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If all you're using Obsidian as is a fancy markdown editor then of course you lose nothing. But the whole point of PKM apps is that they're more than a fancy ma
by imperfect_blue 4y ago
If all you're using Obsidian as is a fancy markdown editor then of course you lose nothing. But the whole point of PKM apps is that they're more than a fancy markdown editor.
Without the tool, a Kanban board that remains as a bunch of scattered markdown files is worthless for its intended purpose, and not easily recreated in another app.
It's like, a Microsoft Word document is perfectly portable if you never use any of its formatting features and always save it as plaintext, but at that point is it really using Microsoft Word?
- jamesgeck0 4y agoObsidian vaults can be converted into formats that work with competing PKM tools. I swapped back and forth between Obsidian and an open source tool based on Visual Studio Code for a while.
- imperfect_blue 4y agoIf you use a subset of its features and don't rely on any particular plugins, yes, you can seamlessly convert between some tools — because in the end, it's just Markdown and some basic features like tagging and linking are shared. "But my workflow is portable!" is really not a good response, when a workflow like OP's, or even one that depends on a few key plugins, becomes very much not portable. The more you buy into the ecosystem, the less portable your workflow will be. "Don't buy into the ecosystem" is not a reasonable take at all because that's the entire point of Obsidian over competition, the (mostly open-source) ecosystem that they have with the first-mover advantage.
- 323 4y agoBeing open source doesn't help you much. What will you do if they stop developing? Start maintaining the code yourself? Wait for others? Very few open source projects thrived after original author lost interest.
- jamesgeck0 4y agoYou’re moving the goalposts. The “sorting, search, linking, reminders“ features you initially mentioned are all easily available elsewhere. A highly specific Obsidian-specific workflow is harder to replicate, but everything you initially mentioned is pretty basic functionality.
- imperfect_blue 4y agoThe features may be available in the new app, but your existing setup will break. Your existing relations and notes will break if they used any Obsidian specific feature, of which there are plenty. Any notes you use to dynamically summarize/organize/sort/filter other notes will break, and probably can't be trivially recreated in whatever app you switch to. The most basic type of links, links to other notes, will generally work fine yes. But what about links to headings? Links to blocks? Links to attachments? Embedded blocks? Embedded files? The more you've used Obsidian's features, the more stuff will break. Searching by tags is trivial. What about searching by properties? By done/undone status? By note attributes, by tasks, by attachments, by block-level searches? What about filters? The simplest use-case being, if I simply want to view the list of all undone tasks across a set of notes on a separate app, sorted by priority, as I can now on Obsidian? Not trivially possible, as far as I know. Reminders and any calendar-like functionality are definitely not carried over across apps, either. Like I keep saying, if you limit your functionality to just markdown basics, it'll work fine. Start using the exclusive features of the app or even just the tasks plugin and it's no longer so simple. Something like the Kanban plugin is just impossible.