[theshrike79]

I went from Notion and Joplin to Obsidian mostly because Obsidian stores stuff as regular files on my filesystem and I can easily interact with them with external programs and scripts.

Joplin, while being open source itself, has a "proprietary"[1] storage format I can't be arsed to figure out how to interact with.

[1] Meaning non-standard in this case, Joplin is the only software using Joplin's storage method

[stavros]

It's "just" a SQLite database, I wrote a small Python script to extract my Joplin notes to a static site:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/

[theshrike79]

On the other hand Obsidian markdown with front-matter can be fed pretty much directly to a static site generator.

Sqlite does give some speed improvements and makes searching easier.

[anonzzzies]

It’s SQLite; arguable the format most fast custom storage format requiring software (games notably) should use instead of rolling their own.

[moneywoes]

is there anything with a lightweight learning curve akin to Obsidian that uses a accessible format?

[theshrike79]

Any text editor with markdown support should work. Just VS Code with a Markdown viewer is a decent replacement.

You don't _need_ all of the fancy plugins that Obsidian has, but some of them are genuinely useful.