How to make Obsidian more accessible, ergonomic, and reproducable.

obsidian-standard-interactions.md

While obsidian tries to create a plain-text, standard-format, future-proof notes; I found that it does a B- job of doing the same for the whole experience of using the application.

It gets some marks for supporting customization themes, plain-text representation of settings, and plugins support.

So here are some recommendations to make that experience more ergonomic and reproducible. I hope these could influence the devs and spark some interesting conversations.

Follow Standard System Interactions

• User should be able to have multiple vaults open in different instances at the same time.
• All vaults should have the same configuration by default.
  • Therefore, all settings should be available under ~/.config/obsidian by default.
• User should be able to have vault specific settings.
  • This should enable collaboration between users without messing each others config.
  • Therefore, settings in vault/.obsidian should override global settings in ~/.config/obsidian.

obsidian.css should be in the obsidian settings folder and act like a config file.

• Separate setting from application state in .obsidian/config to be able to backup or sync them selectively and separately.

  • Example: User A works on a vault at the office and with their laptop at home. Different setup may require different css, but they might want to have the same files open across both workstations (preserve application state).

• Have all settings available from standard menu bar for keyboard and screen-reader accessibility.

A lot of these points are needed to make collaborating on different vaults while keeping others personal across different workstations a great experience with obsidian, right now that might not be bearable.

I am also pretty sure these would make developing and testing themes and plugins a more enjoyable experience. Maybe also make Silver's and Licat's lives a bit easier along the way. 🤷

Feel free to start a conversation here if you want if more structured that discord.

Why is this not a thing already? I have to install git plugin, theme, and whatever other settings I like on every vault. Global settings should have been included, repeating setup for each vault is exhausting.