The Problem
Over the past couple of years, I have tried a variety of notetaking applications throughout my internships and college, but it wasn’t until this past year that I discovered the tool that fits all of my needs perfectly (for the moment at least).
As a Mathematics major, the majority of my classes involved solving proofs and equations which did not translate well to typed notes. At the beginning of my undergraduate journey I turned to Notability for all of my digital math notes because it was the easiest to write down equations and diagrams with my Apple Pencil. This worked very well my first quarter of college until I took my first computer science class. Computer science became my obsession after that class and I later changed my major to Math-CS because of it. As a computer science major, notes are much less equation heavy and bias toward keyboard driven notetaking. I was presented with a problem because as great as notability was, it’s support of text based notes just wasn’t as feature rich as I was hoping for.
This dilemma drove me to trying new solutions like Evernote and Notion. I really enjoyed using Notion, but during my internship Notion was not approved by security because notes are hosted on Notion’s database. After I left, I too began to question whether I was okay with Notion storing all of my personal notes. The convenience of having my notes everywhere on any device was amazing, but having my data stored in Notion’s cloud was less than ideal. Another thing that I disliked about Notion was its lack of support for vim keybindings, which were becoming essential for me.
Obsidian
Eventually I discovered Obsidian. My mentor during my junior year internship suggested I try out obsidian for notetaking, as all of the files are only stored locally and as I quickly discovered, Obsidian supports vim keybindings! After discovering that the “Obsidian Vault” is just a directory, I learned that I could put my vault on iCloud Drive and access my notes from the Obsidian app on iPhone. This, in addition to discovering community plugins made Obsidian nearly perfect. The only complaint that I had was that I could not access my notes from the web like I used to be able to do from Notion.
This is when I discovered Obsidian Publish! It allows you to publish a subset of your notes to the internet and it renders the graph view on the website so readers can see how notes are connected and explore related topics. The problem with Publish however is that is comes at a costly $20/month. I began exploring free open source solutions and I came across Quartz which is a free Hugo website that can be generated from an Obsidian Vault and can be self hosted. I chose to use Github pages to deploy the site because of its simplicity combined with the fact that I haven’t decided on a custom domain yet.
Quartz
I thoroughly enjoy the functionality that Quartz offers and I love the minimalist interface. The fact that it uses D3 to generate the obsidian graph is one of the biggest reasons I ended up choosing Quartz. I have also loved the community that quartz has built with their discord server and extensive Wiki with troubleshooting advice and examples of sites using Quartz. I have no regrets with my decision and I am thoroughly enjoying my hosted Obsidian site.