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by bobuk 1501 days ago
Inkdrop and Obsidian both have the same issue for me - electron. I will not tire of recommending people FSnotes [1]. Native (mac/ios only), opensource, one time payment (if you want it), sync with iCloud, git and TextBundle support.

Not affiliated, just a big fan.

[1]: https://fsnot.es/

3 comments

Though I usually feel the same, Obsidian is one of the lightest and most responsive Electron apps I've ever used. (Not using it anymore, because I didn't like on mobile.)
It's still very clear that it's not a native Mac application. All the classic Electron issues are present:

- Close the main window and try to figure out how to get it to reopen. This is probably the reason Cmd-W doesn't actually close the window (unlike every other app).

- macOS menubars are still just empty defaults. All functionality is exposed in custom in-app menus, rendering it all undiscoverable through the Cmd-? search.

- Wonky context menus that don't follow macOS standards. E.g. right click on a note and type the first letter of the action you want. Result: nothing.

- Weird, cross-platform verbiage litters the app. E.g. "open in system explorer" instead of "open in Finder"; some hotkey tooltips say "Ctrl/Cmd," while others use the Cmd symbol "⌘"

- Horrendous focus styling and keyboard support – they've cast out all the good native functionality here. Try Tab-bing around the app and attempt to figure out what's focused. This is so much worse than most Electron apps, as Chromium's a11y is typically a big cachet.

Gosh, I could keep going. It's a terrific app, and this is all fixable, but boy does Obsidian wear those Electron origins on it's sleeves today.

Most of those are nothing to do with Electron. I think only the non-native context menus. Not sure Electron supports those.

It definitely supports the Mac menu bar though, the window closing behaviour is completely configurable, and you can of course customise the wording of actions to the platform. VSCode does all that for example.

On mobile (Android) I use 'Markor' (it's on F-Droid), which is a notetaking application for Markdown, that understands folder hierarchies as notebooks and thus is compatible with Obsidian on the desktop. I use Syncthing to sync.
Isn’t inkdrop React Native? The maker has a quite nice YouTube channel where he writes RN and contributes regularly to RN open source.
Desktop app use electron.
Wow, a Mac and ios exclusive app that I can't use on my android or Windows machine!

So incredibly useful to me since I don't own a Mac at all, nor any iphone. Perhaps if you considered that people use other operating systems you'd see why your solution is a nonstarter and electron will continue to dominate the area?