I have been using obsidian for notes and writing for a couple of months now. I’m surprised. Normally, when I’m using a tool like this, I would have found all sorts of limitations and problems by now. Something that would annoy me enough, or prove inconvenient enough that I would just stop using it. I haven’t, not so far anyway.
For a short while I used Scrivener for writing. It was good. Useful, but weirdly limited. And since I only had it as a pc application and I do most of my writing on an iPad with a wireless keyboard now, that just proved too much of a barrier.
For many years I used google docs for writing. It was available on any device I had at hand, and it was pretty easy to use, but I could never get over some of the awful export problems I had. Writing a blog post like this would be simple, but I would have to jump through a few hoops to actually post that post. Exporting, converting, checking that links or images didn’t get broken. I would often need to use a pc to post since I couldn’t get the files I needed in the places I needed on a phone or iPad.
Not only that, but google docs on iOS has a bad habit of popping the OS keyboard toolbar up over the words you are writing. It doesn’t know how to not be in the way. I would often find myself writing a line or two completely blind since the words were under the toolbar. It was an annoyance I got used to, but I still didn’t like it.
Obsidian has never done that, and even if it did I can actually scroll the page up manually or I can turn on typewriter scrolling that keeps the line you are working on more or less in the center of the page. Really useful for writing long documents or stories comfortably.
If I used google keep or notepad or notes to keep some link or idea or list, I would often forget I had even made the note. I would look weeks later and see that it said I should buy batteries or something. I haven’t only just started to use obsidian for this, but it seems a much better general purpose notebook than keep. I think I like that I get to organize it myself and it isn’t trying to help me out. It isn’t trying to be clever. It’s just a notebook.
One of the best things that I have found is that you can add the link to a YouTube video on a canvas and it will let you play that video right from the canvas. It’s an absolute game changer for organizing technical tutorials or videos on some esoteric art topic. Works for web pages too. You can scroll and read them right in the canvas panel. I recently wrote a few complex shaders and obsidian proved invaluable in keeping all of these sources organized.
And just today I discovered that the IPad version allows you to split screen two different documents. So I can have a story I’m working on right beside my notes and research document, because I always have a notes and research document for every story. If it’s a thousand word story I probably have a notes and research document that’s at least that length, if not longer. It’s just how I roll.
Having two documents up at once is an absolute game changer for writing on the iPad. I know it shouldn’t be. There are a lot of programs that do that, and I could always just use a PC and have as many windows open as I want, but writing on the iPad is very comfortable and gets me into a flow more easily than using my pc. The pc is for pc things. Big art tools and coding. Writing fits very comfortably on my iPad.
I haven’t really run into any roadblocks or inconveniences yet, and I don’t see any on the horizon. I used google docs for a lot of years, so I suppose that’s the record to beat. Well, obsidian, do you have it in you to take the title?