A switch to Obsidian

#obsidian #blogs

Primary Objective and initial thoughts

I've decide to switch from notion to obsidian due to its highly customisability which is what I was always after.

It is a hassle to switch from one note take app to the other as there are learning curves, especially apps like obsidian which give you much more freedom to do what you want.

There needs to be a lot of efforts invested into building a workflow, workspace and ultimate objective

Notion VS Obsidian

The pros

I have enjoy my time taking notes and writing blogs in notion and link it directly to my personal website, however I do still find a few lacking features that i want to do with my note taking app that notion does not offer.

  1. VIM MODE I can believe since the day I started learning and struggling with vim, I have advanced so much that i feel like I can't leave vim. (I understand that it is a very specific user group but it is what I am used to and what I would like to have in my note app of choice)
  2. Local Storage The way that obsidian handles their files just makes me feels much more comfortable since everything is stored in markdown and I can do whatever i want with it in the future, unlike notion where there are a lot of proprietary syntax that just breaks note hierarchy and presentation when exported in other formats
  3. Community plugins One of the biggest highlights for obsidian. It is just amazing how many plugins is available to the app. basically anything that you will need for your note taking, they got you covered. Even if there isn't an existing one that suits your need, you can simply create your own plugin using javascript
  4. Excalidraw: One of the best plugins that I enjoy is definitely excalidraw which enable us to draw hand-written like images to visualise the concepts.

The cons

That being said there are still things that notion does pretty damn well that obsidian still lack.

  1. link embeddings given large team and user base, form a lot of collaboration other companies that allows notion to generate a embedding of the collaborating company's product, while obsidian is only able to work with what the public have access to (such as APIs) but not the proprietary access that these companies might grant notion
  2. Properties is not as robust as the notion's property, as notion provides more types and formula calculated fields, obsidian properties only have some basic fields like string, integer, date and checkbox.
  3. collaboration: Since obsidian is storing all the files locally, it is very hard for a team to work on the same files together at the same time. If you have a Obsidian Publish website, you can invite collaborators, but the changes will reflect directly on the website itself which may not be the case every time.

What I have done

There are a lot of preparation to be done

  1. Look up various youtube videos
  2. official documentations
  3. install plugins
  4. publish my content

What I am using it for

I wish obsidian or any note taking app that I am using in the future to do the following things.

  1. Content manager for my blog
  2. Note taking for all my new learnings
  3. Documentation for what I want to do
  4. Personal project management

Concluding Thoughts

There are many apps out there, how you choose the right one is all dependent your own use case. My experience with obsidian is a enjoyable one. I might one day switch back to notion again or other apps, but at current stage, I am happy with what obsidian able to provide me.