Hacker News Reader

Comment by utunbu | Hacker News Reader

I've jumped between note-taking Apps, Evernote, Bear, Typora, Notion, Obsidian, ..., you name it. Finally settled down with Obsidian as I can manage note files directly such as using Syncthing for backing up and syncing. This one does seem interesting and possible to integrate into my workflow, gotta give it a try.

View on HN

I went through the same process and got stuck on GoodNotes on the iPad. Once I got used to using the Pencil for sketching, marking up other documents, and handwriting notes (when that makes sense), I was hooked.

Obsidian is pretty cool and is progressing rapidly. If their iPad client gets Pencil support then I will probably end up there as well.

Same for me. Surprising that Obsidian doesn’t support native pencil option. I tried with excalidraw plug-in and it’s not sleek.

> Surprising that Obsidian doesn’t support native pencil option.

The app was only just released. I hope that it is coming.

With the new Quick Capture stuff I'm all in on Apple Notes. Drafts was a bit more slick when it comes to just capturing and acting on text, sure. But all the nerd-favorite apps like Drafts and Obsidian are heavily text focused. So am I! But I also really like taking handwritten notes.

the thing that really soured me on apple notes is that, not only did they remove precise drawing and zoom, but they flattened all of the previously vector-based drawings i had on my ipad pro. they did this without any forewarning at all via an ordinary ios/ipados update (no popup, no release notes, nothing at all). before that, it was poised to replace all of my paper notetaking and drawing, especially with the handwriting recognition stuff coming to fruition that they promised with the debut of the original 2015 ipad pro.

Argh, that's annoying. I personally don't know why proper outlining support is absent from, basically, every single note-taking app that is not a literal outliner (like OmniOutliner) and, with Apple Notes, why I can't take truly freeform handwritten notes as I can in OneNote. (If OneNote didn't have awful performance and reliability I might just use it.)

I'm in a similar spot, recently started using Obsidian and am enjoying it. It's far from perfect, but it is better than the others imo. And the fact that it is all markdown based means no lock-in which is fantastic.

If you're looking for Obsidian, but with a nicer UI, Reflect is definitely worth trying. (https://reflect.app)

Is it open-source and cross-platform, like Obsidian?

I don't know if this was rhetorical or not, but I read through the blog and found no indication that it's open-source. The only platforms I saw mentioned were macOS and iOS (Android was mentioned once but I think it was more of a future thing) and it appears the final price will be $160 per year.

From what I saw of the website and the blog posts, I'm not sure how this is better than Obsidian. The original comment mentions a nicer UI but the UI doesn't seem that much different. One of the things I love about Obsidian is how customizable the UI actually is.

Obsidian isn’t open source.

How do you handle sync to mobile with Syncthing? Obs mobile only supports iCloud and their own sync service.

"möbius sync" works pretty well.

This is one thing I've been keeping an eye on. I cannot find a way of doing that now; I don't think I can make the Möbius Sync the other commenter mentioned work either since it can only access files under its own App directory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com