I won’t let this thread burry itself, although full text notes are great for discoverability, oftentimes a small doodle is worth a 1000 words, and not having drawing capability risk pushing people to write a complete wall of text just to describe what they could easily do in a table (hard enough to do in markdown without friction) or a free hand diagram.
Markdown is nice to be editor neutral (postly), readable, but should not become a liability because “markdown doesn’t support this”, drawings especially vectorial can be edited, saved and displayed in the current Obidian version (svg / pdf) and drawings are supported in most note taking app as a core functionality.
Nothing against plug-ins but in the end i don’t really want an app that does almost nothing by default and needs a plugin for every single thing, and a workflow that has to launch an external app/save export as image/import in obsidian is way too much friction vs. trying to describe the diagram instead of making it.
Could also double up as an image annotation/crop/highlighting tool for regular images.
+! i’d super love to have a freeflow handwriting feature built into obsidian. excalidraw is kinda laggy after a small amount of usage.
obsidian would be perfected imo if it had onenote’s strengths like notetaking and obsidians own strengths that lies in laying out information.
So I just wanted to add this here so people can find it, someone very early on in this thread talked about excalidraw. someone made it into a plugin so now you can write notes by hand and much more. here is a link to the git so you can look into it. I just found it so I want to add it here because it was not on here.
GoodNotes lover here. I want to love Excalidraw; while I appreciate all of the effort that has gone into it, the UX feels clunky on iPadOS compared to GoodNotes.
I totally agree, and unless drawing and tablet can happen natively within the editor without embed, without plugin, without even touchign a button, and mix text and drawing as if it was the same things, seamlessly, i don’t feel the experience will improve, as much as i like excalidraw…
+1 Ability to draw things, especially on canvas, will make the process of connecting thoughts much cooler. Curves and simple drawings directly on objects increase the possibility to generate something useful. It should be frictionless, native, and ideally everywhere to allow some spontaneous moves.
+1 This is the last bit of thing spreading around in multiple places/notebooks…
Hand drawings.
This is where we jot ideas and we may want to keep it (and allow further refinement).
+1, I’d really (really) love to be able to use an apple pencil natively on Obsidian to create and store handwritten notes . Is this planned anytime soon?
It is the one thing keeping me from switching from UpNote to Obsidian. I’m willing to deal with the sync issues (when using github) between Windows & iOS as long as I can handwrite and type within the app. I use both for different reasons. Excalidraw works horribly. You can’t handwrite when zoomed in and the handwriting doesn’t work very well.
If Obsidian is an idea app, and for many it is, then drawing is essential. For applications I design and build, I often ‘draw first, implement later’. The limitation of other drawing apps is that it is uncommon for them to combine notes and other content. It would be great to draw ideas, then as part of some overarching container (folder), create notes and other content to descend from or are related to the initial drawing.
+1, the major reason for my use of obsidian is to have a quick digital organization of my ideas. I am currently tearing through paper at the moment because my thoughts can’t wait for me to format a drawing in excalidraw and then move it over and then edit and repeat ad aeternum.