If you’re a fan of VSCode, you will love Obsidian as a note-taker.

After spending an embarrassingly enormous amount of time and money searching for the ideal note-taking app, I found Obsidian to be the one with my Goldilocks set of features — not too much, not too little.

Nebo, Goodnotes, Notability, OneNote, Bear; I’ve tried them all and a bunch of others whose names I don’t remember anymore. Apple Notes was too little and Evernote was too much. And, don’t even get me started on Notion.

Obsidian is strikingly similar to VSCode with a clean and minimalistic look and feel. So much so that, I was inspired to write this note after noticing how many times I have mistaken one for the other, having used them side by side for a long time.

And for power users, Obsidian does offer additional features such as templates, graph view, and canvas. But they are neatly tucked away and don’t get in your way if you choose not to use them. I don’t.

I want to give a shoutout to the Obsidian team for a job well done and I hope they can avoid the trap of enshittification that befalls most freemium products.