Obsidian - My Note-taking Tool of Choice
If the layout of this site looks familiar to you, it should be no surprise that I use Obsidian a lot! Although Obsidian is not FOSS software, what drew me to it was that it uses the open Markdown format for your files and you can store them locally on your machine, which makes it easy to backup and port to another software if the need arises (such as Logseq,Joplin, or some of the other alternatives).
Like many note-taking applications, you can easily over-complicate things by going down the plugin rabbit hole and quickly find yourself spending more time configuring things instead of taking actual notes (I’m guilty of this myself and it’s one of the reasons I decided to create this website), but I try to keep mine as close as possible to the vanilla settings with the exception of Obsidian Git that backs up my notes to my GitHub repository for version control and also makes it incredibly easy to publish new content for this website.
After resisting the urge to install the Obsidian Dataview plugin for a long time, I did finally cave and began to play around with some different ways to query my notes in my private Obsidian vault. However, I mostly just find it fun to find new and interesting ways to query my existing notes and try to avoid wasting time re-configuring things rather than taking useful notes. After all, setting up a bunch of unique query’s isn’t going to result in any novel insights if you haven’t taken the time to actually create the data or content in the first place!