Bicycle For Your Mind
Path
2021 Review
Focus on Obsidian
This is an easy post to write. 2021 was the year of Obsidian for me.
Obsidian took over all my writing. The best feature of Obsidian is the plugin infrastructure.
The schemar/obsidian-tasks: Task management for the Obsidian knowledge base. and the mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban: Create markdown-backed Kanban boards in Obsidian. have extended Markdown and Obsidian in ways I hadn’t thought possible.
I am not using one of the major plugins in the ecosystem: obsidian-dataview. Haven’t had the time to understand how that works.
Not sold on the whole Knowledge Management bandwagon either. I use Obsidian to write everything. I am not creating a second brain or anything like that. I am writing in it. Everything. The goal is to write. Use it as the main text editor, and manage my schedule and tasks while I am in the program. It is my one-stop-shop for all my writing. The charm of the graph-view of my notes is lost on me. Not interested in that. As you can tell, my use-case is different from the usual Obsidian evangelist.
I love the community around the product. There are new plugins and themes appearing at an astonishing rate and they enhance the experience of using Obsidian.
It is an efficient Markdown based text editor for me.
Pain Points in Obsidian
- Non-native. Doesn’t support Services and other system features. It bugs me. Typora proves that an Electron app can support Services and other system features. Wish Obsidian caught up with that.
- Live Preview. I am sure I don’t need that. Hiding the Markdown syntax is not something I care for.
- Electron apps have a tendency to feel “heavy.” I don’t have a better way of describing the experience. Drafts or iA Writer have a much lighter feel to them. I miss that sometimes.
Everything Else
- Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, and Hazel all received upgrades. They are all critical to my life on macOS.
- BBEdit and Sublime Text got major version updates and they add value to the task of wrangling order into text files.
- TaskPaper provides for my outlining needs.
Looking Forward
I need a new machine. Waiting for the next generation iMacs. I will be in the market for a new machine when that is available.
Hoping and wishing you a better 2022.
Take care.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie.
Thanks to Photo by Tyler Lastovich from Pexels