Obsidian is great and highly performant, even though it's using Electron. Electron is a huge advantage, faster development and the option to customise it easily with plugins.

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eviks 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not highly performant, its startup time is a multiple of that of native apps. Nothing is easy about plugins, APIs you expose/maintain define that, not Electron, and those can be good/bad in any system. Electron gives easier access to UI styling, but then again, real "easily" comes from the structure/stability of your UI, otherwise your plugins would break all the time. Also, same as with APIs - e.g, Joplin is Electron, but you can only style on a desktop. Then, of course, there are plenty of Electron apps that you can't style at all and that don't support plugins.

I'm happy for devs' "faster development", but as a user I care about "faster use", which Electron blocks outright

	▲	kepano an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Startup time in Obsidian could be better (we're working on it!), but performance is more than startup time. It's making interactions fast throughout the entire app. Obsidian is only three developers but we spend a lot of time shaving off milliseconds everywhere we can. Keystrokes, scrolling, querying, navigating large vaults, opening and parsing large Markdown files, etc. In 2025 we made reduced startup time on mobile under 0.5s (used to be several seconds), made search nearly instantaneous and released Bases to make complex queries equally fast (much faster than Dataview and other pre-existing solutions). I wrote a bunch more on this topic here: https://x.com/kepano/status/2004008730720194759

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jauntywundrkind 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Obsidian just launched Obsidian CLI too, if that helps. And sync.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197267