About Obsidian

The project

Why build yet another note-taking app?

Like the cliché goes, we started Obsidian because Erica couldn't find anything that can satisfy her need to build a personal knowledge base. She has tried all kinds of software from TiddlyWiki to TheBrain; nothing felt right though.

Quarantine finally gave us the chance to start making it. After thinking about it some more, we decided on the three most fundamental directions of Obsidian:

• Local-first and plain text;
• Link as first-class citizen;
• Make it super extensible.

Although we call it a personal knowledge base or your "second brain", we also like to think of it as an IDE for your notes. You can think of an IDE as a powerful frontend that tries to understand your code, such as where are functions and variables stored, what are their types, and by doing so make it super easy to navigate code and get suggestions as you type.

In this sense, with most of the current note-taking apps, working with notes feels like writing code without syntax highlighting, code autocomplete or Git integration. All the things that programmers have been taken for granted for decades. That's pretty sad, don't you think? Today's knowledge workers are facing new challenges all the time, and they deserve better tools.

Yep, that's why we're building "yet another note-taking app".

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The team