(I apologise if somebody already suggested this, I searched but failed to find anything).
So, my question is why not implement Obsidian as a VSCode extension? In that way the Obsidian engineers may focus on the features that make Obsidian unique and leave general editing and visualisation stuff for VSCode to take care of.
Is there some technical problem? If so, please explain.
Not everyone is familiar with, nor likes, VSCode - it is, after all, a programmers’ text editor, not a knowledge-management tool, so targeted at a very different niche.
If Obsidian were to become any other app’s ‘plug-in’, it might gain some users, but will alienate others. IMHO, Obsidian works nicely on its own.
Exactly the point I’m trying to make: VSCode is a reasonable text editor and substantial resources are dedicated to its further development. Why the Obsidian community doesn’t take advantage of this (free) offering and focus its (comparatively limited) resources towards strengthening its knowledge management-related features? Why lose time re-inventing the text editing wheel?
(I don’t mean to sound pressing, I’m just interested in the technical reasoning behind this choice).
Off the top of my head:-
Foam already exists
It reduces optimisation potential
It makes creating mobile versions harder
It reduces the size of the potential user base. By quite a lot I should think. I certainly wouldn’t consider it.
We’re not considering making Obsidian into a VSCode, especially with its current scope. Further discussion is still welcome, but I’m archiving this so we’re not implementing it.
Definitely DO NOT WANT Obsidian to compete with or go in the direction of VSCode.
I also don’t want Obsidian to be a VSCode extension. That doesn’t make any sense to me…
Obsidian is already awesome and does what it does really well! It’s so easy to use, has a great UX/UI, and dead simple to setup and get started, I think those all lead to a potentially wider adoption among non-tech users.