Emacs vs Obsidian md

Emacs can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. While true, I often find the mouse and menus handy for those lesser-used commands. An aide-memoir.

Customizations can be made to a wide range of Emacs' functions through a Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). A robust list of existing Lisp extensions include the practical (git integration, syntax highlighting, etc) to the utilitarian (calculators, calendars) to the sublime (chess, Eliza).

You can debug, compile, manage files, integrate with version control systems, etc. All through the various plugins that can be installed.

You can use Emacs' command line interface or graphical user interface.

Emacs has extensive help support built-in as well as a tutorial accessed with C-h t.

Licensed under GNU GPL.

With 30+ years of use the Emacs documentation is very thorough. There are also a lot of tutorials and guides written by third parties.

Evil mode emulates vim behaviors within Emacs. It enables Vi users to move inside the Emacs universe.

Advanced planning and publication which can start as a simple list.

Through its programmability, a very broad range of functionalities can be integrated in emacs, turning it even into a "single point of contact" with the underlying operating system.

Works on Linux, Windows, Macintosh, BSD, and others.

You can jump straight from your org-mode files to programming tasks - and back - and build a seamless workflow.

Emacs is great for everything.

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer.

Fully compliant GNU-emacs is available on many platforms, and they all understand .emacs configuration files.

Emacs can select rectangularly.

With lisp customization, any behavior of Emacs can be changed. Update with pre-release patch can be also applied without recompiling the whole Emacs.

Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It provides Vim features like Visual selection and text objects.

Dynamic word completion.

Review the "Emacs Rocks" video.

The first verion of Emacs was written in 1974 and GNU Emacs in 1984.

Powerful commands, search, and more with the Helm plugin.

Since version 25 you can run GTK widgets inside Emacs buffers. One of these is the WebKitGTK+, which allows the user to run a full-featured web browser inside Emacs with JavaScript and CSS support among other things.

The tutorial you are presented with at startup shows you exactly what you need to get started and teaches you how to use the built-in help yourself later.

Emacs has a number of shell variants: ansi-term, shell, and eshell.

Complex git history editing become a breeze with very few keystrokes. And simple ones are quickly stashed in muscle memory. Git becomes an direct extension of your brain thanks to Magit. Cherrypicking, blaming, resetting, interactive rebasing, line level commit, spinoff branches... you name it, magit already has it and has typically all those 5 to 10 git CLI commands of higher-level patterns also tide to one simple shortcut (want to amend a commit three commits away ? forgot to branch out and you've got already N commits on master ? ... etc... ).

Managing several large mailing lists has never been easier using Gnus. The threading commands and the various ways of scoring articles means that I never miss important messages/authors, etc. A joy to use.

You can use the underlying operating system shell as a terminal emulation in an Emacs buffer. Don't like the default shell for your configuration? You can change it to your liking.

Built-in packages make editing Lisp source code feel natural.

Missing some neural package that predicts actions, maybe in the next release ...

Everything is stored in your device. You can back them up, encrypt and process however you want to. Works completely offline. Read your notes anytime, anywhere.

Variety of settings, and community themes & plugins, available from built-in marketplace. Every community plugin is open-source which means you can learn from it and develop your own.

This allows you to link notes back and forth really easily.

It's becoming more powerful everyday, it seems like they add many functions within several days.

Linking notes is a game changing feature. Very easy to use and link notes. Their implementation of markdown doesn't deviate from the standard form of markdown and so the same files can be used by other markdown programs without any consequence.
While renaming note link still works.

A Vault in Obsidian is like a database. Internal links and files are not shared across Vaults. Each Vault is opened with a separate instance of Obsidian. Each Vault can have its unique app settings and plug-ins. Useful if you have distinct/unrelated projects or "data spaces" requiring different workflows and data relations.

Ability to tag-as-you-write and find each occurrence of a tag in the entire vault makes it very easy to organize and retrieve notes. Supports nested tags.

In Obsidian, pane = window = note = page

Obsidian allows you to open as many notes as you can fit concurrently in your screen. You can split a pane horizontally/vertically. You can lock/link panes so they scroll in sync, useful for and edit & preview modes.

Also open for anyone to develop their own extensions/plugins.

Daily Notes plug-in, when clicked, generates a new note with the current date. Great for journaling and reduces friction in your writing habit.

You can create a custom template for your Daily Note.

The Graph view is more than an aesthetic gizmo. It allows you to grasp and recognise clusters of information, follow branches and easily filter out what you don't want to see. The "animate" option shows how your notes and links have grown organically. With a bit of tweaking to the visuals and the proper theme, your graph might even start to look like a disturbingly "alive", eerie thing.

A plugin that, when clicked, surfaces a random note from your vault.

This is a big difference, as having to read through long-form texts laden with [[links]] gives friction.

Easily turn your notes into simple yet sleek powerpoint-style presentations by enabling the Slides plugin and adding the --- separator.

Hotkeys can be customized in settings.
Can switch on or off Vim key bindings in the editor settings.

The onboarding consists of well-written help documentation (saved as a vault) served in small chunks and organized systematically so that you become familiar with all its features as well as get hands-on experience in real time.

Due to the tool being very developer-friendly, there are tons of cool developments being made to it by 3rd party devs.

When you hover on an internal [[link]], you get to preview the note without opening it on a new pane.

Page preview plugin must be enabled.

The app doesn't frustrate the user - the built-in help is excellent.

Variety of file formats are directly embedded in the markdown preview, e.g. markdown, image, audio, video and PDF files.

Allows exporting your markdown files as PDFs rendered with all of your plugins.

Daily and Weekly notes with Calendar Plugin.

A pretty, alternative way to represent links between your notes.

A feature unseen in other tools.
From the help doc, "This can be useful when modifying a lot of lines in the same way, for example putting - at the beginning of multiple lines to turn them into a list, or appending [[ to a series of links you’ve copied from elsewhere."

Supports extended searching by default. Community plugin called "Vantage" allows to make more advanced queries.

Version Control for your vault with Obsidian Git plugin.

Allows to refer to a note with multiple names.

There's a Discord server and a forum. Join the community!

No lock-in to a certain company - just markdown files on disk.

Available as a plugin.

Uses MathJax.

Allows to create templates with built-in plugin. There's also powerful community plugin called "Templater".

Uses Mermaid.

You can link to a block - e.g.: paragraph, blockquote, heading.

Add a custom metadata to a note with YAML front matter.

With Excalidraw.

Supports Citations and provides inserting from Zotero.

Advanced queries for the data-obsessed with Dataview Plugin.

Saving and loading workspaces.

With other options like notion, we can not see how the data is actually stored.

Use HTML in a note.

Variety of planning and organization plugins, such as Kanban boards or Day Planner.

Supports importing from tools such as Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Apple Notes, Bear, Zkn3, TiddlyWiki 5, and Roam Research. Refer to Obsidian Help for more info.

Translations are made by the community at GitHub repository.

Update your Discord status to show your friends what are you working on with Discord Rich Presence plugin.

When taking notes, you can just grab a print screen from your clipboard and paste into the notes without having to do any file management