[haswell]

I used Evernote for well over a decade and I don’t regret that I did, despite the changes that eventually forced me to get rid of it and change my habits.

There is already a growing ecosystem of tools that are Obsidian-like, and if Obsidian ever went down an unpalatable path, those tools are ready and waiting.

If a no frills editor works for you, great. But at the same time, I don’t think a future problem with Obsidian is a good reason to avoid it. In a worst case, that no frills editor will open your vault just fine. But I’d personally switch to something like Logseq, which is also coming along really nicely.

In the meantime, the value that Obsidian brings to my daily life is immense. And that’s worth the risk of eventually needing to find something new, especially when I know that the underlying data is completely portable.

[PurpleRamen]

> There is already a growing ecosystem of tools that are Obsidian-like

That very much depends on the definition of "like". Most are very different in their concepts and abilities or even foundation. They are mostly similar, if you compare it to cloud-tools, or old commercial tools.

[haswell]

I think this is fair, and maybe “Obsidian-compatible” would be a better way to describe it.

With that said, there are a few key tools that are extremely similar conceptually, e.g. Logseq/Roam. Logseq in particular feels like “Opinionated Obsidian”. And this is where most of the tooling growth has been occurring through plugins.

[bosie]

> There is already a growing ecosystem of tools that are Obsidian-like, and if Obsidian ever went down an unpalatable path, those tools are ready and waiting.

can you name a few? i have currently installed and enabled 65 plugins. Granted, that is mostly because the obsidian team does not know how to build a good product, leading me to use plugins. but even then, the functionality is not that bad (templater, book search, dataview, loom, custom file explorer/command palette etc)

[criddell]

The fact that the product is so extensible is a sign to me that they know how to build an excellent product.

I'm currently using 1 community plugin and have only enabled a handful of the core plugins.

I personally wish they would stop adding features to Obsidian. It feels complete to me.

[bosie]

i disagree. extensible is super duper but even that isn't great with Obsidian from a dev perspective. so the product "Obsidan Plugin API for devs" is also lacking.

and core features should be in core (dataview for example). what is most shocking though is that sync and publish are horrendous implementation of said features. i would kind of get it for other stuff but together they are 20 bucks plus tax per month. just now sync has 'merged' a note on my iphone (no changes on iphone though) and completely scrambled the note. same with another 3 notes. if i did not check the note by chance now, i would have missed it.

the entire UI around a sync feature is bad.

[haswell]

Logseq is at the top of the list and would be the most similar/robust in terms of linking, visualizations and plugins [0]. It’s also open source, and I think a lot of development would shift in this direction if Obsidian ever angered the community.

Roam Research is also conceptually similar but I’ve spent less time digging into the tooling.

I’ve also been keeping an eye on Zettlr and Joplin, but these are not as flexible and their usefulness would depend on how you’re using Obsidian.

I misplaced the link to the repo right, but there was a “universal markdown notes migrator” project I found on GH back when I was evaluating Obsidian that looked promising and the goal was to facilitate movement between tools.

- [0]https://github.com/logseq/awesome-logseq

[dv35z]

Check out: VSCodium + FOAM (VSCode plugin). Cross-linked markdown notes. You can then use MkDocs/MkDocs-Material and ROAMLinks (MkDocs plugin) to publish as a cross-linked HTML site.