Markdown for your notes & docs (with great UX) was a pipe dream, until now.
If you’re still using Evernote, Google Keep, OneNote, Notion, or Confluence, you’re living in the dark ages!
The idea of being able to use markdown to store all of my notes and technical documentation always felt like a pipe dream. If you’re like me every time you’ve tried to do this you’ve been met with substandard authoring experiences. I always say it’s the ‘paper cuts’ that kill user experience (‘death by a thousand cuts’ is torture!).
An example of this is: you want to link to another page/document, but then you later move the location of that document, now your link breaks. Most note apps and wikis use internal IDs to reference docs to avoid this. But you throw some Markdown files in a Git repository and do this and you’ll feel the pain! And the more folks you have contributing, especially in large and fast-changing orgs, the worse it gets.
I started using Obsidian for free earlier this year for all of my notes and technical documentation, and it certainly lives up to the hype! It stores all of your notes in Markdown, and it solves for the broken link ‘paper cut’, among many others! I cannot overstate how good the user experience is.
And the best part? It’s completely free for personal use, and if you’re using iCloud, you can have it sync across your devices for free, too. They also have a solid paid offerings with their ‘Sync’ product for working across other devices, and support for working with teams. And their plugin system has a great Obsidian Git community plugin which allows you to periodically sync changes to git for free.
So if you’re still using Evernote, Google Keep, OneNote, Notion, Confluence, etc. you should free yourself from proprietary file formats and make the switch! To be clear, I have no affiliation with Obsidian and this is not a paid endorsement – I simply love their product and think you will too.
What app do you like most for taking notes and storing technical documentation? Do you use separate tools for each of those use cases or just one?
