Ask HN: YAML or Markdown for Personal Notes?
I've used, Evernote and yes it was okay, until I realised I do not want my data out there in the wild. This was maybe back in 2015.
Since then, I use Notepad++ for everything. Save things here and there and it's really unorganized. I feel shame because I am actually a mega-organised person...
So... I tried Obsidian. Wasn't my tempo.
Now I am at organising my notes by text file by the following format: /Notes/Year/Month/Y-m-d.txt
I am seeing myself naturally moving towards Marking-Down my notes, which I like. But it brings me to the question: which is better to use for future use-cases in terms of software and tooling? I am not sure what the question here actually is -- the title compares apples to oranges (e.g. Obsidian uses YAML for meta-data but markdown is the markup language). Then in the post itself, it sounds like you ask a question about how to organize your note storage. Separate questions with some potential overlap. A couple of questions -- what didn't you like about Obsidian?
Have you considered Emacs and Org-mode? I think you answered my question, although indirectly. I thought there was competing standards (if that's even the right word, I don't know) for note-taking. YAML is more for configuration and meta-data, so my original question didn't make a lot of sense. You've helped clear my confusions so for that, thanks so much! As for Obsidian, I just wasn't super keen having a whole extra app just for my note-taking. I like simple Notepad++ (or Geany, now that I'm moved to nix), as it can work on any files, not just text/MD/note docs. Even if you don't want to use Obsidian, the file format of yaml frontmatter (yaml in a --- block) and then markdown below is a solid format. https://noteplan.co, if you're on a macOS/iOS device.