Much like @philbowell, an email landed in my inbox from the good folks that make Bear and put me on to a post from Robert Breen about moving everything from Obsidian to Bear.

I really like Obsidian. I’ve recommended it to multiple people in real life who are studying alongside me and they love it. It does exactly what they want it to. But they’re all using it specifically on desktop platforms. And that’s where the app simply doesn’t work for me.

I do 98% of my work from either my iPad Air 5th-gen or my iPhone 13. Even though I have a study available to me at the church, I regularly find that it is not the best place for me to be to get work done. There are interruptions but also, I’m essentially invisible to the world when I’m there.

So most of the time, I take my stuff to the library or the Wetherspoons pub (usually both on the same day) in order to work.

That means I need to have apps that work well when my iPad is connected to not-brilliant WiFi or paired with my phone.

So I went onto my old MacBook Air (it’s one of the 2017 models so it’s getting quite old) and imported my Obsidian vault into Bear.

The experience? Seamless.

All of the notes that I’ve been living without because I couldn’t get Obsidian to work properly on my phone or iPad are now available to me and quickly. The sync speed is astounding considering that it’s moving nearly 2000 notes. All of the links between notes work. I don’t have a pretty graph view anymore but I have something that actually seems to be functioning.

I’ve implemented a bit of structure through tags thanks to a post at The Mindful Teacher.

As I mentioned in a reply to Phil’s original post about this, the only thing I need now is for Ulysses to get their act together regarding sync. It’s embarrassing for them at this point that whenever I open the app on my phone, I have to redownload my entire database.