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by Kelteseth 1339 days ago
So what is difference to vscode here? I can see a cool graph view of my links. I guess the target is not directly developers when looking at their paid sync addon, because I would simply put this into a free closed gitlab repo. I will definitely try out the free version this week :)

Edit: Found md-graph that also has the same neat graph: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ianjsike...

4 comments

In my opinion links and images work much better. If you move a Markdown file or an image file to a different subdirectory, links gets fixed automatically. Absolute timesaver over a custom script I had to use previously.

And plugins! I can put a search query right within Markdown and it works. I have a unified interface over Markdown's to-do syntaxes I've left in various files. I can put a button that triggers some internal Obsidian command. I can have templates that pull from APIs and auto-populate some fields. I have variables I can easily query over. There's a git plugin you can use to auto-push/pull. There's a fully-featured mobile app (nearly feature compatible with the desktop app, plugin support and all). I have some subfolders that automatically get published on multiple websites that use a different CMS/SSG.

It's nothing you can't achieve with some custom bash/python scripts, but I don't like to spend my free time maintaining custom scripts, and Obsidian is truly a remarkably extensible product that allows me not to do that. It's easily in top 3 software products I use the most (next to a browser and a terminal emulator), I can't praise it enough.

It is mainly easy of use of the links and being backed by .md files (easy to backup anywhere and future-proof). I think of Obsidian as Org mode 90% there and easier to use.

Two example of easy of use:

- You can type "[[" anywhere and start entering the title of a new or existing note (and follow that link). If the note already exists it will fuzzy match inline as you write.

- While on a note, you can change the title and all the references get updated.

There are also plugins with extra feature like note of the day, which creates and opens a file in the format 2022-10-13 so you can easily have a file for each day. Vim node also works very well.

Plugin community - stuff like pulling tasks from notes, helping with various organisational systems, etc.

Editing in a somewhat rendered markdown - it's not quite full wysiwyg, but e.g, your heading blocks are sized right, your lists are rendered as bullets until you're editing that line, etc.

Notes first UI: Stuff like the rendered view toggle, links, inline image previews are more acccessible than in vs code due to their higher relative importance.

One big difference is that it works on desktop and mobile.

> I guess the target is not directly developers when looking at their paid sync addon, because I would simply put this into a free closed gitlab repo.

You could, and people do, but there's a bit less friction with the built-in sync.