Obsidian is the best note app
I’ve tried a lot of note-taking applications, especially the so-called zettelkasten ones. From emacs’ org-roam, to tiddlywiki, to Bear, to VS Code based denron, and logseq, noteplan and craft on the mac platform, and the equally famous logseq, I’ve tried each one a little.
UI-wise, Bear is my favorite, nothing fancy, powerful tag system, simple and easy to use. But the Bear team seems to have spent a lot of time on rewriting the editor, which doesn’t make any sense to most users. It’s a shame that this rewrite wasted more than a year, resulting in little major updates to the main version, and thus completely missing the wave of so-called bidirectional linked note taking applications.
If you’re just writing one card at a time, tiddlywiki works best because you just click an add button and write. And it’s also very customizable. But you need to be strong enough to not be tempted by other applications.
Dendron is actually also good, based on vscode, so the editing function is undoubtedly powerful. But it is not a standalone application after all, and I also use vscode to write code, so you will feel the vscode windows mixed together which is very annoying.
Logseq is the one I complain most. When I first started using it, I lost notes. Suddenly the notes I wrote on certain days were gone. And after I emptied all my notes, several just reappear in the app, I don’t even know where they came from. After abandoning it for more than a year I downloaded it to check it out, but it still had a lot of problems. First is slow, it takes a long time to open the app, and the whole UI is slow only with a few notes. And some diary will never appear in the list of “recent” list. Also, there seems to be a problem with the diary stream on the home page, where one click is to edit the previous day and another click is to select the next day, but there is no visible border between the two. I really don’t know why there are so many people using it.
Craft and Noteplan, the two native notes on Mac, the concept of Craft is not the same as other software. Each paragraph or each list of items is a block, and then this block can be easily transformed into more detailed blocks, very suitable for the kind of thinking that I first list an outline, and then refine the details. But Craft does not support tag until now, you dare to believe? And Noteplan I actually like it very much, also insist on using a period of time, its diary, weekly and monthly notes function is the best. The reason why I don’t use it anymore is because Obsidian has some more powerful features, especially on capture.
Obsidian is the only app that does what I expect, like quickly adding a prefix with the current date and time as the file name, and the note is added to a folder and a template is applied. And it has more powerful features in the plugin, like quickadd, which allows you to do most of the functions of org-mode capture on emacs. For example, you can quickly add a task to today’s calendar, add a file to a directory, apply a template, or add a line to the Books.md file if you often see a book you want to read. With the dataview plugin, you can also use it as a simple database.
Compared to logseq, obsidian is so much more stable. I’m expecting to use only obsidian for a long time, because it is the best note app.
Edited on 2023-12-19: Don’t use obsidian anymore. More and more features I don’t need and more and more complex. Now I use emacs + denote.