidraw plugin adds a lot of friction and complexity if all you want to do is write.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  This is one reason I can't stop using Goodnotes with an Apple Pencil: I like to handwrite. It's particularly helpful when I'm taking notes in multiple languages; switching keyboards every time I want to write a word in another language is a pain.
- brimwats 4y ago
  Excalidraw works pretty well in obsidian. I didn't like it the first time but I'm increasingly getting used to it
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    What's your secret? I find it... icky (maybe too long of a delay?) compared to Goodnotes.
- yellow_postit 4y ago
  This is what keeps me coming back to apps like OneNote or Apples Notes. Obsidian and their ilk, for me, just encourage endless bike shedding and metrics that get in the way of the job to be done — taking and finding notes.
  - phlakaton 4y ago
    FWIW I only use Obsidian for note-taking, not metrics or graph views or bike-shedding. Markdown with two-way links and the occasional image, code snippet, or Mermaid diagram. Doesn't need to be more complicated than that!
    - mcluck 4y ago
      Adding my voice to the cacophony. I don't use Obsidian but I do use Foam in VS Code. Daily notes and wikilinks is all I need. I've toyed with adding more metadata but it's just not worth the maintenance cost
rjzzleep 4y ago
I'd love to use obsidian, but the mobile app does not allow specifying the folder. As a result on iOS you can only use the official syncing method. Maybe it's so you pay for the app, but I would personally rather pay a few for that functionality.
- wscott 4y ago
  I ended up paying $20 for the 'working copy' git iOS app and then setup an iOS shortcut to sync my repository to a private github repo. So everything is manual when I click the button for the shortcut it syncs. On the desktop the git extension does the same thing, but is automatic. Conflict resolution is as detailed and I want. Yeah lots of non-opensource components in that flow, but it works well and is perfectly happy when I am totally offline.
- shakezula 4y ago
  Uh, this can’t be true cause I have my Obsidian mobile vault set to my iCloud and use that for syncing and backup and it works pretty much perfectly.
  - fnoof 4y ago
    It allows iCloud or obsidian syncing. I tried to set it up with Dropbox because I didn’t trust iClouds conflict resolution and couldn’t get it to work.
    - nvrspyx 4y ago
      I think that's a limitation of the Files API. In the least, I've yet to come across an app that allows syncing with third-party storage apps through Files. I've only seen one-way saving or using the file picker to retrieve a file.
      - poglet 4y ago
        https://apps.apple.com/us/app/keepassium-keepass-passwords/id1435127111 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/keepassium-keepass-passwords/i... In the app description: "KeePassium can work both offline and with your favorite cloud provider. There is no setup: pick your database through the familiar Files interface — and that's it. By integrating with the Files app, KeePassium supports almost all storage providers, including..."
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
It’s not often that I see a mention of Workflowy in the wild. I know there is better out there, but Workflowy and Apple Notes are the ones I already use and I’m unsure whether the others are better enough to be worth the switching costs.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  I still use workflowy till this day.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  I find with extensions I can basically replicate the Workflowy experience in Obsidian.
  - boundlessdreamz 4y ago
    Which extensions are you using for that?
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      outliner?
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        Granted it might not be as good as the original depending on how deep your notes go. I know that the team behind Obsidian also created dynalist which iirc is a workflowy competitor.
rayiner 4y ago
Seems more like a dark age. Obsidian makes the fans on my 4 ghz laptop go crazy. And in some ways (integration with email and tasks) it has less functionality than One Note 2010. And Obsidian has a PDF view and PDF annotations, but you can’t search in it? I’m using Org mode with emacs just so I can have cross references into PDFs and emails in my notes.
- angryasian 4y ago
  I'm not sure about the issues with your computer, but there are a ton of plugins for tasks and boards. What type of email integration are you looking for ?
- monkmartinez 4y ago
  There is very little criticism of Obsidian here, but you definitely pointed a few out. I am a OneNote user and Obsidian doesn't really compare to OneNote. If you read a lot of papers, you can have OneNote OCR the text and make it searchable.
  - jamesholden 4y ago
    So, there is this tool: <https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf> OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched or copy pasted. This mentions cross-platform usage and seems simple. Is there some way to use this with Obsidian through a plugin? If so, please create a GitHub project and send us a link! :D Just for reference, I found it with a list of a ton of other tools: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/301318/how-to-ocr-a-pdf-file-and-get-the-text-stored-within-the-pdf https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/301318/how-to-ocr-a... I have messed around with Tesseract a bit, and at some point, I was able to turn a PDF into a text file. I was thinking of doing that and having them as markdown files which are tiny compared to the original. Then keep the Original elsewhere. I've been playing with another PDF system I'm not willing to give up on. :D Point is, I think I can bring more dimension to my Obsidian or Markdown library by having 'txt' copies of pdfs. The search and tagging alone would be so handy.
  - coffeeling 4y ago
prox 4y ago
I have been using scrivener as my note taking app. It’s actually made for writers and for researchers to make their work (books, essays) but as a note taker it’s very versatile. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/ https://www.literatureandlatte.com/
- kstrauser 4y ago
  I have Scrivener, but I've been using iA Writer much more for note taking. It has wiki links, decent-ish support for x-callback-url automation, and a dead simple filesystem layout that lets me write custom scripts for note mangling when I need to.
lukewrites 4y ago
MacOS also has the FOSS app Notenik (https://notenik.app/ https://notenik.app/)
samstave 4y ago
ELI5 What ever happened to Evernote? because I have a thoughts been killing me in the back of my head: Need a family version but self hosted + cloud which allows for an auto push of notes, pics and calander to your own thing.. basically a family planner.
- luckman212 4y ago
  TLDR- the founder quit, a bunch of suits took over, they gutted the dev team and put the app on life support for years. Bugs piled up and nobody could fix them so they outsourced to a new offshore team who rewrote the whole thing in Electron... which of course was waaay too little, way too late.
  - samstave 4y ago
    You sound like someone i need to talk to email via profile.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    Remember the whole copy paste debacle where they literally couldn't figure out how to allow for pasting with formatting versus pasting without formatting? That went on for practically a year until I finally just jumped ship and ported all of my notes into markdown.
The5thElephant 4y ago
My issue is that it feels like none of these tools do anything significantly new, and are all so obsessed with wonky features like node-graph views and backlinks that are only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them. That's why I'm working on creating https://visible.page https://visible.page because I want a tool that isn't just for markdown organizational obsessives, but rather for organizing and visualizing ALL kinds of information the way regular people do. None of these tools handle things like dates, locations, numbers, and other data of various types well. With Visible if you add a date or a location to some content, that content is now accessible on a calendar and a map side by side with all the associated text and media you added to it as well. No worrying about what table column it goes into or what metadata row or plugin you need to render it well. Just add the location, and add a map view, boom done. Want more than one date associated with some content? Just add it, you don't have to figure out to add another "Date type" metadata section the way you do in Notion for example. It is not offline first. It is not file based. It is not catered to the needs you see so often here on Hacker News but don't actually hear when talking to regular people who just want to plan a trip together or keep track of an apartment/house hunt without spreading information across a half-dozen tools. Does no one else get frustrated that even Google can't show you a map of your week's upcoming event locations? That when you are doing research online you have to tediously copy and paste each address one-by-one into Google Maps and then copy an embed link for that into another tool, and even then the addresses are isolated with no relevant information like photos or notes attachable to them? We have so many amazing internet powers that are simply unavailable in any of these note taking tools. I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring. I want to see my information the way it was meant to be seen and in a way that my parents can understand it as well.
- duderific 4y ago
  It sounds like you're going for a completely different type of user than those who like Obsidian. That said, I've signed up for your Beta rollout, as what you're building sounds appealing for my use case, that of a kind of family planner.
  - 4y ago

Vrondi 4y ago

I'm still waiting on one of these upstarts to implement the most essential features of the "first gen" apps, like inking/handwriting.

AB1908 4y ago
There's an excalidraw plugin that helps with this to a degree.
- monkmartinez 4y ago
  This plugin misses mark big time. I tried it and tried it again. Trying to love it... just couldn't compare with OneNote.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Likewise. I love Obsidian, I love my Apple Pencil - and the Excalidraw plugin just does not get me there, unfortunately. Goodnotes, Apple notes, and OneNote still leagues better for Apple Pencil support.
  - bostonvaulter2 4y ago
    I absolutely love this plugin. But I'm probably using quite differently from you since I barely use the pencil/draw tool at all.
tryptophan 4y ago
Not everyone considers that essential. I had onenote once, realized my handwriting was shit, and never tried to hand write notes again.
- lillecarl 4y ago
  Handwriting I find completely useless, but drawing on a display can be quite OK even for me
  - angryasian 4y ago
    theres a plugin for that - https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Unfortunately, I find the delay unacceptably high with this extension compared to first class support from apps like Goodnotes, Onenote and Apple Notes. Still love Obsidian - just wish drawing on it was a viable option.
      - gyrovagueGeist 4y ago
        Yep, Obsidian's latex support makes it almost ideal for writing math notes.. but because you can't quickly drop in quick sketches from a stylus (something like the Bear notes app.. which misses too many other features) it kills Obsidian for this usecase :(
    - bostonvaulter2 4y ago
      That's a great plugin! It even lets you create links to docs from within the drawing. And you can embed one part of a drawing in one note and another part in a different note. I also highly recommend checking out the creator's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/VisualPKM https://www.youtube.com/c/VisualPKM
_iyhy 4y ago
There is one in Apple ecosystem. That is called Muse
- gumby 4y ago
  Thanks!
Ruq 4y ago
Try the "Excalidraw" Plugin for Obsidian.
- HellsMaddy 4y ago
  I think the Excalidraw plugin solves a different problem. It’s great for creating diagrams, especially with a keyboard+mouse. What I’m looking for, though, is something like Apple Notes on iPad, where you can seamlessly write in your notes with your Apple Pencil. The Excalidraw plugin adds a lot of friction and complexity if all you want to do is write.
Mezzie 4y ago
This is one reason I can't stop using Goodnotes with an Apple Pencil: I like to handwrite. It's particularly helpful when I'm taking notes in multiple languages; switching keyboards every time I want to write a word in another language is a pain.
brimwats 4y ago
Excalidraw works pretty well in obsidian. I didn't like it the first time but I'm increasingly getting used to it
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  What's your secret? I find it... icky (maybe too long of a delay?) compared to Goodnotes.
yellow_postit 4y ago
This is what keeps me coming back to apps like OneNote or Apples Notes. Obsidian and their ilk, for me, just encourage endless bike shedding and metrics that get in the way of the job to be done — taking and finding notes.
- phlakaton 4y ago
  FWIW I only use Obsidian for note-taking, not metrics or graph views or bike-shedding. Markdown with two-way links and the occasional image, code snippet, or Mermaid diagram. Doesn't need to be more complicated than that!
  - mcluck 4y ago
    Adding my voice to the cacophony. I don't use Obsidian but I do use Foam in VS Code. Daily notes and wikilinks is all I need. I've toyed with adding more metadata but it's just not worth the maintenance cost

rjzzleep 4y ago

I'd love to use obsidian, but the mobile app does not allow specifying the folder. As a result on iOS you can only use the official syncing method. Maybe it's so you pay for the app, but I would personally rather pay a few for that functionality.

wscott 4y ago
I ended up paying $20 for the 'working copy' git iOS app and then setup an iOS shortcut to sync my repository to a private github repo. So everything is manual when I click the button for the shortcut it syncs. On the desktop the git extension does the same thing, but is automatic. Conflict resolution is as detailed and I want. Yeah lots of non-opensource components in that flow, but it works well and is perfectly happy when I am totally offline.
shakezula 4y ago
Uh, this can’t be true cause I have my Obsidian mobile vault set to my iCloud and use that for syncing and backup and it works pretty much perfectly.
- fnoof 4y ago
  It allows iCloud or obsidian syncing. I tried to set it up with Dropbox because I didn’t trust iClouds conflict resolution and couldn’t get it to work.
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    I think that's a limitation of the Files API. In the least, I've yet to come across an app that allows syncing with third-party storage apps through Files. I've only seen one-way saving or using the file picker to retrieve a file.
    - poglet 4y ago
      https://apps.apple.com/us/app/keepassium-keepass-passwords/id1435127111 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/keepassium-keepass-passwords/i... In the app description: "KeePassium can work both offline and with your favorite cloud provider. There is no setup: pick your database through the familiar Files interface — and that's it. By integrating with the Files app, KeePassium supports almost all storage providers, including..."

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

It’s not often that I see a mention of Workflowy in the wild. I know there is better out there, but Workflowy and Apple Notes are the ones I already use and I’m unsure whether the others are better enough to be worth the switching costs.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
I still use workflowy till this day.
whimsicalism 4y ago
I find with extensions I can basically replicate the Workflowy experience in Obsidian.
- boundlessdreamz 4y ago
  Which extensions are you using for that?
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    outliner?
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Granted it might not be as good as the original depending on how deep your notes go. I know that the team behind Obsidian also created dynalist which iirc is a workflowy competitor.

rayiner 4y ago

Seems more like a dark age. Obsidian makes the fans on my 4 ghz laptop go crazy. And in some ways (integration with email and tasks) it has less functionality than One Note 2010. And Obsidian has a PDF view and PDF annotations, but you can’t search in it? I’m using Org mode with emacs just so I can have cross references into PDFs and emails in my notes.

angryasian 4y ago
I'm not sure about the issues with your computer, but there are a ton of plugins for tasks and boards. What type of email integration are you looking for ?
monkmartinez 4y ago
There is very little criticism of Obsidian here, but you definitely pointed a few out. I am a OneNote user and Obsidian doesn't really compare to OneNote. If you read a lot of papers, you can have OneNote OCR the text and make it searchable.
- jamesholden 4y ago
  So, there is this tool: <https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf> OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched or copy pasted. This mentions cross-platform usage and seems simple. Is there some way to use this with Obsidian through a plugin? If so, please create a GitHub project and send us a link! :D Just for reference, I found it with a list of a ton of other tools: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/301318/how-to-ocr-a-pdf-file-and-get-the-text-stored-within-the-pdf https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/301318/how-to-ocr-a... I have messed around with Tesseract a bit, and at some point, I was able to turn a PDF into a text file. I was thinking of doing that and having them as markdown files which are tiny compared to the original. Then keep the Original elsewhere. I've been playing with another PDF system I'm not willing to give up on. :D Point is, I think I can bring more dimension to my Obsidian or Markdown library by having 'txt' copies of pdfs. The search and tagging alone would be so handy.
- coffeeling 4y ago

prox 4y ago

I have been using scrivener as my note taking app. It’s actually made for writers and for researchers to make their work (books, essays) but as a note taker it’s very versatile. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/ https://www.literatureandlatte.com/

kstrauser 4y ago
I have Scrivener, but I've been using iA Writer much more for note taking. It has wiki links, decent-ish support for x-callback-url automation, and a dead simple filesystem layout that lets me write custom scripts for note mangling when I need to.

lukewrites 4y ago

MacOS also has the FOSS app Notenik (https://notenik.app/ https://notenik.app/)

samstave 4y ago

ELI5 What ever happened to Evernote? because I have a thoughts been killing me in the back of my head: Need a family version but self hosted + cloud which allows for an auto push of notes, pics and calander to your own thing.. basically a family planner.

luckman212 4y ago
TLDR- the founder quit, a bunch of suits took over, they gutted the dev team and put the app on life support for years. Bugs piled up and nobody could fix them so they outsourced to a new offshore team who rewrote the whole thing in Electron... which of course was waaay too little, way too late.
- samstave 4y ago
  You sound like someone i need to talk to email via profile.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  Remember the whole copy paste debacle where they literally couldn't figure out how to allow for pasting with formatting versus pasting without formatting? That went on for practically a year until I finally just jumped ship and ported all of my notes into markdown.

The5thElephant 4y ago

My issue is that it feels like none of these tools do anything significantly new, and are all so obsessed with wonky features like node-graph views and backlinks that are only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them. That's why I'm working on creating https://visible.page https://visible.page because I want a tool that isn't just for markdown organizational obsessives, but rather for organizing and visualizing ALL kinds of information the way regular people do. None of these tools handle things like dates, locations, numbers, and other data of various types well. With Visible if you add a date or a location to some content, that content is now accessible on a calendar and a map side by side with all the associated text and media you added to it as well. No worrying about what table column it goes into or what metadata row or plugin you need to render it well. Just add the location, and add a map view, boom done. Want more than one date associated with some content? Just add it, you don't have to figure out to add another "Date type" metadata section the way you do in Notion for example. It is not offline first. It is not file based. It is not catered to the needs you see so often here on Hacker News but don't actually hear when talking to regular people who just want to plan a trip together or keep track of an apartment/house hunt without spreading information across a half-dozen tools. Does no one else get frustrated that even Google can't show you a map of your week's upcoming event locations? That when you are doing research online you have to tediously copy and paste each address one-by-one into Google Maps and then copy an embed link for that into another tool, and even then the addresses are isolated with no relevant information like photos or notes attachable to them? We have so many amazing internet powers that are simply unavailable in any of these note taking tools. I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring. I want to see my information the way it was meant to be seen and in a way that my parents can understand it as well.

duderific 4y ago
It sounds like you're going for a completely different type of user than those who like Obsidian. That said, I've signed up for your Beta rollout, as what you're building sounds appealing for my use case, that of a kind of family planner.
- 4y ago