This post is for Hyde’s April vim carnival.

Note-taking apps were all the rage until AI took the tech-influencer-industrial complex by storm with a new vision of computer-assisted cognition. These days the hype around “personal knowledge management” (PKM) — smart notes, second brains, and slip boxes — seems to have died down somewhat. But of course, these apps and methodologies still have their place, and many people still use them (some with AI-assistance).

I don’t really have a PKM system. What I do have is a notes folder with hundreds of notes. A bit of everything really. Recipes, friends’ birthdays, personal journal writings, quotes, lists, and the occasional more “intellectual” note thinking through an idea or argument. Certainly not a system. To write and review these notes, I primarily use Neovim with the obsidian.nvim plugin.

Obsidian needs no introduction in the world of PKM, but if you’re not of that world, it’s a (proprietary) app that helps you build, manage, and review a folder (“vault”) of plain-text notes on your computer. It also lets you create hyperlinks between the notes. Never let anyone convince you Obsidian is more complicated than this. You write notes which are files on your computer, and you can create links between the notes. It also has a good search function to find notes again. Everything else — from its huge plugin ecosystem to the various dogmas of how one should actually organise one’s notes (links only? folders? tags? ID numbers? short notes? essays?) — is purely optional.

You can probably tell I have quite a minimalist approach to Obsidian, and that’s partly because really, I use obsidian.nvim, a plugin for Neovim. The way I describe it is it helps you write plain-text notes (with links) in a format that is compatible with Obsidian. In other words, whether or not you actually use Obsidian doesn’t really matter. But if you ever do, your obsidian.nvim notes will work seamlessly.

There is benefit to this method. Neovim is, well, Neovim. If you are already married to Neovim, then you obviously want to use it to write everything your notes. But you might occasionally want to dip in to the full Obsidian app to access a fancy-schmancy feature or plugin. Or you may want the pleasant formatting of reading notes in Obsidian, but want to jump into Neovim to write or edit. Perhaps you synchronise your notes across multiple devices, and Obsidian may be a more convenient option on some of these (the mobile Obsidian app is literally the desktop app with a more compact UI — I’m actually using it to write this post).

So what is obsidian.nvim like? Pretty good. It doesn’t try to do everything Obsidian does — for example, there is no point in the plugin offering search functionality, because there is already about five popular search plugins for Neovim. But it makes easy the core feature of Obsidian — writing notes and linking between them. When you start typing a link, it attempts to offer suggested completions for the note you’re linking to. If you type a link to a non-existent note then it creates the note. It also lets you insert note templates from the same templates folder as your Obsidian vault (it was originally me who contributed this feature, though none of my original messy code survives). It also implements a “smart action” operation that does the “obvious” thing based on cursor position — follow a link, look up a tag, check a box, fold a heading.

Another advantage to using obsidian.nvim is if you’re using Neovim, you’re already used to extending and scripting Neovim on the fly, so adding extra helper functions to your note-taking workflow is easy. As an example, I added a function that prompts me to pick a folder (first using telescope, now snacks) when I create a new note. Obsidian is also extensible, but it’s more faff and involves npm, and you’d have to learn a whole new API, whereas you already know Neovim’s API, right?

The original plugin by epwalsh is no longer maintained, but the community fork is going strong (it’s also less opinionated now, so if you tried the original but we’re put off by it automatically formatting your notes in certain ways, it’s worth another look). They’re working on a language server to integrate with the plugin too, though I’m not sure what it will be used for.

A final benefit of using obsidian.nvim over Obsidian is a kind of enforced minimalism. Obsidian has many great plugins, but there is also a great temptation for some to try and get it to do everything. Maybe your note-taking app shouldn’t also try to be your calendar or your kanban board. Maybe those pursuits are just distractions. On the other hand, if you use Neovim, you will never get distracted making tweaks to the functionality instead of actually writing… right?