But Notion has good tables by default, so I can have both good tables (and tableviews) and normal text files in the same app.
I could have tried Obsidian plugins, but I suspect that it would have been a time sink, and Notion offered everything in a neat package, so in the end, it won.
+------------------------------+
Product,Cost per seat,Importance
+------------------------------+
GSuite,$7.20,Critical
Notion,$10,High
"Something, ""with"", commas and double-quotes",$5,Low
+------------------------------+I use it for my workout logbook and cooking/recipe log with hundreds of entries.
I will say that Obsidian's tables have gotten a lot better in terms of reflow, sorting, etc. At some point Obsidian might add some additional config to their tables to allow users to manually control column widths, etc., but it would have to be non-standard markdown - like how you can scale down images by adding a width parameter.
![[./media/example_image.png|Custom caption|450]]You can click "export to markdown" on a notion page, you can click "import from markdown", but those two markdown dialects are totally incompatible. Most of the time notion can't even read what it exported.
The notion web editor for me has very noticeable lag, so I really want to just be able to write some text somewhere to represent a notion table or whatever, but there's simply no supported way to do that I'm aware of.
I mean, it's fine, using a i7 core at 100% at all times just to produce text at a 2 second delay is totally fine for a text editor, I'm sure notion's doing its best.
And for many, it does. It may not for you, but everyone has their own system.
It's WYSIWYG, so even if you don't know markdown, you can just use standard shortcuts like Ctrl-B to bold something, Ctrl-I to italicize, etc.
But it's only as valuable as the notes that it contains. If you are a fastidious note taker (for your projects, work, etc), like to ontologically tag things, and appreciate building inter-related knowledge (like wikipedia links), then you'd be hard pressed to find a better substitute even compared to other heavy hitters like Joplin and Logseq.
I will asked ChatGPT to output responses in a note form in markdown so I can copy/paste it in.
You can wrap code with: ‘’’elixir Code here ‘’’ To get syntax highlighting
Todo lists are as simple as -[ ] to do item
You can use iCloud/dropbox to sync.
Notion shines with database use, and was how I used to write my blogs and connecting the API directly to my site to auto update. I’m surprised you’re a paying customer and barely use the database stuff!
I also really like how it treats everything as blocks, that's another thing that I can no longer live without.
If you're not interested in features like this, then yeah. Obsidian would be a good use-case.
HN, never change.
I just use it for taking notes and writing stuff down. I like how easy it is to drop an image, video, or document into a notion page, but I've only barely used features like databases which seem to be the big selling point, and none of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.
One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.