Reza Ghafari

My Note-Taking App Selection Saga: Transitioning from OneNote to Obsidian

I had a post few years back called From Shiny OneNote to Boring Plain Text, where I explained migrating from OneNote to VScode for note taking. That didn’t last long because:

  • vscode is not great at showing preview in the same page so you see md file most of the time

  • vscode cannot keep and preview inline images. You have to keep and see images separately.

This made me go back to OneNote which was a shame. I stayed with OneNote and also enjoyed some drawing on it with my tablet.

Things that I hated about OneNote all along and specially between 2021-2023 was:

  • OneNote is a formatting mess. You cannot have plain text or md files. You have to keep formatting your documents. You notes have different fonts, colors and structure.

  • Navigation panel on the left is not very intuitive, the way a file system navigator is.

  • Search is horrible

  • App is not regularly updated with features specially on Macos and there is not community of devs / plugins for it.

In 2023 I tried migrating to Obsidian but the migration tool didn’t manage to move most of my notes so I left it at that. I tried it again in July 2024 and this time the migration tool managed to migrate most of my notes. It failed on few pages and few images (about 20, out of hundreds) and I migrated to Obsidian in few hours.

What I love about Obsidian so far is:

  • I finally have plain text! No funny formatting all the time.

  • Search is very capable

  • Navigation pane on the left is very intuitive similar to a file system

  • I keep the vault in a shared cloud storage which is also a Github repo. With Git I can keep an eye on things that change.

  • Everything has a keyboard shortcut

  • Lot of extensions exist. Whatever you can think of. Having a community of devs behind a product just makes it greater!

  • Mermaid diagraming is inbuilt

Things I do not like so much about Obsidian:

  • Even though you can have inline images but the actual image file has to be kept in a separate folder and linked to your note. I guess that is the way md files work anyway. Not a big deal.

  • Sync across devices is paid. If you do not want the paid version then it’s not easy specially if you want to access your notes from Android. This is not too much of a problem as I only want readonly access on my mobile phones. Most of my writing is done on the laptop.

  • No direct drawing. Not a deal breaker for me.