Question: does anyone use Obsidian on a secondary device while working on a different primary device and have opinions?
I recently updated my physical workspace (pictured at the bottom of my post - pardon the poor cable management). I went from two monitors (my laptop monitor and external monitor) to a single monitor (the external monitor - the laptop is stowed away). I’ve decided that I want to try using a single monitor for a while, but it now has me wondering about whether or not a second device entirely (say, my iPad with a keyboard attached) might be a good place for Obsidian. I could easily move that around, which would be nice because I like to write on the space my desk has in front of my monitor.
I feel like there are potential unintuitive benefits to doing this, so I’m curious if anyone works this way. To me, the most obvious downside of doing so is that it’s more difficult to copy content from the active workstation to the external device, but there’s so many options for syncing tools that I think you can come up with a low friction solution to that problem.
I’d like to be a little more mobile with Obsidian, and managing an environment for Obsidian in both my laptop and mobile devices is part of that pain. This could help with doing so.
I don’t use a dedicated second device, but I’ve considered it sometimes (even before Obsidian when I was managing my notes in a text editor). I do sometimes use Obsidian on my phone when I’m at my computer, because I’m so used to doing that everywhere else that I reach for it without thinking.
If you had a Mac it would be easy (copy-paste works wirelessly between devices), but as you say, you can probably work out a satisfactory way.
I did not know that, thank you! My computer is starting to age and I’ve been considering moving to a Mac. I don’t think I’d make this a significant factor, but it does add to the pile of reasons.
I don’t use it a lot, but it (and Apple’s “Continuity” stuff in general) is one of my favorite features. (“Bluetooth: The secret to Apple’s ecosystem” by Rene Ritchie describes some of how it’s done, if you’re curious.)
An option for that between Windows and Androids is Windows Phone Link, where you can share your clipboard among your devices (if you’re okay with that for security). Copy on one device, immediately paste on another.
For sharing between Windows and any mobile device, even iOS, the Windows SwiftKey keyboard works the same way.
I used to use SwiftKey on an iPad—and it worked great—but decided I’d rather add the step of opening Keep on both devices to paste and copy versus typing with an onscreen keyboard I didn’t love. (But this now puts Microsoft, Apple, and Google up in my info, so I do it only for “casual” stuff.)
