Are we moving away from portability? How much is Obsidian locking our notes in?

Knowledge management
29

Right – this isn’t like being locked in to a proprietary format. A simple augmentation such as wikilinks should be relatively simple for a successor program to implement our convert.

The direct access to my content as plain text files, together with a community enthusiastic about doing things with those files, makes me confident I’ll be able to use my files where I want and keep all the work I put in.

2 Likes
30

A simple augmentation such as wikilinks

I think wikilinks are the most compatible thing, along with #tags that I see in Obsidian today. Lots of support across editors like 1Writer on iOS, VS Code extensions, etc. Same with tags — at the end of the day, autosuggestions as you type a tag is important but a grep will find them.

My original point in this thread was the deeper things like dataview plugins, kanban stuff, etc. Deeper augmentations that while they are built on top of markdown and are technically plaintext make a vault full of files less and less portable.

31

I think it’s true that it’s less portable.

But to make my intuitions more concrete, I will give scores for portability (just hunches, don’t fight me :wink:):

  • Plain text 100
  • Markdown 95
  • Markdown with wikilinks 92
  • Markdown with wikilinks and kanban 85
  • Evernote (with all of its notebooks, tags, formatting) 20

I don’t know dataview but I looked at the format for kanban in Obsidian. There are no binary blobs to decode or confusing ways of expressing things. It was very easy to understand what was going on. A coder would find relatively easy to interpret for a different app. (And if all else fails, my data is there in plain sight and I can use search-replace to tidy it up.)

So yes, using the kanban tool gives a reduction in portability, but not enough to concern me, and probably a good trade-off for someone who finds the kanban useful.

5 Likes
32

Hi! … what’s the ‘Evernote’ category?

33

For comparison?

34

I am in the process of moving all my work to Obsidian because of portability. After fourteen years, I’m moving on from Scrivener:

  1. Obsidian is already a more powerful and flexible app, especially across platforms. It is also modern and progressive.
  2. While it is possible to hack into Scrivener projects to retrieve the base RTF files or to export to different formats, the plain text of Obsidian and the universality of markdown are just so much more stable to work with, as well as being accessible to other apps without the need to export or compile.
  3. RTF was originally developed by Microsoft in 1987 and then abandoned by them in 2008. No app should be using it natively these days. And RTF is a development cul-de-sac: there is no road ahead.
  4. Scrivener is essentially a one-person company: one principal owner / developer. There’s no community input (as there is with Obsidian) and the developer is only concerned with doing things that he likes. If the ageing developer retires tomorrow or contracts Coivd and dies, the company and the app risk being lost with him.
  5. Working between macOS and iOS is a nightmare with Scrivener. Syncing across platforms is terrible, and the iOS version has miserable functionality.
  6. The development of Scrivener on a single platform and across multiple platforms has been ridiculously slow, with new versions being years late in their delivery. Obsidian is in another realm.
  7. Scrivener is designed for linear writing and ideas. Obsidian allows thoughts and writing to develop along multiple paths and in multiple directions at the same time. Obsidian allows writers to be far more expansive and expressive.

Scrivener was a great product when it launched in 2007. But it launched on tech that MS killed in 2008. It badly needs to be rethought and rewritten, but there is no sign of that happening.

So glad to have found Obsidian, and feel that my work is now far more secure and far more capable of being augmented by being in plain text / markdown.

Angel

6 Likes
35

I’ve never been an active Scrivener user, but I think that you are unfairly doing it down.

  • It has many functions for writers that aren’t available in Obsidian - or, indeed, any markdown based editor.
  • Many editors for writers are based on rtf and most word processors read and write to it (which isn’t the case for markdown). There are far fewer dialects for rtf than markdown.
  • It has strong community support in its forum even if it has no API or plugins.
8 Likes
36

It’s good to cultivate our data in a way that many applications can process it. The data’s what’s important, not the app

3 Likes
37

Hello.

I only stuck to facts.

  1. Yes, it has some functionality other apps don’t have, but nothing that can’t be replicated or improved upon in some way by using other tools. It no longer has a lead in any area.
  2. RTF remains as an unreliable, basic interchange format. It has been deprecated by Microsoft, and the company has said that it shouldn’t be used. It’s also a security risk. No app should be using it as a native format. As MS says, no user should be trusting their work to it. It was last updated thirteen years ago. RTF has no future: it doesn’t sync well with mobile devices; files don’t transfer well between different writing platforms; and it was designed in an age when the focus was on supplying apps for office workers and producing work on paper. It isn’t a format for the twenty-first century. It isn’t a professional, modern, digital, portable format. It comes with short- and long-term risks for anyone who trusts their writing to it. Although people can make that choice.
  3. It’s a community dominated by closed-minded “Scrivener can’t be improved, and we love the developer” voices: a great many of them retired people who just don’t like or want to embrace change. That support has led to myopia and well-documented turgid “development”, with very little having changed in fourteen years. Fact is that today writers want to write on any device, at any time. Scrivener, largely because of the blind alley of RTF development, can’t offer that. It was built in a time before cloud services were a thing. Instead of rebuilding the app to work in the cloud-service age, the developer stuck with RTF and has ended up with an iPhone app that is a pain to sync and very limited in its capabilities. Other modern apps are the way forward. As someone who tested Scrivener before launch, when it was in beta, I hope Scrivener will change, but it has lost ground to apps like Ulysses and Obsidian, and it will be hard to lure back those who have abandoned it already. Personally, I know far more people who have given up using Scrivener than who still use it.

Angel

38

Not sure I understand the question, sorry… It’s just my opinion on portability.

I mean that Evernote is bad for portability. Much worse than Obsidian, even if you have all kinds of plugins such as kanban, with their own ways of using markdown.

39

Wow. Really? Do you have evidence to justify this before alienating yourself?

2 Likes
40

I just got confused with ‘Evernote’ because it’s not a format but an application (I just Googled it) :slight_smile:

41

As has been said elsewhere it depends to a large degree on how you view the issue of portability and what level of functionality you wish to have should you choose to move to another app. If it is a massive issue for you then presumably you are only really interested in the standard markdown core syntax for taking notes in which case there shouldn’t be much of a problem.

If you want to make use of plug-ins to enhance the features of the app then you have to accept that there will be content such as frontmatter and codeblocks that have no real meaning in the new environment. But even those shouldn’t break anything if ported elsewhere.

The same argument is also true of any core Obsidian feature. If it is non-standard markdown and that bothers you then don’t use it.

1 Like
42

I agree with @Dor, I tried Scrivener, but could make it work for me; this is my way of saying that this is just my opinion and not intended to be detrimental towards Scrivener. My use of these apps is based on the science and engineering research that I needed to do for my job. I easily saw it being used for non-fiction and textbooks, but ultimately to me, Scrivener couldn’t shake the novel-writing biased foundation, which is why it excels in that direction. Obsidian seems to flow better for my brain.

43

@chrisaalid, I believe it’s based on the structure that you decide to use, as succinctly put by @icebear. Due to having to migrate things between software packages in the past, I have learned to use community mods for non-critical purposes. I keep a core structure of folders and notes, that would likely make the most liberal Zettlegiestian weep then, for example, I use data view to generate separate “reports”. Images are renamed from the numerical mash to something that actually describes what’s in the file, etc. Does that mean I may lose out on using some really cool functionality, perhaps, but so far I’m pretty happy.

44

@anon12638239 Your post is so relevant for me! I’ve also been using Scrivener. I’d be interested in using Obsidian for my long writing projects (papers and books) but there is one feature I can’t seem to replicate in Obsidian, Scrivener’s—scrivenings. I use this often to temporarily combine documents to get a better feel for the flow of long text and transitions. Ulysses has a similar feature, “glueing sheets.”

Do you know a way to accomplish this in Obsidian?

45

As I have considered this, I am taking comfort that in most cases, any “lock in” can be navigated by some simple scripting – if obsidian vanished, I could write a simple script to pull YAML tags and convert them to #tags. I would lose things like Dataview and Graph view and a bunch of other things that give me excellent views to the data that is there, and accessible as plain text.

If I compare that to Notion or Evernote, a lot of my data is “trapped” – locked in a proprietary format that might feasibly be saved by a script, in some cases, but it would be far more involved. (for me).

In short, if Obsidian went away, could I recreate the experience in 1:1 feature parity? No … that’s why I CHOSE Obsidian. Could I get to my most important data in less than 5 minutes? Absolutely. Could I, in short order, have a servicable system up and running again with another tool? Yep.

4 Likes
46

One thought is that you create a master document which contains links to blocks in other pages. This way when you hover over a link you will see it in a popover pane. You can freely change the order of the links and even write new text between them that connects the passages better if you need to.

47

I totally agree with you, I copied my essay formatted in Obsidian into Typora, all my formatting got messed up.

A big reason I copy from Obsidian to Typora is to escape that subtle lock-in in Obsidian, Literally there is no way to copy back formatted data from Obsidian to another tool like MS Word

(please, anybody may guide me If I am missing any feature that will help solve my problem)

48

I agree. So, our community has to work from today on those scripts, so that they are easily available 20 years later.