Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by orbital-decay 889 days ago
> I am not going to build my PIM around proprietary tool with subscription!

If your concern is about the lack of a clear migration path, Obsidian vaults are just folders with markdown files, which can be used with absolutely anything, you can literally use them in Emacs or VSCode if you want. The most popular PDF annotation plugin is AGPL-3 licensed and its format is also transparent so you can migrate to something else.
1 comments
keep320909 889 days ago
> which can be used with absolutely anything

Not really, markdown has tons of tiny implementation details. And I can not use PDF annotation plugin in Emacs...

link
orbital-decay 889 days ago
I'm saying that because I actually tried. There are Obsidian and customizable markdown modes/plugins for both Emacs and VSCode. My notes are usually cross-referenced, have pictures, occasional Mermaid diagrams, and are often heavy on math and code.

> markdown has tons of tiny implementation details. And I can not use PDF annotation plugin in Emacs

The same can be said about any other open format, I guess. There's no free lunch, you're always locked in by the implementation/workflow details, and have to write actual code (or use the code written by someone else) to migrate off to a different tool. The point is to not be locked by the format obfuscation or the storage.

link
keep320909 889 days ago
I have text notes that go back to 1997, PDF annotation notes back to 2003. I use PDF annotations for books, articles and webpages (save to PDF). About 70 gigabytes of annotated PDFs at this point.

I need to be absolutely sure PDF annotation tool will be around in a year 2050! Obsidian may withdraw their subscription offer at any time! Or raise subscription to $10000 per year (someone here says much higher price would be a steal!). I will always be able to run Logseq PDF annotator! Maybe in virtual machine. Or I will patch it (I have source code!!!). I have control over it!

And I really really hate fiddling with plugins. I was never much of Vim/Emacs guy for this reasons (prefer integrated IDEs such Idea). Logseq just works without setting up dozens of plugins and scripts. I use vanilla version with two plugins (video timestamp annotations and extra theme).

link