Obsidian
2022-01-02

As covid-19 hit us all my way of note taking has changed I started to love the format of markdown for writing things like notes assignments initially, Well my initial shift to latex hasn't been that great as I didn't understood what is going on there when I say it at first glance so I thought let us write things in docs like word or google docs and then slowly move to the latex during those I loved writing stuff in LibreOffice and google docs but then I was introduced to the GitHub that is the first time I saw markdown to edit the readme file I looked at the markdown guide and I was amazed how simple it was how note taking was way easy and I also created my blog using markdown and GitHub pages and at this point time I thought it would be nice If I have an app to write edit read markdown files so then I started my haunt

Apostrophe

Back in those days I was in ubuntu with gnome setup so my software setup recommended me with two options marker and apostrophe , I started with apostrophe to be frank I loved the app and the way it was with focus mode and Hemmingway mode I started using and it was light and very flexible way to write thing but the only issue I have is it's support for maths and it's exporting options I don't blame apostrophe for this as it uses pandoc which is popular file converter and pandoc support for markdown to pdf was bad as it wouldn't render things then I used chrome puppeteer to convert md to html and then print page to pdf it worked fine and I was so happy with that then I moved to windows and pandoc doesn't support windows and it also doesn't allow me to edit files on mobile which is a second issue

Typora

Then when I was in windows I used typora which is an excellent writing application and it is beta at that point of time I loved it and I thank great devs out there who ported it as a flatpak to Linux I loved it and it support for things and way it handled things it is good and it removed the one drawback I have with apostrophe and then one day I got a message there is a typora update and when I saw that boom it asked me for licence and it became paid I don't blame typora devs for this because it is great applications but I felt I am not such a great writer to buy that to write my things and then I again started quest

Joplin

Then came a yet another most beautiful app Joplin which is completely open source and supported by lot of devs and it is the most and best recommended app for note taking and I loved it android sync feature and I was amazed the way it worked in all the platforms I use and love the way it does my job much simpler but the only issue I have with Joplin is it cannot open a folder containing markdown files because Joplin by default uses a file extension of JEX I guess which can be converted to all famous file formats which is fine but It became a different job when it comes to store them I need to convert every notes I wrote to markdown for better access and opening while converting most types it all went fine

Obsidian

The main reason initial reason for switching to obsidian is it filetype it stores everything in markdown and I like the live preview which remained me typora but soon after installing obsidian I realized it is not a small and simple writing application but full set of tools for doing things in markdown and I learned few things from guides YouTube videos I saw and now I am happy with obsidian and it's vaults

Things I like

  1. vault feature
  2. daily notes folder which was set to my Jekyll blog posts folder so that I can easily write them with one click
  3. calendar and planner

things I wish to have

  1. more export options
  2. And making it opensource (even though it is free and lot community of developers with custom plugins it would be great if it open sources it source code may be just like elementary os whose source can be seen by donating them and we also get there beta builds)