Note Taking Software
When planning anything, taking notes is very important (The Brain tends to forget). I use notepads and stickynotes, but also some software. My personal budget and gym-logger is in LibreOffice Calc. For temporary stuff and creative planning I also use moinmoin wiki.
Few days ago I stumbled on Obsidian. This is a note taking software that could replace moinmoin. Not that there is anything wrong with moin, but it is a wiki and since it is only accessible on localhost I can’t access my notes if I’m “elsewhere”. Both solutions have data in cleartext so if something goes wrong everything is easily accessible.
After using Obisdian for 3 days I can make some comments and comparisons between the two.
- FLOSS: Both are free, but moinmoin is also opensource.
- Installation is much simpler with obsidian since it’s only executable and for moin you basically run a python server also simple to setup, but in comparison a bit trickier.
- Navigation: Both have text and hyperlinks. Hyperlinks take you elsewhere, basic stuff. Obsidian has a graphview that shows also the links that aren’t in the other file. So a simple referral makes a backlink entry to the other.
- Media: moinmoin has more control on media, it’s quite simple to set image width and height – on obsidian you can only change the width.
- Error Correction: So let’s assume that I make a typo on titling the page i’m writing and link it anyway. In moimoin I’d have to fix every link that points to the page, but in obsidian I only need to change the page title and every link is changed to point to that.
- Sync: Obsidian offers paid sync service, but since the files are just -md files in some directory, it should be possible to use a sync-tool to mirror this between the devices. As for moinmoin syncing is much harder as you’d need to sync the server files that are edited and i’m not sure how to do that. But I do recall that moinmoin could be installed into usb-stick to make it portable.
- Customizability: as a webserver moinmoin is themeable. Obsidian on the otherhand not only has themes (I haven’t used those) offers a lot of plugins to extend the functionality and my favorite is that you can customize the keyboard shortcuts.
I’ll keep on using Obsidian and wait that Proton releases a Desktop Sync software. Then I can test it on my tablet.
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