Note Taking: Obsidian and Fastmail

-Ben

Everyone has a note taking app they prefer. For almost 5 years now I’ve paid for Standard Notes to give me plain text notes synced across my devices. Back then, I was much more bullish on encryption and privacy and this worked great cross platform. It gave me basic searching and sorting functions.

Old Editor

I never really liked their editors, even their Markdown or Spreadsheet ones. They didn’t feel good, especially on mobile. Like they were making as many as possible, but not refining any of them. So I always used the plaintext editor, even when typing in Markdown.

I didn’t want to fall into the hamster wheel trap of the next new note taking app. Standard Notes stored and synced notes like I needed. Migrating notes to a new experience every couple of months would be such a pain, especially into a new format. And just to try some other editor that will probably charge me money to sync.

A lot has changed in the time since I started using Standard Notes. I’ve gotten less strict about a E2E solution for everything. I favor open standards over the encrypted stuff now, in many cases. I switched email providers from Proton Mail to Fastmail (again, a big UX choice). I’ve learned much more about self hosting and have gotten more comfortable with how to put things on the web (including this blog). And it has been 4 or 5 years since I’ve changed notes apps, Standard Notes hadn’t changed much in that time.

New Editor

I had heard about Obsidian on a couple podcasts, but mostly ignored it. I was setting up a new laptop at work, where I used the free version of Standard Notes, and decided this would be a good time to give it a try. The promise of all my notes being Markdown files on my computer was super cool. I figured I could script against them myself even! I don’t need any syncing at work, it’s just the one computer.

And wow, I was blown away! A few weeks in and I’m still amazed at how open Obsidian is, how responsive Obsidian is, and how many great features they’ve packed in. I’ve even taken a look at CodeMirror, and might use it in future projects.

I liked it so much at work I decided to download it on my Android phone and see if it could live up to my hype there. And it nailed it! Really just wonderful. The obsidian links make it easy to extends via macros and the markdown looks great.

Syncing Solution

So I also downloaded it on my laptop too. But now I needed a way to sync between my phone and computer. Since I’ve begun to self host other things, I started to look into that. But they all seemed like they might be a lot of work, I didn’t want something that would be more maintenance than useful.

I looked into the official Obsidian Sync, which costs about the same amount as my Standard Notes subscription at $4/mo. But by now my imagination was going wild with embeddable photos and who knows what else! The official plan only gave me 1GB and sharing with my wife would be another $4/mo for her.

As I was looking at the possibilities, I stumbled into WebDAV as an option via the RemotelySave plugin . My experience with the DAV protocols are somewhat mixed. They’re powerful but tough to use. Fortunately, my Fastmail email has a full WebDAV server. You can even view the files in their app! And my account comes with 10GB of storage, plus I could have my wife just log in with a different app password.

Migration

Coming back to this complaint from above, I haven’t migrated much yet. Standard Notes will give me my notes in a .txt, and Obsidian will automatically recognize those if I change them to a .md extension. Some of the titles might be mangled and I might lose some metadata. But I had very little metadata, and titles can be repaired.

I’ve realized that maybe most of my notes are fairly transient anyway. The posts on this blog have a little more staying power, I think. So this is a work in progress, who knows how much I’ll end up moving over.

Conclusion

Time will tell how long this version of note taking lasts for me. But Obsidian is an amazing product and RemotelySave with Fastmail makes it so easy to sync that for now, this is definitely a winner.