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There’s gotta be something better than markdown for notes, though

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We keep switching back and forth between vim + wiki.vim and Obsidian. Vim is a text editor, the bloody fastest there is at it, made better now that we’re more or less efficient with a bunch of commands and keyboard combinations. And now that we actually have a somewhat decent implementation of our dotfiles being kept in our git server (aka not github) we can keep my vimrc file the same pretty much everywhere.

But Obsidian is just so convenient… Looks and runs exactly the same on Windows, Linux, and Android! You just run the application and open the vault. Their iOS version will not open my notes vault which is kept on my Nextcloud instance.

I’m sticking to Obsidian for now mostly because it does let me see images in it’s preview mode and on that it does have vim beat. If you need to edit text table nothing beats vim-table-mode.

tl;dr I want Google Keep extended with WikiWords and file storage.

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I’ve toured all the note-taking apps: Evernote, Simplenote, OneNote, Google Keep… and I’ve found them all wanting. These past few months I’ve gone back and forth between Keep and Tiddlywiki trying to figure out exactly what I want I think I finally realized what I want:

  • The speed of Google Keep when it comes to creating and saving new notes.
  • The speed of Pinboard when it comes to tagging.
  • The formatting facilities of Simplenote, which uses markdown. The version control is also nice.
  • The file attachment ease of OneNote when it comes to binary blobs. You can put anything in those notes.
  • For images… well, pretty much everything sucks, but I guess WordPress is a good starting point.
  • The interlinking ease of Tiddlywiki. WikiWords kick ass.
  • The ubiquity of Keep. It’s on your phone, your desktop, your tablet. Which goes back to it being fast.

Reading through this and apparently no one makes a version of Keep that has better text formatting, lets you attach images and decide where they’ll appear, while letting you travel from note to note via tags or WikiWords so you can remember the flow of though that led to that thought sequence.

Paper does not work for having to remember related thought separated by time and space. Plus writing for more than five minutes annoys me.

They say most programming projects start from a developer scratching their own itch. I guess it’s true.

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