Today is an Obsidian update post because follow ups are often more telling. If you’ve only read my ‘Notes, Notes and More Notes’ Post, then you’ll think Obsidian is simply awesome and I’m off and running with my new app.
However, there is always more to the story once you start using it!
Honesty straight up, after the initial find and discovery, I really didn’t use the app much at all.
I kept falling back to my trusty Simplenote and almost avoiding Obsidian. It wasn’t until I finally had some time that I went “Hang on, why am I using Simplenote and not Obsidian?”, that I started investigating.
When I first got Obsidian, I did a bunch of exploring and set it up how I THOUGHT I wanted it. Turns out that a lot of what I did wasn’t quite right for how I work.
Add in that I was trying to get Obsidian to behave like Simplenote!
I’m not quite sure why, as the reason I wasn’t using Simplenote for larger writings was because the simple part was limiting.
Because the formatting in Simplenote is, well, simple, you develop little habits for making things standout like headings and such. This led to those same habits becoming second nature and I was using or trying to use them in Obsidian, but most of these naughty little habits were not friendly with markdown!
The second big hiccup I was facing was with iCloud (lets out a little growl)! iCloud has never given me many problems, because I simply don’t use it much; just the small iPhone to iPad to MacBook syncs. In the case of Obsidian, iCloud on my Mac was seeming to get cranky with so many little files getting synced frequently. On the iPhone and iPad, no problem, but then I’d turn on my Mac and “Boo” it’s gone and gotten itself stuck.
These issues led to me opting for Simplenote over Obsidian every time I needed to quickly jot something down, and only using Obsidian for bigger jobs. Although I’ve been so busy that this was far and few between.
After taking a step back and getting all mindful about why I was opting for Simplenote I realised I needed to change some things about the Obsidian app and my mindset.
Some Changes
Realising how I liked my Simplenote formatting, I started playing around with Obsidian using the same note. Basically I figured out what I liked doing in Simplenote and how I could do something similar with Obsidian but remembering that I was going to have to think about and apply it differently. Wow, that sentence is not necessarily helpful, so what am I trying to say?
Because I often use headings 4 – 6 I was finding it annoying doing the markdown for these. So playing around I was able to assign my own shortcuts to headings and highlights for Obsidian. Solved!
Like many of us, I’ve used Tab key throughout my life but in Obsidian hitting the tab key results in the whole paragraph indenting and changing the formatting instead of just a space being added. After my initial annoyance I realised this could be useful, and instead found other methods when I wanted a Tab Space
At the end of the day, I was really only using Tab Space when I create my own Manuals for all my different Software. This is where the Highlight key came in handy.
After some serious pondering I realised I don’t like typing in a dark space. Obsidian’s Dark theme is awesome, and I really loved it, so I’d stuck with it. But somewhere along the line, I realised the clean white space in Simplenote was something I much preferred typing on. Switching Obsidian to a Light theme seemed to make a huge difference. This one was not a clear ‘issue’ for me, however once it hit me, I completely understood why, and it really came down to what I’d spent a lifetime typing on. When you’ve used something a certain way for so long sometimes it creates this wonderful nostalgia that actually inspires writing, and this was one of them.
Finally, the issue with iCloud! This one was not at all an easy fix and may take some time to fully work around. I’m already paying for Dropbox, so adding Obsidian Sync is just WAY too expensive, considering it would only be used for Obsidian. So it’s a matter of being patient and hoping they will bring Dropbox sync in at some point.
Instead I’ve madly googled different ways to easily unstick iCloud when that little pie stops dead in its tracks and refuses to move until I restart my computer. A restart is an absolute buzz kill when you’re in a groove, so instead I’m just killing a bird instead! It seems a little program called ‘bird’ is at the heart of my problem, so going into Activity Monitor, finding ‘bird’ and force quitting it will get everything working again. Although you can also shortcut by typing killall bird into the Terminal, but the Terminal makes me nervous for fear of killall mac happening!
Final Thoughts
Of course this is just a beginning, there is so many plugins and capability to the Obsidian app that I’ve not even scratched the surface yet. Mostly I’ll figure out new things as I need them to make my note taking and writings easier. But I am still enjoying it and have been using it a LOT!!
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