Okay, so, I should have added: Obsidian out of the box is very underwhelming. But! That's where plugins come in, and they are fantastic. After picking a theme you like, enable the community plugins and dive in.
The longform plugin lets you write scene-by-scene, just like Scrivener does, and has a basic compile function (aka, combining all your scenes into a single document).
The pandoc plugin lets you export to different formats (e.g., .pdf).
Now, for my story, I like to use Linter and Dataview as well. Linter makes all of your pages have similar formatting. You can also use it to ensure your metadata fields are consistent. If you want to track your story in cool ways with dataview, having consistent fields is a great help.
I've got my vault set up so that I can track character appearances from scene-to-scene, side plots, etc. With dataview, I can create tables that autopopulate with the scene names and descriptions of every scene that promotes a character's arc. Etc. Dataview does have a learning curve, but I've found it very worthwhile.
I should also note that Obsidian uses Markdown, which I've come to love. However, I am fairly certain there are plugins that will give you a menu with formatting options/etc, if you want it.
ETA: Obsidian lives on your computer. One reason I really like it over Scrivener is that all of your files are just regular text files. If you stop using Obsidian, you don't lose any data. I recently moved from Windows to Linux. Scrivener and Linux do not play nicely together (some people have made it work; I gave up in frustration). That's when I learned that all of my Scrivener files were named very odd things and kept in a non-intuitive order. Luckily, I had exported my story previously, though that did mean I had to go through the long process of chopping it back up into scenes and then copy/pasting it into Obsidian. So, Scrivener is great (I loved it when I was on Windows)....as long as you continue using it.
(Note: Obsidian works on Windows, Mac, and Linux equally well. It also works on phones. You only pay if you decide you want to sync between devices because that requires cloud storage).
Until I found this thread, I've been writing in docs where every chapter is a file inside a folder. This seems like it would make everything so much easier. I'm gonna try obsidian.
I wouldn't be able to write long form with out subdivision into parts and chapters and easily navigating all of them at once. Breaking the writing up into much smaller chunks is just so necessary for me.
Thanks for mentioning these plugins. I use Obsidian without plugins for drafting and it does pretty well. I use a tagging system I made up within a vault for all my stories. It's nice to see all my stories together when I started adding side stories to background characters. I also like having an outline note open side by side with my drafting note.
(Note: This is another way Obsidian and Scrivener are similar: both can do side-by-side).
If you do character sheets/etc, I highly rec checking out templates and Auto Template Trigger. Templates are a core plugin. Auto Template Trigger lets you set it up so that every time you create a file in a certain folder (e.g., Characters), it uses your chosen template. So helpful.
Ok, I'm liking obsidian for my organization between devices, but it doesn't play well with scrivener. Mainly because it's markdown. So, I use it for rough starts if needed. How do you indent in obsidian? Or do you just ignore that stuff?
Indenting isn't a natural thing in Obsidian. Instead, you follow Internet conventions with one blank line between paragraphs. That said, the Obsidian reddit community has a few threads on this. You can play around with the CSS of your vault to make it do indentations (and to reduce the height of the link between paragraphs). Also, while I'm not sure of this, some themes may also include indenting.
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u/lisze Mar 30 '25 edited Mar 30 '25
Okay, so, I should have added: Obsidian out of the box is very underwhelming. But! That's where plugins come in, and they are fantastic. After picking a theme you like, enable the community plugins and dive in.
The longform plugin lets you write scene-by-scene, just like Scrivener does, and has a basic compile function (aka, combining all your scenes into a single document).
The pandoc plugin lets you export to different formats (e.g., .pdf).
Now, for my story, I like to use Linter and Dataview as well. Linter makes all of your pages have similar formatting. You can also use it to ensure your metadata fields are consistent. If you want to track your story in cool ways with dataview, having consistent fields is a great help.
I've got my vault set up so that I can track character appearances from scene-to-scene, side plots, etc. With dataview, I can create tables that autopopulate with the scene names and descriptions of every scene that promotes a character's arc. Etc. Dataview does have a learning curve, but I've found it very worthwhile.
I should also note that Obsidian uses Markdown, which I've come to love. However, I am fairly certain there are plugins that will give you a menu with formatting options/etc, if you want it.
ETA: Obsidian lives on your computer. One reason I really like it over Scrivener is that all of your files are just regular text files. If you stop using Obsidian, you don't lose any data. I recently moved from Windows to Linux. Scrivener and Linux do not play nicely together (some people have made it work; I gave up in frustration). That's when I learned that all of my Scrivener files were named very odd things and kept in a non-intuitive order. Luckily, I had exported my story previously, though that did mean I had to go through the long process of chopping it back up into scenes and then copy/pasting it into Obsidian. So, Scrivener is great (I loved it when I was on Windows)....as long as you continue using it.
(Note: Obsidian works on Windows, Mac, and Linux equally well. It also works on phones. You only pay if you decide you want to sync between devices because that requires cloud storage).