I wrote last year that I’d love one app that sticks the best features of iA Writer, Bear and Obsidian together. It’s 2023 and it still hasn’t happened, but I want to more consistently use one tool for notes and writing this year, so I’m deciding to stick with Obsidian and not think about it for the next year. The main reasons for this:

• I use Obsidian for notes at work, because I can’t / won’t use the Apple App Store there, so consistency between home and work is nice.
• iA Writer and Obsidian both have a quick open feature (⌘ + SHIFT + O and ⌘ + O respectively). Bear... has search, which doesn’t work half as well. I’ve worked around that by using an Alfred plugin to quick open in Bear but it’s not as nice as having this work as a native function of the app.
• Most of the UI quirks I’ve been annoyed by in Obsidian were smoothed out in the 1.0 release, or at least made tolerable.
• I realized that I can keep all of my blog posts/content in the same working folder as my personal notes by simply symlinking the content folder in the git repo for this blog in my notes folder, which means I can now keep stuff like my notes on monorepos in sync on this site and locally.

The one mark against Obsidian compared to Bear is the mobile app support. Obsidian has a mobile app and sync service that is paid, but I rarely edit on mobile, so I’m going to use my Things inbox for capture instead, and iA Writer if I need to really modify some text.