Hi, first time participant in the forumsā¦ I was excited about new table editing functionality when I saw the release notes. But it I am now quite disappointed, so much so I signed up to the forums to participate in this thread.
The new table editing not only does mostly not work for me (on a chromebook, see below), but it also breaks the vim key bindings, appears to override the previously functional Advanced Tables plugin, and canāt be deactivated?
I found the new table editing functionality works only in live preview mode, so Iāve now switched permanently to that, as itās the only solution that seems to work around the new misfeature. I donāt mind the markdown source, except for wide tables now go off screen and require lateral scrolling. Live preview was good for that.
I am using the flatpak package on ChromeOS/Linux for various reasons (DIGRESSION ALERT: mostly because the Android version, which also runs on Chromebooks, does not work with vim bindings, and does not support the mouse well in canvases. And BTW the Linux packages (flatpak and AppImage) do not support the international keyboard fully on Chromebooks either.)
This is not the first time vim keybinding functionality has been impacted by new āfeaturesā. It seems that no one pays attention to that, or there are no regression tests? I would like to not have to use the mouse at all at least while editing, and I am a longtime vim user, so that was one important feature when I started using Obsidian. Paying a little more attention to keyboard usability, for vim users, but not only, would be nice.
Anyway, Iāve loved Obsidian for a couple of years, but itās slowly becoming less attractive and more of a struggle for me. I am a pretty pedestrian (or maybe lazy?) user of note taking software, tend to minimalism, and try and quickly disable most bells and whistles as they come out.
Iāve seen quite a few good ideas coming out in Obsidian, but I feel often they end up not being fully developed; perhaps too many. There is also too much focus on visuals, and too little on computational intelligence or usage aspects.
For instance, canvases are promising but superficial, and would need to go deeper to be really useful, beyond just a way to lay out a few pages. I understand canvases are new-ish and would expect them to receive a lot of future effort, but even the layout is kind of painful, for instance as soon as one wants to rearrange nodes and arrows become spaghetti. Similarly, the graph view is nice to look at, but not that useful for daily use. I feel the graph view and canvases are notionally strongly related, and could benefit from some integration. For instance, a canvas could be basically a view of the underlying graph, with some additional features. And by a view of the graph I donāt mean the graph view, if that makes senseā¦
Or I never understood why, with all the emphasis on links, backlinks and the graph view, Obsidian does not include an actual graph database engine as a core feature. That could be the base of an actual graph. The dataview plugin leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion, and there are off-the-shelf graph db engines and query languages that could be integrated and could be the base for some intelligence features, for instance the canvas-graph integration above.
Anyway, could the impact on vim keybindings be fixed or at least a toggle added for the table editing feature?
Thank you.
Bernardo Rechea
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