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Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

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321–330 of 377 posts

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Golang a great fit in your opinion?

Server setup before the rewrite: docker + php-fpm + php7 + larvel + nginx + redis + cron + worker + certbot Server after the rewrite to Golang: server, a 15MB no-dependencies binary that has everything.

Using Go means you are forgoing Docker...? Ok.

Also if you don't need certbot anymore is your service managing its own ssl certs with letsencrypt? Isn't it generally easier to configure with a reverse proxy like nginx or caddy and terminate SSL at the edge? That's literally caddy's whole thing that it does SSL for you so that it doesn't concern your application.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like software in AI-era should be distributed open source. That makes it easy for AI to be trained on it.

Yeah, also makes it easy for humans to train on it. That's the point of open source, sharing the knowledge. We'll all make the same shit over and over if noone shares. But if we all share, then the only thing left to make is the unknown.

That doesn't explain why particularly in the AI era software should be easily accessible. All that stuff you said isn't relevant as it applies in the pre-AI era as well.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#323

My note taking endgame is a plain dir with md files and a simple website that gives you fullscreen textarea to view and edit them.

Isn’t that a text editor?

You can both edit text files directly in server or edit them via the web view from any device.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#324
post #43

I use .MD files, helix terminal editor with a markdown LSP called markdown-oxide that replicates the obsidian feature set (like bidirectional links, tags, making new notes automatically, two keys get you from a in-line footnote to the definition and back again, etc), and rumdl which is a super efficient and customizable markdown linter and formatter (semantic line breaks far the win!) . Since it is all helix I can ju…

Right, but most people want to be able to consult their notes on the go, quickly add items from their phone, etc.

To be fair you can just keep using Obsidian or similar apps on your phone for this, along with an external sync solution like Syncthing.

I tried it for a bit in the past, the main friction is apps formatting Markdown slightly differently (indents, blank lines).

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#325
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really mind this way of doing it since I know that my data is "safe". I can at any time just grab my vault and open it in any editor. I can write my own editor. I can import the data into most other tools. It's when the data isn't open that I tend to avoid the product.

Its "safe" as in you can access it but its not safe from Obsidian accessing it.

If you don't use their sync service, all your vault files are local only, and there isn't any mysterious telemetry happening in the background.

If you do use their sync service, it's end to end encrypted with your own local-only password, so Obsidian doesn't have a backdoor to your encrypted remote files either.

If you don't trust Obsidian's sync service, but want to sync files, you can sync your files in any other way you choose, like with git or webdav. You can keep it all self-hosted if you want to.

You could encryt your entire local vault too if you want to.

Obsidian's business model is just selling the sync subscription service. There's no ads component to incentivize data collection/tracking and pissing off their entire customer base.

So I can't find it in me to be worried about this one.

And if Obsidian did go rogue one day, the files are basically exported already, so whatever, it'd be easy to switch to something else.

I think the open-source obsidian plugins that aren't yet popular enough to have a lot of eyes actually checking over the source code yet are more suspect than Obsidian itself. Open-source on its own doesn't always actually prevent malicious actions or privacy violation, since most people just treat "open-source" as "this app is automatically trustworthy because surely someone else is keeping on eye on it" and either don't know how or don't bother to look at the source code themselves. But I'm not actually worried about that, either.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a better version of something is an invitation, not an imposition! I'm not a developer and never have been, I study literatureand I use a modal editor for all my writing. If you've ever used Ctrl+C to copy, you've already done something harder than the core concept of modal editing. Modal editing is simpler: you press a single key, and you switch to one (of two) modes. That's it. That's the thing people find in…

> In Word, you hunt through menus for the word 'cut' or 'paste' and click it. What you just described is discoverability. Something that terminal applications and modal editors tend to do quite poorly.

Yes but helix for example has very good discoverability by presenting commands on the screen which you can read slowly or not even notice between memorized key presses. And even ancient editors like vi it means printing out or having the commands listed in a window to reference which is a far cry from developer level ability.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#327
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but most people want to be able to consult their notes on the go, quickly add items from their phone, etc.

To be fair you can just keep using Obsidian or similar apps on your phone for this, along with an external sync solution like Syncthing. I tried it for a bit in the past, the main friction is apps formatting Markdown slightly differently (indents, blank lines).

The beauty of an interoperable format like markdown

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#328
One strength of Obsidian is actually it's plugins. All of the plugins are fully open source so I think if someone truly plans to disrupt it they should make their editor interoperable with Obsidian plugins.

It's a bit strange to me that in 2026 where code is allegedly "free" we're still building these web apps that pretend to be desktop apps. In part I understand it, and logically a PWA must be better than electron for the most part (takes up less space, doesn't install another browser on my computer) yet I cannot see myself installing a PWA on my Mac. I feel like in general I've come to the point in my life where if a desktop app is not native I am not installing it (apps that I NEED to have for one reason or another are excluded, but I'll still grunt)

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will it be Free software? If you're building something that's Free software, fully compatible with Obsidian, and a native app, AI'm willing to contribute tokens.

Free to download, free to use, free to share, no data collection of any kind, but closed source. A full 1:1 native clone would be too much to build without funding. Plugin/theme/api compatibility, canvas, bases, sync, and all the small Obsidian edge cases would make it a much larger project. Without sponsorship or some sustainable funding model, AI'd focus first on the native markdown editor/vault part: local files,…

Free to download, free to use, closed source - for that we already have Obsidian...

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#330
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does every webpage not encode its images as base64 data?

Because web browsers support hyperlinking there is no need to embed everything into one big html file

And markdown does also support hyperlinks, like HTML. So it makes sense to use that feature.
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