Obsidian Replaced Notion for Me

In my search for the perfect all-in-one note taking application, I’ve used Google Docs, Apple Notes, Notion, Trello, and even a todo.txt file.

Most of them have a lot of features with an easy-to-use user interface with only one being absolutely bare bones but none quite fit what I wanted. Unless I invested a significant amount of time building a bespoke application for myself, my search for the perfect note taking, to-do list, calendar, project board tool will be a fruitless never-ending search.

Obsidian, with its vast library of community plugins comes pretty damn close, though.

I discovered Obsidian while listening to the Ruby For All podcast and the fact that it was a markdown editor caught my attention. Looking over its features I was glad to see an editor that resembled something I was already familiar with while being able to write in Markdown, steering away from the classic WYSIWYG panel.

Daily Notes & Organization

Today’s daily note is the feature that I mainly use in the app and although it is a basic feature that can be created in other note taking apps. The power of this feature comes from being able to link these “sections” of notes to a main topic that can be created as a table of contents for a subject or topic.

Let’s say for instance I’m fixing an issue within a Rails application and I’m reading documentation on Active Storage. Before Obsidian, I would takes notes within the Apple Notes app under a folder. Some notes are a single sentence and others are a few pages filled with things I want to remember and reference back on. Organizing these notes were a pain and most of the time I never got around to cleaning them up.

I’d forget about the notes that I took and when the same problem arose again in another application I ended up going back in circles re-reading the documentation to have to learn again.

Creating links to sections of notes within the application and creating a page as a table of contents to these notes has been a easy and seamless way to organize notes without having to manually copy-pasta to new pages.

CSS Snippets

You can’t customize the look an feel of Apples Notes application and you can only do so much with Google Docs. The second closest thing to customizing an app or pages for your notes is Notion but it too fell short as it didn’t organize well IMO.

However, Obsidian gives you the freedom to customize certain (not all) aspects of the application itself so that you can enhance or modify the look & feel with it’s CSS Snippets.

You can read more about how to start with CSS Snippets here.

The snippets folder is located in the vault folder that you created when first installing Obisidan under the hidden directory /.obsidian.

Another thing to note is that you will have to toggle on the custom snippets that you create in the ‘Settings’ panel under the ‘Appearance’ Tab.

Obsidian incorporates a ‘hot reloading’ feature for CSS Snippets, ensuring that any modifications made in the CSS are instantly reflected upon saving the snippet.

The CSS in the snippets file can be modified within the body selector and Obsidian uses a vast amount of CSS Variables to set its properties. The list of CSS Variables can be found in their documentation site and customization can be made all the way from typography down to the window settings in the Obsidian application.

While the CSS Variables that you can modify give you a good amount of properties to customize your Obsidian application. I’m looking for a fully customizable look and I want the feel of it to resemble my neovim editor.

Luckily for us, we can fully customize the entire Obsidian application following the guide in the documentation and using CSS!

Syncing Issue

So far, Obsidian has met nearly all my needs as a note-taking application, offering far more features than I could ever use—especially with community plugins.

The one drawback, and one that speaks to my frugality, is the $4-per-month syncing option. It allows you to sync notes across multiple devices, including offline syncing once you reconnect to the internet. But for me, it’s unnecessary—I’m not collaborating with a team or publishing notes publicly.

For now, my search for an all-in-one notes management system has landed me here on this rock, and I’m glad I found it.