Yesterday I wrote in Getting to Like Obsidian
The combination of Obsidian and Zotero, which I started using for reading references, even looks like something to replace Evernote with. This is the first time I’ve thought that in the past 4 years for longer than an hour.
Coincidentally today was my annual renewal of my Evernote subscription. I guess that I now have a year to remove myself from Evernote 😀
Today I moved my daily notes (a bullet list of things I do during the day) to Obsidian from WP. It was a frictionless change. A next experiment will be to take a random recent note and a random recent bookmark from my Evernotes and see how I can add them to the Obsidian/Zotero combination in a meaningful way.
Start the count down! 😉
@ton I wish Obsidian was released under an open source license.
Foam is interesting to me in part because it’s open source. Much more developer focused pieces it’s built on.
I wasn’t aware of Foam yet, thanks. Looks similar indeed. The whole install through terminal/clone from github is a bit off-putting for users like me though. Obsidian isn’t open source, true, but as it’s a viewer on my data, for now I don’t mind much. Maybe if Foam gets better, it will become the next viewer I use for my data. It’s all md text files afer all.
@boris Yes, you’re right that that is a concern. e.g. forum.obsidian.md/t/open-so… The license info on Obsidian to me reads like a not very thought through way of positioning the app, and it reads like no legal person reviewed that EULA. On top is ‘you’re leasing this copy of the app, not owning it’ stuff that I don’t really want to see anywhere near my tools.
@www.zylstra.org yeah I start worrying about functionality on top of Markdown files being enclosed. The personal / private use only makes it less risky. More experiments to come!
@boris Yes, you’re right that that is a concern. e.g. forum.obsidian.md/t/open-so… The license info on Obsidian to me reads like a not very thought through way of positioning the app, and it reads like no legal person reviewed that EULA. On top is ‘you’re leasing this copy of the app, not owning it’ stuff that I don’t really want to see anywhere near my tools.
I just realised that it’s a month this Friday that I started using markdown textfiles and Obsidian for notes, and that I have not used my local WordPress install at all during that time, nor Evernote much. I made 4 notes in EN in a month: 1 bookmark, 1 shopping list, 2 call logs. Compared to 47 notes the month prior to it.
Day logs and work notes are now in markdown files, internal wikipages are now my Garden of the Forking Path notes in markdown files. Those were previously in my local WP install. Bookmarks aren’t mindlessly send to Evernote at a touch of a button anymore, with the vague intention of reading later and/or having it come up in a search at some point in the future. Reading ‘later’ never really works for me (Instapaper never succeeded in really landing in my workflow). So now it’s either I read it and want to keep it for reference by adding a snapshot to Zotero, or I did not read it and trust that if it’s important it will resurface at some point again. Other elements in my use of Evernote I’ve recreated on the go in text files quite naturally: Folders for each of my areas of activity match up with what I have as Notebooks in EN.
It feels like coming full circle, as I have for the most part been note taking in simple text files since the late ’80s. I started paying for Evernote in 2010, after using the free version for a while, and used wiki in parallel to text files for note taking for a number of years before that (2004-2008 I think). Textfiles always had my preference, as they’re fast and easy to create, but it needed a way to connect them, add tags etc., and that was always the sticking point. Tools like Obsidian, Foam and others like it are mere viewers on top of those text files in my file system. Viewers that add useful things like visualising connections, and showing multiple queries on the underlying files in parallel. It adds what was missing. So after a month, I am getting more convinced that I am on a path ditching Evernote.
Time to start syncing some of my notes folders to my phone (through NextCloud), and choose a good editor for Android, so I can add/use/edit them there too.
photo by me, London 2012, license CC BY SA
Today I deleted the Green Elephant. Ever since I removed Gmail and other Google services back in 2016, Evernote was next in line, but harder to get rid off.
Last year July when I started using Obsidian, I almost immediately realised and quickly experienced how it opened up space for me to finally ditch Evernote. I used Evernote last in August 2020. This February I exported all my Evernotes and started bringing them into my growing collection of mark down text files, with Obsidian as a viewer.
Today I deleted my Evernote account. It felt slightly odd. Even if I hadn’t touched Evernote in over 8 months, even if I had exported everything and double checked that it worked, there still was some lingering sense of dread of the finality of punching the delete button. But after 11 years of Evernote, the Green Elephant is no longer in my room, and another single point of failure and the final silo that part of my workflow depended upon is now gone.