ieve's Squall of Consciousness

Entry 9 - Abandoning Obsidian for Logseq

(Jan 4 2026)

I have been using Obsidian for my notes for a couple of years. It seemed perfect - it's low friction, low distraction, customizable, programmable for slightly fancier things (like workout logs and buttons that add notes from templates), pretty to look at, and a tool I actually _enjoy_ using.

I didn't want to abandon it. I really like the tool. But it kept deleting notes silently in the background. (Well, not deleting the file, just setting file content to 0 bytes / empty which is almost worse because when I do a git commit it just looks like I modified the file rather than obviously being in the 'Deleted' bucket. Not that I actually _review_ my git commits for my notes so I may have not seen it anyway.)

At first I thought it was something to do with my shutdown routine - I had started doing 'shutdown now' which gives a SIGTERM _maybe_ 1 second to any applications that are open before just killing them and shutting the computer down. And it seemed to be files that I either had open at that time, or had opened during that session.. So I thought maybe it was like, something to do with the way Obsidian was shutting down.

But digging it _seemed_ like it was clearing things on startup? I saw some modify timestamps on the 0 byte files that were right when I opened Obsidian after booting computer up.

This seems like kind of a critical bug, and it seems like this has happened to other people based on bug reports on the Obsidian website, and it doesn't really seem like it's taken very seriously. To be fair, I never paid them anything for the tool - I publish things manually myself, and I sync my git repository up to my little cloud slice server manually, so I never needed to pay them. But. You would think, the _main function_ of the program is to keep a 'vault' of notes, there would be some way of flagging to the user "Hey there was potentially data loss here". When something goes from {some bytes} to zero bytes, that's kind of a signal.

Or, you know, just ... fix whatever the problem is that is setting things to zero bytes.

I noticed this happening for about ~2 weeks. There is a 'File Recovery' tool within Obsidian with a default time period of 7 days where it saves snapshots of notes, so I was able to restore some of them that way, but it wasn't until I started digging, and did a 'ls -alS' to sort by file size and saw a bunch of 0 byte files at the bottom of the list that I _know_ should have had some content. Not a lot. Nothing really critical. But enough that I said ... enough.

So, I have moved to logseq. It's similar and different. It's pretty, it's easy to use, it's made for my use case.

I find it very strange to not be able to open two arbitrary files in tabs side by side - there is a sidebar that can open a second file, but it seems like the default behavior is that you can only open _linked_ files in the sidebar. I think there is a 'tab' addon that I'll probably end up adding.

And the 'block editing' behavior is pretty strange too. Not used to that. Any "\n" newline creates a new 'block' of contiguous text. Like if I want to copy things out of my notes from two separate blocks, it seems like I need to select both _entire_ blocks. Can't just copy from an arbitrary spot within a block to another arbitrary spot. This is fine it's just a little bit of a paradigm shift from having one big buffer of markdown or plain text.

My writeup on 5 years of Zettelkasten (Web)

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