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As limited as OneNote is, I find it the place I keep returning to. Obsidian was extremely off-putting to me when I last tried it out, as the node parents themselves could not be documents. Or I couldn't figure out how to use them that way! Maybe it's just me!

Beyond that, I have a fondness for wikis that permit breadcrumbs from excerpts back to a main documents. Giving the right information in the right place, with a centralized main resource that is carved up. This strategy is super useful to prevent dead instruction sprawl.

I once read (in someone else's wiki) that all documentation is a memorial to some time in the past. That really stuck with me for years now. When you hit "save" it's already in a state of decay.

I am talking about sharing of information and maintenance of knowledge stores though, and that perhaps is a different beast than cataloging ones own interests.



Long time OneNote user (since 2003 debut) chiming in. I have been extensively test-driving Obsidian for 6 months now and couldn't be happpier.

I think both [^1] are opinionated on which layers of organization maps to where.

- OneNote: FS dir -> FS file (database) = OneNote Section (manual ordering) -> OneNote (sub-)Page (manual ordering + level) -> OneNote "note containers" (textboxes; [^2])

- Obsidian: FS dir -> FS file (plain text) = Obsidian Page (automatic ordering) -> headers in the page (manual ordering + level)

While I agree in principle that some non-leaf node should be allowed to have content, really you can see that headers/sections in Obsidian map well to the OneNote page-level organization. I wish I got a choice though...

[^1]: Out of the box. OneNote also has a major plugin bundle known as OneTastic.

[^2]: OneNote has _cosmetic_ headers in textboxes which isn't very useful.


Naturally Obsidian has a plugin for this[1].

This is what I like about obsidian. Ultimately nobody has a consistent set of capabilities they want because the whole space is pretty underdefined (exactly as the article is saying). But we still want something. So Obsidian is a kind of bring-your-own collection of features, and the mobile app works good enough too. It’s kinda like vim or emacs where people customize it however they want.

I reckon as the space evolves more clarity will appear and more opinionated schemes will become popular.

[1] https://github.com/aidenlx/alx-folder-note




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