Obsidian.md has been one of the very few apps that I have stuck with throughout my professional career.
It is an extendable, local-first, markdown editor. Day to day it is just a pleasant place to write. But the reason it stuck with me lives in two of those words: local-first and markdown. Let’s start with what you see, then get to what actually matters.
Extendable
Obsidian, at the surface level, shows you your markdown files. But its plugin ecosystem is so rich that it helps you get utilitarian value out of your notes.
- You can add links and backlinks to your notes
- You can view your interconnected web of notes as graphs to better visualize your connections
- You can query your notes like a database
- and do lots more with the in-built and community-built plugins.
Since Obsidian is built on web-tech, you can build plugins to customize your note-taking experience. Here are a couple of inbuilt and community plugins I goto in every new vault.
All of that is the surface. What kept me around sits underneath it, in how Obsidian stores the things you write.
Local First
Obsidian is local first, meaning your notes are stored as .md files in your local storage.
”Goutham, in the age of cloud and SaaS, why do we even need local-first?” is a valid question. But when it comes to SaaS, you will often run into scenarios where the tool that you were using in the past doesn’t serve your current or future needs.
- your provider may change their pricing model
- you may not be fully confident about how private your notes are
- your favorite app might just not keep up
The solution to this is file over app.
File over app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.
— Steph Ango, CEO, Obsidian
Markdown editor
Local-first puts your notes on your own disk. Markdown decides what is inside those files.
Returning to a similar question: ”Goutham, in the age of SaaS, why do we need to work with markdown?”
Your Notion data sits in their database in a proprietary format. So are your Evernote, OneNote, mem.ai, or Roam Research data, all inaccessible in their entirety. Sure, you can export them and try to use them without losing any context, but there is always some context lost in translation between proprietary data models.
Markdown is the simple, open standard that fixes this. Any past, present, or future software that supports markdown can make use of your data. My notes will outlive whichever app I’m using this year.
Then AI showed up
That argument got a lot stronger once AI arrived. For some reason, AI loves Markdown. Every AI agent feels right at home with markdown. The very garden you are reading this on is written in .md, on iA Writer and Obsidian, and reviewed by my Claude Code agent before it reaches you. The same files that I read on Obsidian, any agent with file-reading capabilities can read, edit, and reason over without any translation.
Local-first, extendable, plain markdown. That combination is why Obsidian stuck when nearly every other tool fell off, and why it is one of the first apps I install on a new system. These days it is my personal knowledge management system, the CMS for this website, and my daily workspace at work.
See also:
To write: