Back to Bear

KillerWhale

Funny as how @GeoEng51 's thread came just as I was conducting similar thinking. So, on my end: after yet another long attempt to get Obsidian to work for me, I'm yet again back in Bear.

I was looking at devising a one-all, be-all end tool for all my needs. The idea was: capture, journal, mull ideas and create all at the same place, and the insights will grow and feed off each other over time. I painstakingly devised the whole parts of the system, curating the exact plugins I needed, bridged the gaps through automation, and worked like this for a year.

And it all slowly fell apart, with unprocessed stuff piling up high, because it's depressing as hell to be in.

Here's the thing: you can make such an environment. You can replicate pretty much anything in Obsidian (hell, people even wrote a bloody email client for it). But it multiplies the pain points, and you end up having to think about how to run your system as much as you have to think inside it. And that does not work for me.

• Geographical data is paramount for me when journaling. You can capture that in Obsidian, but it requires the help of an external website, or a lookup for your address. But I just want to journal, not prop the system with helper tools.
• Media management is a major pain. You can of course add attachments, but removing them to avoid cluttering your vault requires manual cleanup or plugins which somewhat automate stuff for you. But I just want to capture media, not prop the system with helper tools.
• Because filing is built on folders, linking, filing and making sure you find stuff again later requires some overhead. But I just want to make notes, not prop the system with helper tools.

"Oh, this command is no longer working properly. Okay, maybe I need to update the plugin. But what on Earth is the plugin that does that again?"

I did an experiment and journaled in Day One again – it was a breath of fresh air. This is the tool for that. I don't have to work on anything, I just write. It was a forgotten joy to just work in it. I wanted to browse my entries, reminisce, be with my words. Instead of looking at that obscure file explorer.

But if a whole integrated system does not work, and I actually should use the best tool for each job, then Obsidian's main interest gets seriously threatened: the power is no longer really worth the trade-offs.

Back in my Evernote days, I had an awesome system which worked beautifully for me. I would encounter stuff, have ideas, open the app, put them there, add a handful of tags, and be done. Later, I knew I would either find the stuff again because it was about projects I was working on, or it would be stored as a "maybe" for later retrieval if it was relevant. A lot of it wasn't, and it was fine.

I've realised that my needs are

• A beautiful, snappy app. I might be superficial, but I spend my day alone in front of a computer. I pay a premium for Apple stuff because I want pretty software that runs fast and cares for detail, otherwise I would have stayed on Windows. Obsidian's team does a tremendous work, but it remains an Electron app, and it lacks so many of the deep OS features. Bear is Apple-only, crafted by people who obsess so much over detail they spent two years developing the foundation of their text editor for v2.
• I have a slight ADHD and will agonise enterally about where to file stuff when confronted to too many choices. Tags? Backlinks? Folders? Bear's answer is simple: tags, period. Just like in my Evernote days, I can add something there, tag it and move on. And, tags are links, in a way. Soft ones, but still. What matters is for me to find my stuff later. Who cares if not everything has links?
• I enjoy capturing and referencing stuff, while not being an academic. I want a copy of that website for reference, I want to archive that PDF to make sure I can still get to the original info just in case. But I don't need a reference manager at all. I just want to clip stuff because it's inspiring, and centralise both my notes and my references / articles in the same place like I did with Evernote. That's where the real cross-pollination occurs. And Obsidian's media management is extremely clunky. Bear takes it whatever I throw at it, embeds it wherever, and allows me to resize stuff with the mouse and just delete it without worrying about orphaned files! This might be superficial, but this matters to me.

And also, Bear has all of the core relevant features for a PKM in my opinion:

• Multiple windows (with per-window navigation history is in beta! I no longer need Andy mode in Obsidian)
• Wikilinking with autocompletion
• Links to headers
• Wikilinks are updated upon note rename
• Backlinks
• Privacy (supports iCloud's Advanced Data Protection)

What's missing from Obsidian?

• Block links
• Transclusion
• Graph
• Database

I've never gotten to use Dataview or Databases in the 5+ years I've used Obsidian, despite me wanting to, so it's safe to say I never will, because I'm too busy doing other stuff. Luhmann didn't have a graph and it wasn't a problem. Transclusion is fun, but I never really used it a lot. I can replicate block links with links to H6 headers if really needed.

Not to disrespect Obsidian, which is a terrific, beautiful software which has done a lot to promote PKM to the general public, with a strong company ethic, and is infinitely flexible. In my writing workshops, I will still recommend people use it, and will keep teaching it. It's by far the best free, multiplatform tool for people to discover Zettelkasten, PKM and linked thinking.

But I've been in that space long enough to realise that the way I work and function makes me need something that channels me and offers me powerful yet subtly limited tools to focus me, and delights me to use. Obsidian, despite all its power, does not delight me (or then needs to be used bare – but then what's the point…?). Bear is just powerful enough, and delights so much that the tradeoff is well worth it for me.

I think the general discourse around Zettelkasten and PKMs in general tends to focus on beautiful, expertly crafted systems. But as our hosts often repeat and show here, the goal is to write and work, not maintain a system. Luhmann did not have all our fancy toys. The Zettelkasten method can be summed up in one slide, and yet, there is a whole trap of perfectionism that it is horribly easy to fall into, and I've fallen in it repeatedly. I think there's a "Perfectionist's Fallacy" as well as the Collector's.

c4lvorias

I also ditched Obsidian last week. I didn't use to think software primes brain in a significant way, but changed my mind after switching to the Archive. It's interesting to see my nightmare of shallow processing and just leaving references to things are getting erased. May not be the case in Bear, but the friction in the Archive helped me a lot. Software as extended mind tools affect your thinking process.

mlbrandt

I'm with both of you! I love the discussions from those who really understand the coding, and adding plugins etc... but I landed on using google drive with direct links. I don't use tags because I have been able to use searching for words instead.

KillerWhale

@c4lvorias I would definitely look deep into the Archive if it had a worthy iOS counterpart. Unfortunately, a lot of my capture and organising happens on my phone, and that includes quite a lot of rich media (which also excludes Drafts) so that's a dealbreaker.

ZettelDistraction

I ignore the plugins I don't use. I wait until I have something written outside my Zettelkasten to add Zettels, unless I need to record something I believe I will need but will forget, such as some technical configuration. I could purge a few community plugins. I use QuickAdd, Templater, and the Calendar plug in. I prioritize taking notes by hand, which has its benefits. This slows the "Zettel metric" but it makes the ZK more useful, at least for me.

KillerWhale

@ZettelDistraction I see what you mean, but to me, that's the whole point of Obsidian. If I'm not using its power, I'm losing on a non-native Apple ecosystem app, which has its own benefits, and I have to manage files and media by hand. So for me I've simply settled on Day One (for journaling), Bear (for Zetteling, notes and reference material), Readwise (for reading and highlighting) and just the files system for everything else. 🙂

But I totally get not everybody is as obsessive about those things as I am 😅

GeoEng51

@KillerWhale said:
@ZettelDistraction I see what you mean, but to me, that's the whole point of Obsidian. If I'm not using its power, I'm losing on a non-native Apple ecosystem app, which has its own benefits, and I have to manage files and media by hand. So for me I've simply settled on Day One (for journaling), Bear (for Zetteling, notes and reference material), Readwise (for reading and highlighting) and just the files system for everything else. 🙂

There's a lot to be said for your approach. That way, you can select apps that have exactly the features you want (I'm a great fan of Bear, even though I don't use it any more, and of Readwise). You absolutely do not need to have "One huge App to rule them all, One App to do your bidding, One App to find them all (zettels), and in the darkness connect them."

ZettelDistraction

@KillerWhale said:
@ZettelDistraction I see what you mean, but to me, that's the whole point of Obsidian. If I'm not using its power, I'm losing ...

I'm deliberately truncating your sentence for two reasons: I don't understand the portion I'm truncating (exhaustion and inanition have set in), and biological creatures are wasteful.

Our aesthetic concerns are different.

It doesn't matter to me to let more than a handful of features of an all-in-one application languish unused. I expect to waste most of the features, since nature is wasteful (in ways that likely violate the terms of service and etiquette of the forum if I were explicit), and there is little cost to me by letting them sit there, unappreciated and unused. I could reduce the clutter of some unused buttons and community plugins, but my focus is so narrow that the work to remove them is barely worth it, for me.

Also, I don't suffer from functional fixedness. I'm too insensitive to seize on the teleology of all-in-oneness. I see an app that does what I want when minimally configured; it doesn't break after many upgrades, so I am unmotivated to switch.

Besides, I do the same thing: I use Obsidian (not the full-blown Absurdian) and Zotero. I'm also on Windows, which is means I cannot run the Archive, and I cannot bear the cost of Bear.

Nick

That is interesting, as I recently tried switching over to The Archive and bounced back to Obsidian. The benefit I get from already having all my notes there, the ease of linking, and pipe-linking outweighs the benefits of perceived longevity & more focused thinking that I experienced in The Archive.

I haven't experienced the same issues with plugin fatigue as others have. I have two plugins that I consistently use (Homepage & Exalidraw) and about 6 more that I use in a blue moon for convenience factors.

I find bears organizational structure & minimalist design to be interesting (no folders allowed, just tagging). There is something to be said for how a minimal app (Bear or The Archive) push you towards certain workflows that are more productive because they keep you focused on what matters (thinking). To me the Archive would be perfect if they had some sort of autocomplete feature for linking notes where you search the filename as you are creating the link and it pastes only [[Unique Identifier]]. Thinking of taking a stab at it again whenever Sascha comes out with the English translation of the book.