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I like Obsidian, but plain text continues to reign supreme. I prefer nvAlt or my programmers editor, or if on a team, whatever the company provides (e.g. Jira).

I like Obsidian, but plain text continues to reign supreme. I prefer nvAlt or my programmers editor, or if on a team, whatever the company provides (e.g. Jira). The embarrassment of options is actually a key problem in itself, since if you do not commit to one, you find your notes spread across various files, tools, and services, totally disjoint in a way that is impossible to work with and difficult to undo. The ideal tool, which I don't think exists, would combine the immediacy and locality of nvAlt and bidirectionally map to something like Jira for sharing, distributed as a browser plugin and/or a simple server component with local write access.

patmorgan23 2y ago
Obsidian is pretty close to that. Markdown is basically plain text.
galaxyLogic 2y ago
> you find your notes spread across various files, tools, and services That is a problem I've experienced too. Therefore I currently write my comments in plain text in the IDE I am using (WebStorm), which saves them as text-files. I used OneNote for some time but I realized there is a lock-in because it saves its notes in its proprietary format. And now it seems its content can only be saved online on Microsoft servers. On the other hand if there was a clear rationale as to which type of notes belong to which tool then using multiple tools can actually help you find your note later. For example: Use your fridge-door for post-it-notes about what food we need more of. This may have something to do with the "Memory Palace" -techniques. You can remember things better when you can associate a path to finding them. Food? I must write a note about the food. Where should I save it? Preferably close to the fridge, because that is where most food is. Here's a trick I am using to write my coding-notes: I actually write and save them in files with .js -extension. I can have multiple such files for different aspects of notes. I can write notes about my app specification in one file and code-notes in another file, and what was done and what remains to be done in yet another file. That means my notes are comments in syntactically valid JavaScript files (which exists only to store such notes). Now I can use the Expand/Collapse feature of the IDE to collapse all comments to their first line, which is the title of the note. I can also save real JavaScript functions within the same file and have them syntax-highlighted, so I know the code-examples are valid JavaScript. I also use a WebStorm macro to generate tags based on current time and/or date. Saving them with the note allows me to refer to that tag from other notes. A bit like hyperlinking, but for text-files.
adiabatty 2y ago
Obsidian vaults are just folders full of a bunch of Markdown files with a dotfolder that has some JSON configuration files in it. You can probably put images in them, too (I haven't needed to bother yet). I'm not sure how you can get more plain-text than that.

patmorgan23 2y ago

Obsidian is pretty close to that. Markdown is basically plain text.

galaxyLogic 2y ago

> you find your notes spread across various files, tools, and services That is a problem I've experienced too. Therefore I currently write my comments in plain text in the IDE I am using (WebStorm), which saves them as text-files. I used OneNote for some time but I realized there is a lock-in because it saves its notes in its proprietary format. And now it seems its content can only be saved online on Microsoft servers. On the other hand if there was a clear rationale as to which type of notes belong to which tool then using multiple tools can actually help you find your note later. For example: Use your fridge-door for post-it-notes about what food we need more of. This may have something to do with the "Memory Palace" -techniques. You can remember things better when you can associate a path to finding them. Food? I must write a note about the food. Where should I save it? Preferably close to the fridge, because that is where most food is. Here's a trick I am using to write my coding-notes: I actually write and save them in files with .js -extension. I can have multiple such files for different aspects of notes. I can write notes about my app specification in one file and code-notes in another file, and what was done and what remains to be done in yet another file. That means my notes are comments in syntactically valid JavaScript files (which exists only to store such notes). Now I can use the Expand/Collapse feature of the IDE to collapse all comments to their first line, which is the title of the note. I can also save real JavaScript functions within the same file and have them syntax-highlighted, so I know the code-examples are valid JavaScript. I also use a WebStorm macro to generate tags based on current time and/or date. Saving them with the note allows me to refer to that tag from other notes. A bit like hyperlinking, but for text-files.

adiabatty 2y ago

Obsidian vaults are just folders full of a bunch of Markdown files with a dotfolder that has some JSON configuration files in it. You can probably put images in them, too (I haven't needed to bother yet). I'm not sure how you can get more plain-text than that.