#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

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#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.
4 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

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#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?

#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

@Angel 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.

2 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.

#49

I believe what you’re looking for is Pandoc. Off the top of my head, there’s a plugin for Obsidian and an Alfred workflow for an easier UX

#50

Thanks, yeah that’s good, but using it is not easy for me.

I understand that it is still not possible to keep things portable. And yes there’s also a ‘pure markdown export option’ on the roadmap, but I ask why the devs didn’t implemented ‘md to docx’ as a built-in solution, when there are many open source scripts lying out there on github?
isn’t it a kind of locking?
Also consider the growing user base, who not only use it for PKM, but also to share and do many other things. I sometimes feel, it is just a method to secure the revenue model.

I think instead of complaining I should request someone to build a plugin for that. (md to docx)

This little app supports docx to md and reverse albeit the tables: https://www.calmlywriter.com/

#51

but I ask why the devs didn’t implemented ‘md to docx’ as a built-in solution, when there are many open source scripts lying out there on github?
isn’t it a kind of locking?

Hi again! :slight_smile:

Yeah, well, in my mind: to not natively support all formats ever constructed by other developers can hardly be called “locked-in”.

Most app developers try to concentrate on “doing their thing”, their “Unique Selling Point” (USP) as well as possible first and foremost. Do remember that this whole thread mainly is about if plugins, and their use by us, the users, creates a kind of lock-in or limitation in portability.

It is mostly not core functionality we are talking about in this thread, it is voluntarily added functionality created by users for other users. You, as a user, can just as easily chose to not install the plugins mentioned. What you will be left with is a “vanilla” Obsidian, which writes Markdown, and does it well (IMHO). Markdown is generally considered to be very portable, even though there are a couple of dialects (such as “Github flavour” etc).

I think you should turn your question around: would it not make more sense if Microsofts Word-team created an “import markdown” function? Markdown is an open standard that is very possible for them to add, if they were to prioritise users coming from Markdown based software, and MS Word tried to lure those users in to the fold.

To me that would make more sense than to say “Obsidian doesn’t export to my preferred external format, therefore it is lock-in”. Then another user might come along and say “booo! It doesn’t natively export to json, which is my preferred format!” and then a third one coming in saying “oh noes! Obsidian doesn’t support direct export to RSS, which I love!” and all of the sudden the very limited Obsidian developer resources have to concentrate on, and dig out, every format ever created by man, to create export functionality for those formats.

Ok, slight exaggeration, but you perhaps get my point? I know lots of apps that does not export to .docx. I wouldn’t dream of saying they therefore are locking users in, as I wouldn’t consider it to be true.

Another thing users often forget when it comes to development is maintenance. If any of those formats were to change, which they do (in many cases often too), things will start to break if all apps that claim they export to one of those formats doesn’t also update their code base to cater for the added/new/changed/deleted functionality in that format over there. In Obsidians case that could grind actual feature addition development to a halt, just keeping 67 export formats up to date whilst being backwards compatible.

So…many developers, rightfully so, concentrate on doing their thing, and to do it well. That is not lock-in.

IMHO of course. :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#52

It used to be a full time job for word processor companies to keep up with Microsoft’s secret tweaks to .doc and .docx so they could maintain compatibility.
Which meant that a big chunk of their development time was spent on Microsoft’s product rather than their own.

2 Likes
#53

If I’m effectively locked into Obsidian, what difference is that compared to just using Notion or Roam. How are people mitigating this?

There has been a good discussion in the thread on the other questions in the original post, but I feel this part was sort of forgotten. I think so because the main difference with Obsidian compared to both Notion and Roam is: Privacy. Privacy was my main trigger for finding Obsidian in the first place, having discarded Roam and Notion for their lack of Privacy.

Both Notion and Roam are online services, only, right? I haven’t actually tried Roam, only read about it, but that is my take-away (please correct me if I’m wrong). I know Notion definitely require me to be online. If any of those services went away, so would your notes. If Obsidian went away I would lose access to future updates. I would still have my files on my E2EE encrypted hard drive. I can still access my files within Devonthink, in which I have a DT Db indexing my Obsidian vaults.

Sure enough, and to your point, in Devonthink I can’t (already today) utilise the benefits of Dataview and a few other Obsidian plugins which I have voluntarily chosen to install as they improve my workflows within Obsidian, but to me still, the main difference compared to the mentioned services is that the files are mine, to do with what I wish, and as they unlike for example Evernote still are plain text files all content will never be lost. My files can’t be sold, they can’t be bought and “I can see them, right there [points]”. :slight_smile:

1 Like