| For me, a lot of it is that the "plumbing on the outside" approach of Markdown isn't nice. I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025. Maybe Obsidian appeals to a particular type of techie who uses Vim and stores all their files locally, compared to someone who isn't technical and just wants "documents in the cloud". I should add that I dislike Notion for most things. In particular, the database support (which a lot of people here are singing praises about), tables, lack of diagramming, and the poor search. But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage. That's because Notion only has hierarchy. It doesn't have a sense of "cross cutting". So everyone organizes their stuff in completely different ways, and you have to deal with poorly thought-out folder hierarchies. Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool. Lately I've been using Linear as a replacement for Notion for some things, and it's just a much better designed tool. |
For the same reason they liked it in the UX of 1985 and 1995...because Markdown gives you the ability to actually see the format codes that create your formatting and fix them if they're not what you want.
Now Obsidian (or any other Markdown editor) certainly isn't WordPerfect, but the one thing that diehard WordPerfect users loved was the ability to hit "reveal codes" and gain exacting control over their formatting...something Microsoft Word has never even tried to do. Markdown is far, far simpler, but the same control is there.