Blackwell Idealist

Posted by MadaboutDana
May 28, 2025 at 09:54 AM

Interesting question. I’ve found – and this is really going to irritate some of you! – that one can create something very similar using Obsidian’s properties and templates features plus various plugins, with the added advantage of much greater flexibility, rich text support and vastly greater data capacity (that was one of the shortcomings the last version of Idealist attempted to resolve). Thing is, there are a lot of full-text-capable knowledge managers out there; the extent to which they’re “comparable” with Idealist varies enormously. Having designed an entire business admin system using Idealist (that worked really rather well in combination with MS-Word templates, albeit back in the 1990s), I’m intrigued by the capabilities of e.g. Notion and similar systems (cf. e.g. AnyType), which combine full-text support with relational features, in this respect.

The advantage of Obsidian is that you can configure a given vault to behave in very specific ways, so that it’s feasible to create a very complex knowledge management system if you really want to – personally, I always try for the minimum necessary to fulfil the required functions. But the sample project included with e.g. the Projects plugin gives you a taste of the kind of thing you can create if you want to (alas, Projects has been discontinued, but I use CardBoard to achieve similar outcomes).

Then, of course, there’s Pierre’s astonishing InfoQube, which I was looking at just the other day (alas, Windows only, but hey). IQ easily matches and exceeds anything Idealist could do! And benefits from regular support, a very reasonable price, and a constantly growing list of super-integrated features. I’m well impressed by how far it’s come! What’s more, you can keep it as simple as Idealist if you want to – you don’t have to use e.g. the “Pivot Table” feature, although you may eventually be glad of it, depending on how extensive your Idealist-a-like system eventually becomes!

Finally, to answer your question more precisely: there was an Idealist clone around a few years back, but it appears to have sunk without trace (as does askSam, the near-equivalent that also had a very large fanbase back in the day). I’d love to know what the Idealist programming team are doing nowadays…

Cheers,
Bill

James Salla wrote:
Blackwell Idealist seems to still have a heathy fanbase, like Ecco Pro
>or Lotus Agenda. Has anyone tried to create a piece of software that
>mimics the features that makes Idealist so well liked?