Crafting Notes in Obsidian MD

A Personal Meditation on When to Switch Note-Taking Apps and Why.

Every update for Craft Docs excited me. I was fully invested in the app, so much so that I basically ran my whole life through it. Every email, every manuscript, every message, it almost always started in Craft. My partner joked I could give a Ted Talk about note-taking with Craft Docs.

I started note-taking in Craft during my last year of graduate school for my dissertation and other projects. Taking notes helped me manage information for PhD studies, and Craft Docs was where I kept my notes. It was a lab notebook of sorts. I ran online experiments and wrote up summary documents of results. I also used it for several years during my postdoctoral research for similar types of notes, coursework summaries, analysis documentation, manuscript outlines, and grant proposal management. I was very attached to note-taking in Craft Docs, but as a keen Reddit user once mentioned, Craft is like a best friend that doesn’t want to be friends with you. In my opinion, Craft stopped prioritizing the individual user (possibly around 2022).

They seemed to shift their focus from the individual to the corporation, which eventually made the app incredibly frustrating (for me) to use. My main gripe with Craft Docs was their addition of a “Home” page. This essentially breaks the separation between spaces, showing recent documents from every space. If you’re like me, and you wanted to use Craft for everything, you would see recent documents from disparate areas of your life. Every time I opened a tab, I would be faced with writing projects, work notes, email snippets, freelance drafts, and personal reflections. I tried workarounds. They didn’t work for me. I stopped using Craft. I started crafting in Obsidian MD.

For a while, I played with other note-taking apps. I like a lot about taking notes in Bear. I thought about only using Apple Notes. I tried Capacities for a day or two. But no app matched Craft’s functionality like Obsidian did. What I enjoy most about Obsidian, and this is something that some people hate, Obsidian can be anything I want it to be.

Simplest Method to Move Notes to Obsidian

I moved my notes from Craft to Obsidian using MD files. I just (1) download markdown (.md) files and (2) move the markdown files to a separate vault in Obsidian. I’m currently using three main vaults, personal, writing, and academic (work). Vaults in Obsidian are what spaces used to be in Craft. Now, I just needed Obsidian to look more like Craft.

These are a couple of views from my personal vault using the Project Browser plugin.

This is a snippet from my writing vault using the Cards View plugin. I have the Matter reading app connected to this vault, so anything I highlight gets synced here.

The Project Browser plugin is also gives a nice folder overview. This is a space where I keep tabs on some of my academic projects.

Plugins to Craft Notes in Obsidian

There are a few things that I really enjoyed about taking notes in Craft. I can achieve several of them with Obsidian’s plugins, which are supported by the lovely Obsidian community. Below, I will list some of the plugins that I use to mimic the experience I enjoyed in Craft and give a brief summary of how I use them.

1. Cards View — overview all notes in a gallery view, filter by tags, and pin notes to the top to focus on (e.g., projects, content notes to meditate on).
2. Project Browser — view cards for specific files based on their status (thinking, focus, finalize, review, etc.).
3. Note Gallery — get an overview of certain notes in a gallery view, which is similar to the Cards View.
4. Ink — make handwritten notes and drawings in-line with typed notes.
5. Minimal (and Minimal Settings) — make the interface pretty and simple.
6. Calendar — take daily notes based on a template, navigate between days, and see a visual indicator of how much I wrote for a given day with a closed dots (one dot per 200 words) and an open dot for any open tasks. It’s lovely.
7. Periodic Notes — take weekly and monthly notes based on a template.
8. Zoom — open a heading or bullet point and focus on a specific section, similar to pages in Craft Docs. This helps me avoid overwhelm in long notes and focus on one aspect at a time.
9. Advanced Obsidian URLs — link to a specific file or heading in Obsidian from other apps (e.g., deep link from a task in Things 3 to a note in Obsidian).
10. Font Size Adjuster — adjusts the font size of text with configurable keyboard shortcuts.

This may seem like a lot, and there are actually even more that I use. I’m happy to chat more about this, so comment or reach out if you have questions.

The flexibility of plugins just works for me. I prefer the control that Obsidian gives users to essentially build their own app and tailor it to what they need to focus. Craft’s Home page, tab view, and search across spaces became distracting to me, hindering my ability to focus, and that is a dealbreaker for me in an app, especially one that I use every day (Michael Lopp writes about a similar experience with Bear notes in “300 Times a Day”).

While I enjoy Obsidian, I don’t use it for everything. I use iCloud sync, and even with my files set to “Keep Downloaded,” it loads more slowly than I’m used to. To my knowledge, Obsidian does not have export functionality that matches the aesthetic of Craft, at least not from a tablet or phone. To workaround slow loading times, I take quick notes either (1) on paper or (2) in Apple Notes, especially Quick Notes. I process these notes regularly, and important notes live in Obsidian, my central, digital note-taking space. To workaround exporting documents, much of my personal writing lives in Ulysses (I’ve recently realized that I can add my Obsidian folder to Ulysses as an external folder and have my writing exist in both platforms!). I edit blogs and book drafts in Ulysses and share notes (e.g., meeting notes, agendas, responses to reviewers or editors) from Ulysses. Because Obsidian is free for personal use, I don’t mind paying for Ulysses. I’m also not opposed to paying to support Obsidian. But I won’t pay for an app (or multiple accounts of an app) that I do not enjoy using.

Notes

• My method to move markdown files from Craft to Obsidian is simple, but there are likely better methods. When I first wanted to move from Craft to Obsidian, I consulted a couple of guides, one from Curtis McHale and another from FlohGro.
• Writing this made me think of a Michael Lopps’s piece on “300 Times a Day” and his experience with the Bear app. Any time an app updates it may change the way in which we engage with it, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
• Some readers may note that neither Ulysses nor Apple Notes have separate spaces and don’t allow for perfect separation between areas. But Ulysses has Projects, which let users focus on and search within that specific area. Apple Notes has tags that, when you select the tag twice, it will exclude all notes with that tag from view. Smart folders work in a similar way. Also, I am less bothered by the lack of perfect separation in these apps because I don’t use them “300 times a day.”
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