Love love love obsidian. The tool is aesthetically pleasing, built-in vim mode surprisingly well (a few minor glitches with the cursor blinking) — but above all else, the plug-in community takes the cake.

Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "second brain." Previous note taking applications I've tried in the past (e.g. Zettlr, Bear) lacked the vibrant developer community that Obsidian has cultivated.

Hats off to the founder and the Obsidian team!

[0] - https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkas...

Did you try https://logseq.com/? I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source Logseq.

The biggest fundamental difference is that Logseq is an outliner whereas Obsidian is more flexible to any kind of text you throw at it. So if I am trying to write prose it feels constraining for everything to be a bullet.

That said Obsidian and Logseq are interoperable since they both run on a local folder of plain text files. Meaning you can switch over to Logseq for your outlining needs and use Obsidian for everything else.

(slightly biased since I helped on Obsidian 1.0, but I am a lover of all plain text tools)

I always feel like the term “outliner” misrepresents the approach to note-taking that tools like Logseq, (Org-)Roam, RemNote, etc. have chosen. I don’t really have/know a good alternative label, but there is so much more to it than just “outlining” your thoughts in a list of bullet points.

Often when I write down my thoughts this way, it is more like following associative threads. I focus on a particular thought and relate something to it, which now becomes my new focus. Then I defocus and focus on something completely different. Kind-of like these threads here on HN. I wouldn’t call this outlining, it is more like spawning local contexts, nested textual environments to think in.

This is something that I miss the most when working with linear text structures as in Obsidian. I know you can indent and fold indentations in/out, but for me it doesn’t feel natural the way it does in notebook apps that organize text in block-trees. I also cannot reorganize or reference those indentations easily. I feel liberated (in thinking) with those bullets rather than constrained, but of course it is a matter of personal preference and habits.

I like this approach too, just drilling down and fanning out as needed as you research or think.

I’ve used dozens of outlining and mind mapping tools from FreeMind to Logseq to OmniOutliner and more… But for me Obsidian, still wins because of the plugins. Check out the selection of outlining, link management (in particular link graphing) and crucially the refactoring plugins.

At the basic level the outlining plugins give you shortcuts keys to rapidly realign, reindent, fold and navigate a large tree of indented text, and when you combine that with the ability to take an entire level of that tree and just slice it out into its own document, leaning a link to the new document in its place (which other plugins can use to display an inline preview of that document) … it’s just amazing.

I've been using Obsidian for a while and have some plug-ins, but nothing like you're talking about. Would you make some specific recommendations on the plug-ins you're referring to?

- For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

- For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian

- Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images

- For analysing the content for some useful stats there's: https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis but this is for a relatively specific sort of analysis.

- More general and flexible analysis and graph visualisations are available from the combination of https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain , https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview and https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... in short query your notes and note metadata like its a database, build reports and data visualisations, and then excalibrain is a whole thing built on top of that power.

- Dynamic embeds of outside content are available from https://github.com/dhamaniasad/obsidian-rich-links and https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed depending on the style and use you like. While there is a built in functionality to preview the links to other notes when you hover over them https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Page+preview which has a demo here https://youtu.be/dmnVml_jbsQ?t=222

- And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when you use the refactor to cut out a new note, the automations will trigger, ask you to give the note a new heading, tags, and you have a little script that checks last modified time of the folder tree of text files, and looks at the folder of the last modified time and asks you in that popup if you want to move the new note to the folder the note you cut it from is located in. Or anything else you can imagine using outside automation and scripting tools on your plain text markdown files.

These are just a start and if you haven't already browsed the plugins at https://obsidian.md/plugins I wholeheartedly recommend it, people are adding new cool things pretty often and other plugins add new functionality that makes them worth checking out if they were previously not something that you found interesting. I do a read through of the plugin list probably at least once every month or two just to see what's new, and more often if I'm experimenting with changes to my workflow.