RE: https://mastodon.social/@jarango/116047121332640221

Reminds me of "Dominik's tenth rule: Any sufficiently complicated #PIM or note-taking program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of #Orgmode."

Today they're adding a CLI.

Next a REPL.

In a couple of years maybe a decent programming language.

If you want all the fun just now without the lock in effects of #Obsidian, take a look at the cool features of https://karl-voit.at/orgmode/ 😉

#Emacs #publicvoit

@publicvoit I share your concerns about lock-in. They’ve added features like bases and transclusion, which only work in Obsidian. But it’s still all just plain text under the hood — on your computer. And the core Markdown files work everywhere. It’s a much more open platform than (say) OneNote or Notion. (Still, not as open as Emacs.)

@jarango Everything true.

However, I disagree with #Markdown: https://www.karl-voit.at/2025/08/17/Markdown-disaster/

It's way more open than, let's say, #OneNote & so forth. Unfortunately, it's far from being a #textformat that can be reused anywhere without problems. At least I need to convert MD all the time from one flavor to a different.

With more and more #Obsidian add-ons introducing their own syntax elements, you will end up with clear text files you still can't convert for a different tool without modifications. Good luck with finding out which elements are going to survive and which not. For a few files, that seems OK. If you have a decent #PKM like you describe in your awesome #DulyNoted book, it requires more effort.

For everything I need to use with #MD, I keep a syntax file with one example element so that I keep an overview & know what to convert how in case I need to reuse information stored in this MD flavor.

With org, I just push it through #pandoc & I'm done. 🤷

#publicvoit #LML #Zettelkasten

Markdown Is a Disaster: Why and What to Do Instead

Markdown Is a Disaster: Why and What to Do Instead

public voit - Web-page of Karl Voit

@publicvoit @jarango FWIW there's pandoc support for converting Obsidian Markdown to other formats. I added it a while ago but it hasn't been merged yet:

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/pull/11135

Obsidian reader extensions for comments and wikilink transclusions by kepano · Pull Request #11135 · jgm/pandoc

Add Obsidian-Flavored Markdown #9883 using Markdown extensions. Extensions comments: Parses %%text%% as comments (removed from output) wikilink_transclusions: Parses ![[Title]] for full file trans...

GitHub