I have been using Obsidian as my main writing tool for a couple of years now. I run it on my iPad, my Android phone, and my Windows laptop (that might become a Linux laptop fairly soon, but that’s another post). It works great on all platforms, and it is simple to sync my work from one platform to another. On the extremely rare occasion when I get a version conflict between two of the platforms it is flagged and fairly easy to correct.

I love that it is simple, and other than basic spell check and some very simple autocompletion in cases where I am mocking up code, it just gets out of my way and lets me write. There are no AI intrusions trying to help me write in a certain way. There are no grammar or style checkers, because those can fuck straight off into the sun. I speak and write in English and I know how I want it to sound. Language is not a set of rules, it is the way we convey the noise in our heads to another person and that is just as mess and inconsistent and fluid as it sounds. I’ll write it the way I want, thank you very much.

Using Obsidian does have a downside though. It makes me a little lazy. Not in the words I use, or the ways I construct sentences. I’m lazy in the way I use Obsidian.

Obsidian, by itself, is a very simple, almost spartan, program. It’s really just an app you can use to take notes. You can sort of organize those notes any way you want. They can be highly structured and labeled, or you can just put them anywhere and use a system of tags to order them. I sort of do a little of both. But that’s not really important. Mostly what you do with Obsidian is take notes.

Then there are all the things that Obsidian can do. There is a whole catalog of user created addons for Obsidian that can turn it into almost anything. Want to use it for web development? Sure. Want to create graphs and charts and diagram drawings? No problem. Want to use it to create a whole book-keeping system? Looks like you probably can. There are so many addons for Obsidian that it can be a little overwhelming.

I use a small handful of writing tools and some exporting tools and an addon that lets me sync through my own setup rather than using their paid service. Sure their service isn’t particularly expensive and it’s probably convenient, but I like doing that stuff myself anyway. What I haven’t done, at least recently, is gone through the whole list of addons and looked for some that would help me.

Maybe something in there would be revolutionary. Maybe there would be a tool that would save me time and solve problems with my workflow. Except, right now, I can’t really imagine what that might be. Short of pulling the words directly out of my head, I don’t know how much more frictionless my process could be. Obsidian is just that simple and works just that well.

Now, I know that at some point, the developers will stop working on it, or it will be out of date with all the other tools I use, or there will be some other tool that is even more revolutionary to my writing, but at the moment, I can’t really imagine what that might be. I will keep my ears perked for something better, but for now, I will keep writing in these stupid simple markdown files and watch as it catches my many spelling mistakes and typos.