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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Yeah I've tried Obsidian but it just has too much going on and feels very cluttered, but doesn't have features like automatic sync between devices.
Isn't that funny how different our experiences are? I liked Obsidian because it felt less cluttered than some of the others. But that might be the theme and fonts I set up, i'm not sure. I will agree with the sync. I'm fine paying for a service like that, but $8/mo paid annually is too much. I did end up paying for a year to see if it was worth it. And while it's flawless and fast, I can't justify that continued cost. Once my year is up I'll look at syncthing or the CouchDB plugin sync to see if that does what I want and performs well. Shouldn't be too hard as it's literally just folders full of plain text files...
Yeah we can have very different ideas of what works for us haha.
Like I consider markdown editors cluttered and complex, because there's not a simple toolbar up top to format everything in rich text. It feels like a one step forward, 2 steps back kind of deal to me.
I showed my son Obsidian and a little explanation of how markdown works. Explaining the draw (to me at least) is that I can format text without taking my hands of the keyboard. A few hours later he tells me he discovered that there are shortcut buttons a the top of the screen to do bold, italics, underscore, etc and "you just need to click on them so it's a shortcut!"
I do like markdown editors that do the live preview of the rendered text instead of the side-by-side view of Markdown on one and HTML on the other. Obsidian sort of just changes to rendered text as you type.
To be fair to Obsidian, the default view is like three panes making it look busy, but you can toggle off both the left and right sidebar, leaving just the edit view which can be switched between edit and reading modes. Even the various toolbar icons need not be visible, and you could just use shortcuts to call them.
I use Syncthing to sync my Obsidian notes between desktop, server, Android, iPad, and Android tablet - it happens seamlessly in the background complete with version control.
With syncthing how well does obsidian handle edits on 2 devices at nearly the same time? Like if I make some edits on my phone while looking at a project and then before syncthing has synced the files, paste some images in on my desktop, does it handle that well?
Syncthing warns you and asks you to choose which is newer. If you have versions set it should also keep older versions for any roll back. But I make a point to rather work in one device at a time. I actually sync all my devices to a Docker instance running Syncthing, so it works from a central point versus all devices syncing to all devices. That Docker version is on 24/7.