Over the many iterations of my blogs in recent years, the search for the best note-taking tool has been a recurring theme. Evernote, Simplenote, OneNote, Notion, or just a DokuWiki - I’ve tried almost everything. My priorities have shifted over time; for example, I almost never edit my notes on my smartphone.

My latest discovery is Obsidian, which is essentially just a text editor for Markdown but allows for seamless internal linking to other notes. This ties into the concept of the Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten is a collection of notes where each note is put into context with the others. The idea is that if you want to delve deeper into a topic, you can quickly see the connections and dependencies by following the trail of notes. A topic essentially unfolds before you in its entirety.

This is great if you’re publishing academic texts or at least doing academic work. I work at an eCommerce company and don’t write treatises in my private life either. It’s not that the links aren’t cool, but I simply don’t have the need to write down knowledge on a scale that would make the system worthwhile for me.

I need a system where I can collect my documents, smaller thoughts, and ideas. A concept for a project, invoices, or funny pictures. You can already tell, it’s a bunch of rather unrelated things. And it’s precisely for this use case that Obsidian loses its added value. I create notes or files in a folder hierarchy within Obsidian. So why not just use the normal file system and the specialized programs for those files? Why load a whole program into memory just to access files in the end?

Synchronization and search are good arguments here. Obsidian offers both good private synchronization and an improved search function via plugins. Still, the tool restricts me more than it offers any advantage. That’s why I’ve since uninstalled Obsidian. It’s great for larger tasks and projects with a lot of information and dependencies. But for personal life? For that, Obsidian is too much and too sluggish for me.

But I’ve already found an alternative for myself. More flexible and more secure.