this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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How you folks like Obsidian? Works well for me but I haven’t tried much competition
Obsidian is fantastic. I use it for work and also for personal stuff like planning TTRPG sessions. Especially with the plugins that are out there, it's super powerful. Getting into using metadata tags and the Dataview plugin it becomes a pretty amazing knowledge engine.
I've found it to be okay. The plugin system is nice, but the lack of local file sync on iOS is quite bothersome, since I use a self-hosted sync instead.
It basically makes the iOS app unusable for me, and it would be a deal breaker if Obsidian didn't just use markdown documents you can edit with a text editor.
Admittedly, I migrated from Apple Notes and raw text documents, so there isn't much by way of competition.
I have tried a bit of the others, like abusing LaTeX for it, which worked okay, but had a few flaws, like when linking other files, and Trillium, which is interesting, but also uses an SQL database (without mobile support, which didn't work for me).
Turtl was interesting, but when I used it, very beta.
Evernote was okay, but also suffers from the proprietary format. I dropped them after they reduced the device support down to 2/3, so no idea what it's like now.
Onenote was nice with the pen support (only Apple and Samsung notes otherwise have that, as far as I'm aware), but I found it to be quite heavy, and a little unwieldy (in addition to being proprietary).
Onenote also has a strange quirk where it will gradually accumulate copies, so big notes will cause it to grow over time until it starts eating up huge amounts of space on your computer.
Evernote is “dead”.
Try Joplin if you haven’t already. [email protected]
It is similar to Evernote and you can set up the sync on another service like Dropbox or even your self-hosted solution. You can also pay them a few bucks a month for their hosting services.
Joplin has a good iOS app as well as apps for nearly all other platforms. I migrated from Evernote to Joplin after Evernote practically doubled their prices and then switched their free option down to a single notebook and could not be happier.
I'd encourage you to check out SyncThing; it works great for syncing pretty much anything: I use it for my Obsidian notes and for my KeePass vault.
I currently use BT Sync/Resilio, since it supports selective sync without fiddling with an ignorelist, but it does work, except on Obsidian's iOS app, which supports only icloud, or Obsidian sync.
Maybe I don’t understand what you mean, but I have an smb share that my phone can always access (via vpn, or when on network). IOS does a good job remembering it, staying connected, and reconnecting between interruptions. I keep my obsidian folder on the share and the iOS app has never had problems finding and connecting to it, just as my desktop and laptop, keeping everything in sync automatically.
Interesting. I don't use Samba, but a different app for syncing, and it's much more of a headache.
Either Obsidian wants you to log into sync, or it helpfully makes a new vault on icloud.
There is not a third option, with their forums suggesting that they weren't going to add one, due to iOS limitations.
That has been my experience with it as well and it is definitely limiting! You can play some games with git and turn your local Obsidian vault into a repository. I sync with WorkingCopy (pro) on iOS.
Awesome, great info thank you
Personally I've been using Anytype. The free version includes I think 2GB of sync storage, which is pretty generous for text notes.
Using it is kinda clunky and unintuitive on a touch screen. Theres a notable lack of touch feedback that makes it weird and imprecise to use. Like pressing and holding on a folder or file doesn’t have any visual indicator that you’re pressing on the correct line, so you have to wait and see what opens. Maybe on a bigger phone this is less of an issue but in my iPhone 15 pro it’s been kind of annoying. Also after like a year or two with the app there’s something about the navigation I don’t like. It just doesn’t follow the usual conventions of what you’d expect from a mobile app.
It feels a lot like how using the desktop version version of a website in a mobile browser does.