Help me undestand why Obsidian is so beloved - first impression not great so far

Help
1

I heard a lot of good things about Obsidian and I decided to look at it. After installing the flatpak version and exploring it a bit, I can’t say I’m too impressed. I thought that Obsidian was an advanced note taking app but I am having difficulties navigating things smoothly with a keyboard.

  1. When I hover the mouse on certain buttons like Files, Search, Bookmarks, they don’t have any indicators if they have a hotkey assigned to them or not. Maybe if I dug into the settings, I could find/assign those, but it is surprising that none of this exists by default for things that (I assume) are used on a daily basis.
  2. I can’t use Shift+F10 to right-click on a node in Files view. While the shortcut works in note editing mode, it feels clunky:
    1. Alt keys don’t seem to be supported. When I hold Alt, no letters get underlined to indicate I could use Alt+key shortcut to activate any of the items. This is a common standard in applications, I don’t want to hit the down arrow key 5 times to access some commonly used menu option.
    2. The right-click menu implementation is kind of buggy. The menu is both in focus and out of focus at the same time.
      1. I can invoke the menu and continue typing text into the editor while the menu stays.
      2. When I invoke the menu with shift-F10 and the mouse happens to be in the same position as some menu element that can be expanded, e.g., Format or Paragraph, the thing just gets expanded despite the fact I haven’t used or moved the mouse to hover on top of it.
  3. I can’t find a way to use the keyboard to switch between panes, e.g., Files vs editor view.
  4. I can’t find a way to navigate directly to a folder and auto expand things. It seems I can only do that with Ctrl-O and finding a specific note inside. This is not ideal since sometimes I can’t remember the note name but I know I added it in Project1 folder.

I expected some challenges with more advanced customization later but I’m getting a bit frustrated by trying to wrap my head around basic navigation so far.

Am I misunderstanding or missing something?

2

I don’t think you’re misunderstanding it. You’re mostly running into a real limitation of Obsidian’s default UX.

Obsidian is powerful, but out of the box it is not especially polished as a keyboard-first desktop app. A lot of functionality is there, but it is often hidden behind the Command Palette, the Hotkeys settings, or plugins rather than being discoverable by default.

So your frustration seems fair to me. If you expect strong keyboard navigation, native-feeling menus, and obvious shortcuts from the start, Obsidian can feel rough. It is better understood as a flexible Markdown workspace than as a highly refined traditional notes app.

That said, some things do get better once you learn the command-based workflow. But your core point still stands: you’re probably not missing something obvious, you’re noticing one of Obsidian’s actual tradeoffs.

1 Like
3

The answer to why it is so beloved despite gaps in its keyboard support is that many people use non-keyboard inputs.

If you search in Bug reports and Feature requests you should be able to find threads about keyboard support in general and about specific examples. You can voice your support for them, and some of them may include workarounds to enable the needed function.