Trying Obsidian

Finally a note taking app with enough flexibility and features

I could never find a good way to organize code snippets in a note taking application. I have tried many note taking apps over the years and almost all had seemed designed for writing prose of varying length, and then there might be different features tacked on top, like folders, tags, formatting, etc.

I mean this is all fine if you are big into journaling or you need to record dreams or some such thing, but this type of writing has always been a struggle. The most useful thing I need to save for later is actually code snippets. I dont need to share them or publish them or anything, I need to save them for my own reference. The outboard brain or whatever you want to call it.

I want to write some

console.log('Save some bit of code in whatever language');

And then probably write some more to remind myself why I saved the thing in the first place.

At a certain point I actually gave up looking and just wrote something for myself. I called it NoteCode. I just privately published snippets to a web app so I could access my thoughts from any web browser.

And that actually worked ok until I heard about Obsidian.

Obsidian is as good as people say.

1. Obsidian is just a markdown editor, so writing in general is a breeze and the storage of the notes are just flat files on your computer. I’m actually starting this draft on Obsidian now, and can publish it straight as is if I want, or if I want to include extra functionality I can convert it to mdx to dress it up later.
2. It supports code snippets, so integrating code blocks is as simple as writing the triple backticks.
3. You can pay for fancy sync, but since I’m on iOS and Mac syncing with the built in sync is totally easy and completely fine. Start writing on my mac and its there on my phone app in seconds.
4. It also has a plugin system where you can add pretty much any feature you can think of.

I don’t see any reason to keep NoteCode running.

• Obsidian
• productivity
• notes