A week ago, I made a post talking about my note-taking problem. In that post, I talked about the mess that my note-taking solution has been over the last couple of years. Then I talked about how the solution I came up with was Obsidian and an app called Quillpad. I’ve been using it for about a week now, and I have some thoughts.

First, I love Obsidian. It’s a nerd’s dream when it comes to customizability. I’ve spent more time than I should admit to watching YouTube videos on Obsidian plugins. It’s obnoxious and somewhat addicting. The thing is, there are so many cool plugins to try. It’s like checking out self-hosting apps. When I started my home lab, I went nuts at trying different Docker containers. I installed so many. Same with Obsidian plugins. It’s crazy. And most of these things I’ll never use long term. But trying them is so much fun.

I had to get that out of the way. I haven’t spent all of my time playing with plugins. I have set up a solid base for my notes. I’ve gotten everything I need transferred over, and I’m working on my organization. I have a dedicated Notes folder then I’ve structured a tree underneath that. I’ve split things out for TLC and my history site and then some general notes. I’ve also created a media directory where I can save screenshots.

The syncing thing has worked out pretty well. Honestly, much better than I thought it would. Quillpad follows just the Notes directory, and seems to sync almost immediately. I don’t like how it tends to list every single sub-directory in the notebooks list. I have a lot of those, so it makes the Notebook section pretty useless. I don’t know how I’m going to fix that, but it’s a pretty minor thing.

Obsidian, beyond the plugins, has also been very good. I’ve found that adding in a bunch of keybindings makes things quite easy to automate the creation of a note. Add in a few settings like creating a dump directory where all notes are created by default, make a world of difference.I’ve also really enjoyed the creation of daily notes. I am a sporadic journal writer at best. Mostly because my hand writing is so bad, that it is hard to actually make a journal useful since I can’t read what I’ve written down.

I will also say that I love the ability to create wiki-like links between notes. This is something I used to do a ton when I used ZimWiki back in the day. It’s nice to have it back since it allows me to organize and categorize my notes further than I normally can.

One thing I ended up having to change is the way I’ve used Nextcloud. It has nothing to do with Obsidian, but Nextcloud doesn’t like large files, and I’ve been having problems with that since I started using it. I’ve always worked around the fact that Nextcloud would sometimes not sync things because it would break on a large file. But with me using it for notes, I couldn’t put up with that. So, I’ve removed all of my photos and videos from Nextcloud. It was these that were causing me the biggest issues. I’ve put them in Proton Drive, and I’ll use that for media storage going forth. I have a blog post or a video coming up on my disappointment in Nextcloud. I’m just not very happy with it. I am a bit stuck with Nextcloud, as Quillpad only syncs via that service. If I end up having to switch away from Nextcloud for sync, then I’ll have to find another solution on mobile, which I do not want to do. I could use syncthing and a local folder, I guess. That might work. For now, it’s working well enough.

I really like this setup. For the first time in forever, this feels like home. It’s a bit convoluted, and it’s not perfect, but it’s very good. I’ve found myself using Obsidian and Quillpad for more than just notes. I’ve started scripting for videos, doing long form research, and working on documentation there. I haven’t been writing my blog posts there, but it might only be a matter of time. Obsidian is such a good Markdown editor that Neovim can’t quite keep up, no matter how much of a Vim-head I am.

So the first week had been great. Can I stick with it long term? I think I can.