Leaning Back Into Obsidian

In 2022 or so, I leaned hard into Obsidian for my note-taking. The combination of the keyboard-friendly command pallet, the customization, the power of linking notes, and the knowledge that my notes would always be accessible anywhere in plain text was really satisfying for me.

My only nit-pick was that the mobile experience sucked if you used iCloud sync, unless you paid for Obsidian Sync, in which case it was flawless.

I paid for sync for about a year, but then gave Craft (a mostly Mac/iOS first app that synced natively through iCloud) a whirl, then just tried regular Apple Notes for a while. The appeal of Apple Notes was that I could access it from anywhere, the sync was seamless, and I could easily add a picture, a sketch, or audio note or whatever.

I migrated all my Obsidian notes to it and tried it for about a year. I grew to really hate it though. I am just so accustomed to writing in plain text now, that I found it slowed me down when I wanted to convert something into a header by clicking or tapping on a little button, instead of just typing ## or whatever. And getting text in and out of it was a pain because the formatting next worked.

Anyway, like with Things, I’m back to Obsidian, and I’m so happy with the choice. (I just caved and paid for the syncing service.) I’m leaning heavily into Daily Notes in Obsidian to try to remember all the things that are happening in my day. And I finally found some time today to set up a Shortcut that runs off of my always-on Mac every day to create a new daily note with all my calendar events to my Obsidian vault. Since Obsidian is always running on that Mac, it means it’s always syncing can open my Daily Note and already have my calendar populated to start adding notes to.

I’m planning on doing some more tweaks to this set-up, by logging new notes I create in Anybox, and maybe inserting the weather for the day and a few other things.