I've been using [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) to take (these) notes. It's the best option I've found so far for me, mainly because it makes it easy to [publish a public notes website](https://mxstbr.com/notes) of some of my notes with very little overhead. However, I'm accustomed to Notion at work, and Obsidian is a noticeably less polished experience. # Rough edges - Note titles can't contain many special characters like `:`, `[]` - This is really frustrating. I want to title my notes `Template: ……` but literally can't. - I know this is because Obsidian creates file names from the titles—I just wish Obsidian automatically handled the special characters for me. - File _names_ automatically change when I edit the file *title*. - This means when I rename a note, it's Obsidian Publish URL breaks—without a redirect. So effectively, I can never edit the titles of any notes that I've shared on social media. - This is related to the point right above—I want those two concepts to be separate and to manually control the filename. Default it based on the first title, sure, but then don't change it unless I explicitly do so. - Obsidian doesn't store/display the published at and modified at time of each note automatically. - ~~When using a plugin for this, [Obsidian Publish will throw a "File Hash Mismatch" error](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/publish-keeps-throwing-file-hash-mismatch-error/69035).~~ [This fork of the update time plugin fixes this!](https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-update-time) - The title is in a separate input from the body. When I press "Enter" in the title the cursor just… disappears. I can't select across the title and the body. etc. Notion has this figured out. - Image handling is awkward. - I wish I could just drag-and-drop images and Obsidian would handle them for me under the hood instead of having to manually create an "Images" folder and deal with asset management myself. ## Publish I use Obsidian Publish to publish my public notes at mxstbr.com/notes. - Public notes have to be in the root of the vault (instead of in e.g. a `Public Notes/` folder), otherwise their URLs will always include the folder name—even if only that folder is published. - Pages are client-side rendered on the first load, making them less search-indexable - There is [no public API for an Obsidian Publish site](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/api-to-access-list-of-published-notes-to-render-the-list-on-my-homepage/82133/2), making it difficult to render a list of notes externally (e.g. on your homepage) - [Setting a `permalink` for a published note breaks it's generated OG meta image](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/setting-a-permalink-breaks-the-automatically-generated-og-preview-meta-image/82132/9)