Discussion of Roam-like Knowledge Managers

Posted by Luhmann
Apr 17, 2020 at 05:06 AM

I should clarify a few things.

There was some discussion in the Obsidian discord forums about the choice not to base Obsidian on an outliner. There are a lot of good reasons for their choices including portability, compatibility, long term reliability of your data, and technical reasons involving the editor (they had to do a lot of custom coding for the editor in Dynalist). I don’t doubt that these reasons are all perfectly good and legitimate - I was just responding to my own thinking about how I like to work ... which is in an outliner. I should also add that I shared the app FoldingText with the developers as an example of integrating outliner like features into a plaintext markdown app and they are considering the possibility of doing so, but it is really too early to say whether this will make it to the initial released app or not.

I add this because I want to clarify that these are very real tradeoffs. In an ideal world one could have everything: an app with a native Mac/iOS feel and integration that also was cross platform, an app that supported open standards, but also supported features that aren’t easily integrated into those standards, etc. Some people here might prefer one side of the equation and some the other, but it is unlikely that we will get one single app that checks all the boxes for everyone.

One thing I will say, however, is that the character of the developer is important. And even though I may prefer using Roam right now, I really like the team behind Dynalist and am rooting for them to succeed. Obsidian is also very exciting right now because the developers are still very open to suggestions, so there is a real opportunity to help shape the future of the app.