Why Obsidian Doesn’t Work for Me
Every so often, I give Obsidian another try. On paper, it sounds like the perfect tool: a local-first, Markdown-based note-taking app that’s cross-platform, extensible, and endlessly customizable. For many people, it really is a game changer.
But every time I sit down with it, I leave thinking the same thing: “huh…”
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The Promise of Obsidian
Obsidian is marketed as a plain text knowledge base. It provides backlinks, a graph view, and a huge plugin ecosystem that can turn Markdown into just about anything — daily journals, task managers, or even kanban boards. For someone who wants an all-in-one workspace, it’s fantastic.
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My Workflow Is Different
The reason it doesn’t click for me is simple: my workflow is built on a different philosophy.
- Markdown is the source of truth. I write everything in plain .md files. No special syntax, no hidden metadata. If I want to preview formatting, I open it in Marked 2.
- PDF is the permanent format. When I need something shareable or archival, I export to PDF. That’s my version of locking it down in stone.
- Finder organizes, Alfred retrieves. Finder handles long-term storage, Alfred lets me get to anything instantly, and Hazel keeps everything tidy in the background.
- Automation glues it all together. Keyboard Maestro, Shortcuts, and BetterTouchTool let me spin up templates, transform files, or publish to Hugo and Buttondown in minutes.
Within this setup, I can create a new document template in 10 minutes. I am not proud of it, but in Obsidian, I spent two hours fiddling with plugins just to get a string quoted or a JSON array formatted consistently without any success.
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The Real Difference
What I’ve realized is that Obsidian and my stack solve different problems:
- Obsidian is for people who want a unified workspace where notes, tasks, and links all live together.
- My stack is for people who want modular tools that each do one job well and can be connected through automation.
That’s why Obsidian feels to me like the love child of MS Word and VSCode. It’s polished, powerful, and versatile — but also too “workspace-y” for the way I prefer to work.
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Why That’s Okay
None of this is a knock on Obsidian. It’s a great app, and I can see why it’s so widely loved. If I needed cross-platform syncing or a personal knowledge graph, it would be near the top of my list.
But for me, life revolves around Markdown as the living format and PDF as the permanent format. BBEdit, Marked 2, Hugo, Buttondown, Alfred, Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, and Shortcuts give me everything I need. Obsidian just doesn’t solve a problem I actually have.
And that’s the real takeaway: the best tool isn’t the one with the most features. It’s the one that disappears into your workflow and feels natural every day.
