And I think that's the important bit. It hits a sweet spot for functionality and ubiquity, _and_ it is freeform enough that I don't have to think in advance how I want to use it—I literally adapt queries and files to the project I'm working on, as I go.

It's a "whatever" box in the context of, "I'm down for whatever you're into, boss" box. But it will do "whatever", deterministically. By cleverly combining pretty, extensible, and customizable rendering of the results of queries over an ad-hoc #markdown-based datastore.

Now, I know that (especially after reading the mention of #symbolics #lispmachine in the first post), someone's gonna say "but emacs!". And sure, follow your bliss, not stepping into that one. Suffice it to say, I'm well past mid career and have tried to love Emacs, perennially, since I started. I have accepted that it meets neither my workflow nor aesthetic needs (and I'll thank you for trusting me on that).

I thought, for a while, that maybe I could make #VSCode be the environment I could use to do this, what with MarkdownPreviewEnhanced and other plugins. But that is an IDE optimized for developing _other_ applications, which is different from building a boat whilst sailing it.

Anyway, this is turning into something that should be a blog post, and I don't expect anyone will read this far anyway, but I thought I'd stop and give credit where credit is due. #obsidian is the closed thing to an ad-hoc productivity operating system I've ever used, and it's quietly become one of the most important pieces of software I have.

Nicely done, @obsidian and community. And nicely done, @gruber and #aaronschwartz and everyone who's made #markdown what it is.