Obsidian is a note-taking app developed by 2 Canadian software developers. They are simply amazing. They have built a real community around the app, and have been very responsive to feedback and comments. The result is an app that is a pleasure to use and which makes it easy for notes to be made public. I am a huge fan. I wouldn't have started my digital garden project without it. You can find them here: https://obsidian.md/ The app excels in developing notes as an external second-brain. It makes it very easy to create links between notes, and it has a beautiful graph view which displays how your notes are connected. It also has a great plugin architecture so that you only install the features that you need. It's the perfect balance between minimalism and power. The following is adapted from their Help Manual. I was won over the moment I came across the John Locke quote. > ## How we're different > > ==*We want you to own and control your data*== > > - We believe in plain text for something as important as your knowledge base. You don't want to put your own brain over someone else's neck, do you? Treat your second brain the same way. > > - Sync is only a utility to facilitate working on multiple devices, the data will always primarily live on your hard disk. > > - When the file system replaces the cloud, you get flexible options to work with your files: you can back them up with Dropbox, use Git to do versioning, or encrypt your disk for security. Whatever works on your file system will work on your Obsidian knowledge base. > > ==*Links are first-class citizens*== > >- Links and connections are crucial to discovering the relations between what we know. > > - Obsidian greatly values this, and encourages it with internal links and graph view among other things. > > - As John Locke puts it... > > > The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: > > 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. > > 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. > > 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. > > \- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) > \ > Hierarchy gives us No. 1, and linking gives us No. 2. We're still unsure what No. 3 entails in the context of note-taking, but it might have something to do with programming or macros. > \ > ==*Your own toolkit*== > > - Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone. > > - Instead of providing you with an opinionated and assembled product, Obsidian gives you a foundation and numerous functional building blocks to discover and build your own solution. > > - The foundation is to be able to view files, edit them, and search them. For the minimalist, that's enough. > > - On top of that, you can add isolated, independent building blocks to add features to your note-taking. We don't expect plugins to be the silver bullet to solve all the problems, but it does get us closer than a monolith solution, without all the features that you don't need cluttering the interface.