Goodbye Capacities, hello (again) Obsidian

27 Mar 2024

One thing you need to know about me to understand this post: I love to tinker with software. It's what got me into vim and Emacs for years¹. The more I can edit things, install, uninstall, play with config files, the more likely I am to jump in and stay on.

The second thing you need to know is that I'm never happy with the way I work. I’ll take any chance to reduce friction. What are the things that feel like chores, like annoyances, that work against rather than for me? Thus, I’m prone (doomed, even) to every so often question my entire workflow and get excited or distracted by new tools.

And boy, has it been one of those months recently.

I came across Capacities while furiously going through productivity apps. It grabbed my attention by stating that “[we] adapted our thinking and the way we work to computers” and are stuck with “faceless files with cryptic names and a multitude of programs to use them”, and that Capacities “break[s] the silo [and] create[s] a network of thoughts”.

As someone who struggled to find a way to work with Obsidian, this hit a nerve. I installed it and started creating Posts, Notes, People, Books, Weblinks. Setting up custom objects like Plants, Quotes. Started writing regularly, collecting my thoughts, sharing them online.

And then, one day, Capacities went down. It was a stark reminder that offline-first is a must-have. For as good as Capacities is at abstracting away complexity and presenting a pretty front-end, it’s a cloud-based service. All your thoughts, all your words are stored away from you. If something fails (and it will), you’re locked out.

You can export your Capacities files. All they contain is simple Markdown augmented with Front Matter. Here’s an example:

---
type: Book
title: 'The Creative Act: A Way of Being'
description: '"The Creative Act: A Way of Being" explores the transformative power of creativity as a fundamental aspect of human existence, inspiring individuals to engage in self-expression and innovation for personal growth and societal impact.'
tags: [Nonfiction, Creativity, Musician]
coverImage: '[[image]]'
author: '[[Rick Rubin]]'
rating: null
recommendedBy: null
bookshelf: '[[Reading]]'
---

Coincidentally, I stumbled upon the personal website of one Steph Ango (CEO of Obsidian) a few days ago². Along with many interesting posts, there’s an Obsidian Vault Template full of Markdown files that look a lot like the stuff Capacities exports.

As I thought on it, I found the following reasons for switching to Obsidian:

1. It's modular and endlessly customizable, with a thriving ecosystem of plugins. Even core functionality can be disabled and configured to your exact liking
2. It's local and offline first
3. You can switch between source mode and reader mode, exposing the Markdown syntax
4. It's 100% user-supported, a commendable business model

New vault went up and the tinkering started. Along the way, I picked up Minimal, a theme that makes it easier to customize Obsidian while providing better defaults, with features like Cards and pretty Tables.

Toss in a handful of plugins and things started clicking into place. Dataview gives you all the power of Queries, a feature that Capacities locks behind their Pro tier. Auto Note Mover puts notes into folders based on rulesets, abstracting the folder structure away. It’s there, but you don’t need to look at it unless you want to.

Couple of days into it and I’ve migrated all my personal notes. In the end, I have to thank the folks behind Capacities for getting me back into Obsidian. It showed me a model for organizing Markdown files. Only it’s not that hard to get as much, if not more, out of Obsidian, as long as you’re willing to tinker with software.

As a bonus: I wrote this post in iA Writer. Because it's all just Markdown files, it's immediately just there in Obsidian. Local files are a wonderful thing.

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