Why I left Obsidian for Emacs Org-mode

The onboarding is essentially frictionless. You open it, point it at a folder, and you have a note-taking app. The graph view is attractive and the plugin ecosystem is the best out there, and the defaults are sensible. If you're a normal person who wants to immediately take notes in a frictionless way, you might as well stop reading here, Obsidian is the right answer.

The problem wasn't any single feature. It was the accumulated weight of the Electron app sitting between me and a text file. Every time I wanted to do something slightly non-standard, run a script against my notes, grep across them, pipe them into something else, harpoon across my frequently used notes. I was constantly reminded that this was a tool designed for non-developers.

My notes are just files on disk. The idea that I should have to open a specific application to interact with them started to feel absurd. With Org files, every tool I already know works: grep, sed, find, git diff, anything. They're plain text.

The test I now apply to any tool: if the company shut down tomorrow, or the app stopped working, would I lose anything I can't recover? With Obsidian vaults on disk, the answer is no. But the habits and workflows built around the GUI are a different kind of lock-in.

I write documentation in Markdown. I write READMEs in Markdown. It's perfect for those things.

But using Markdown for a serious knowledge base has always been limited. It works, technically. You'll get there eventually. But you're making it harder than it needs to be.

Here's what I mean:

None of these are dealbreakers individually. But the pattern is clear: Obsidian needs plugins for things Org-mode has had since 2008. And plugins mean maintenance, compatibility issues, and someone else's timeline for features you need.

The other thing: Markdown has no semantic structure beyond headings, lists, and links. Org-mode has properties, drawers, blocks, source code with language-specific highlighting and execution, LaTeX math that actually works with exporting and conversions, footnotes that don't break your export, etc… the list goes on.

Org-roam is a package for Emacs that implements a Zettelkasten-style note graph on top of Org mode. It gives you bidirectional links and a node database (SQLite under the hood) for a daily journal workflow. But still all operating on ordinary .org files.

The relevant bits of my config:

(use-package org-roam
  :custom
  (org-roam-directory "~/notes/roam")
  (org-roam-completion-everywhere t)
  :bind
  (("C-c n f" . org-roam-node-find)
   ("C-c n i" . org-roam-node-insert)
   ("C-c n c" . org-roam-capture)
   ("C-c n j" . org-roam-dailies-capture-today))
  :config
  (org-roam-db-autosync-mode))

That's most of it. org-roam-node-find opens a fuzzy-search over all your nodes. org-roam-node-insert creates a link inline while you're writing. The dailies workflow gives you a journal entry per day, automatically linked to whatever nodes you reference in it.

If you're curious about this without committing to full Emacs, Denote is a simpler Emacs package that does the file-linking part without the database. It's a much gentler entry point.

Now everything I described above just demonstrates that both applications can do the same thing. The difference is that Emacs as an application is far superior to Obsidian for my actual workflow, because Emacs is an environment and Obsidian is a silo.

As a developer, I live in my editor. My terminal is inside my editor. My git client is inside my editor. My project navigation is inside my editor. When I switch to Obsidian to take a note, I am leaving my work environment. I lose my keybindings. I lose my project context. I lose the ability to fd or grep across my project and notes simultaneously without opening a separate window.

In Emacs, an Org file is just another buffer. It obeys the same rules as a Python file or a Rust file.

The cognitive load of context switching is real. I didn't realize how much friction I was accepting until I removed it. Every time I alt-tabbed to Obsidian, there was a micro-pause where my brain had to switch modes from "coding" to "note-taking."

This extends to customization. If I want Obsidian to behave differently, I install a plugin written by someone else, hoping it doesn't break on the next update. If I want Emacs to behave differently, I write ten lines of Elisp in my init.el.

This is why I can't go back. It's not about the notes. It's about the workflow. Obsidian asks me to adapt to its way of working. Emacs adapts to me.

The Emacs learning curve is real and I won't pretend otherwise. I've been using it for a year and I'm still learning new things. The configuration is Lisp, which is either delightful or horrifying depending on your prior coding experience(if any). The worst is that there is no sophisticated cross-platform mobile solution worth using. Syncing requires you to sort it out yourself(syncthing, dropbox, git etc.)

If that resonates, it might be worth trying. Now I wont hate you if you still choose Obsidian, the best system is the one that you will actually use.

But if you find yourself wanting more, then Org-mode is waiting. It's been waiting since 1990. It'll probably be here in 2050 too. Obsidian might not be. That's the kind of bet I'm willing to make.