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by seanwilson 886 days ago
What about using Visual Studio Code with your notes in multiple Markdown files with automatic syncing to Google Drive via the desktop Google Drive app?

Searching multiple files, editing and organising files is quick and simple on desktop, and you can fallback to Google Doc on mobile when needed (Google Drive app lets you view .md files, there's no way to edit?). You can install extensions as well (like for doing inline maths) and if you already use Visual Studio Code for coding it's one less thing to learn.

I'm not familiar with Obsidian, which gets mention a lot. What does it improve on compared to the above if you don't need a mobile app or complex linking between Markdown files?
2 comments
jbiggley 886 days ago
+1 for Obsidian or other platforms that support Markdown format natively. Being platform locked is terrible for knowledge management and Markdown has made me less concerned with future knowledge access in a post-Obsidian world. (Yes, I said it! There will be a post-Obsidian world.)
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wfhBrian 886 days ago
A couple years ago I switched from Google Docs to Obsidian.

Unfortunately, as other have mentioned, Google Docs omits some seriously impactful features.

All it would've taken, at the time, was collapsible/foldable headings for me to stick with Docs.

But since then, I've grown to appreciate the millions other things Obsidian has to offer, like the ease of developing plugins which, to me, make Obsidian feel like it's an OS within my OS.

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MonaroVXR 886 days ago
I'm using it and syncing my notes to GitHub, these are technical notes
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sesm 886 days ago
If you don't need to sync with mobile, then adding your `notes` directory to IDE projects is a great solution. I've been doing that for a long time.

Eventually I switched to Obsidian for mobile support (syncing with free 'Remotely Save' plugin using S3). There are 2 other features of Obsidian that I came to appreciate over time:

1. Daily Notes

2. Calendar via Full Calendar plugin that uses your daily notes as one of event sources. So I can freely mix my Google Calendar 'official' meetings with my personal timeslot allocations for current day.

It is possible to have both of this features in IDE too, but with Obsidian they come for free.

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