Obsidian: From Honeymoon to Wake-Up Call

First Impressions

When I first heard the name Obsidian, it felt as mysterious and magnetic as a gemstone. I have always been someone who enjoys trying new things, and the first time I heard about Obsidian was in a group chat. The name alone was enough to spark my curiosity. Friends kept recommending it one after another, which made me even more eager to try it. Later, after I joined a new company, my team lead also strongly recommended it to us. On top of that, I already liked tinkering with new software. All of those factors together made me fully curious, and I jumped into the Obsidian rabbit hole without hesitation.

The Honeymoon Phase

During the first stretch of using Obsidian, it felt like I had entered a world full of surprises.

The local storage model felt amazing. I created several workspaces with it and could switch between them anytime, without worrying about data leaks, service outages, or privacy issues from the cloud. That gave me a strong sense of control and safety over my notes. Then there was the rich plugin ecosystem.

Obsidian's plugin marketplace had almost everything I could think of. Whether I wanted a better editing experience, a cleaner layout, or stronger search features, there was always a plugin for it. Among note-taking apps, Obsidian's customization power felt unmatched. It seemed like almost every tiny need could be shaped into something personal.

And then there was the dark theme. I absolutely loved dark themes, and I spent almost as much time tweaking that as I did on functional plugins. Every time I opened Obsidian to write, it felt like stepping into a quiet creative space, where I could turn thoughts into words without distraction and become completely absorbed.

Pain Points

But as I used it more deeply, the problems slowly started to surface.

First, the image management and editing tools were frustratingly limited. Compared with other note apps, Obsidian was genuinely inconvenient to use here. Simple things like cropping an inserted image, resizing it, or adding annotations were difficult to do, and that made note-making much less smooth.

Second, even though there were tons of plugins, and I installed more than ten at once, only a few of them actually became tools I could use confidently. Many plugins ended up sitting there unused because the setup and workflow were too complicated, and I spent time and energy just trying to figure them out. Looking back, I realized that powerful customization is not always a good thing. It is a bit like iPhone versus Android: Apple is relatively closed and simple, so the user experience is straightforward and direct; Android offers far more customization, but that also tends to increase complexity and instability. Even at the latest WWDC, one of the biggest highlights besides AI was desktop customization, and it looked so ugly. Apple has probably been drifting for a long time now. Obsidian felt similar. Too many customization options made me confused during setup and adjustment, and I started to feel that I was drifting away from the original purpose of note-taking: thinking and writing better. In the end, it hurt my efficiency and experience instead of helping them.

Confusion and Impact

After the initial excitement and expectations around Obsidian, I also found myself getting stuck. In search of the note app that fit me best, I kept switching between different products. But that constant experimenting consumed a huge amount of time and energy, and my knowledge management gradually became harder to control. Differences in format, storage, and interaction style across apps scattered my notes everywhere, making it difficult to build a unified and orderly system of knowledge. In practice, I also found that I did not open Obsidian nearly as often as I expected. Maybe the problems I ran into reduced my enthusiasm, or maybe it simply did not fully match my daily work and study needs. On top of that, when I wanted to move away from Obsidian, the difficulty of migrating content became another mountain I had to climb. There were no especially good migration tools in the plugin marketplace, and manual migration was too tedious and error-prone. That left me hesitating over whether I should abandon Obsidian completely.

Now

Fast forward to 2024, and my view of note-taking tools had changed again. I came to understand the idea of 'out of all the waters, I only take one cup.' I no longer blindly chased tools that looked powerful because they had more and more features. Instead, I paid more attention to how well the software matched my own needs, how easy it was to use, and whether it would stay stable over time. That is why I now use Craft for work notes, Yuque for more structured learning notes, and Notion for everyday knowledge capture. I still have a whole collection of note apps sitting quietly on my laptop, but now I mostly treat them as things to try out and study for their design details. I probably will not migrate to another note-taking tool so easily again.