I think Obsidian is great software, and I use it at work all the time, but in my personal computing, I barely use it. This is simply because I generally only use a small subset of its features, and those features are adequately matched by Neovim together with the Obsidian plugin. The new “bases” feature of Obsidian, however, finally gives me a reason to use Obsidian proper from time to time — managing the content on this website. A content management system, if you will.

Obsidian supports adding yaml frontmatter to a note to store arbitrary metadata, such as tags, creation dates, or whatever else you want to record. This is exactly how Eleventy — the app that builds this site — handles page metadata. Obsidian's new bases feature allows you to query, filter, and modify the yaml data like a database, meaning it can be used to manage the pages on this site easily — for example, I can update tags in bulk, toggle the “draft” status of pages using graphical checkboxes, and easily filter for pages that match specific properties. All of this would have been difficult with my Neovim-only workflow.

A screenshot showing some recent blog posts in Obsidian's bases interface

Because Obsidian is just a tool for managing a folder of markdown files on your local machine, and my site is basically a folder of markdown files, it just drops in to my existing workflow with no problem. All the writing and editing still happens in Neovim.