Let's start with the love letter, because it's deserved: Obsidian got the big things right. Local Markdown files, no lock-in, a community that builds everything imaginable. If you're constructing a knowledge base — a real one, with hundreds of linked reference notes — nothing else comes close, and this post is not for you.
This post is for the other Obsidian user. The one whose vault has 40 plugins and 60 notes. Who has rebuilt their daily-note template four times this year. Who opens the app to write and instead updates plugins, tweaks a Dataview query, reads a forum thread about a better folder structure — and closes the laptop having organized the writing they didn't do. The system became the hobby. It happens to smart people especially, because system-building feels exactly like productivity and grades like procrastination.
A quick diagnostic
- In the last month, have you spent more sessions configuring than writing?
- Does your vault have more structure (folders, templates, queries) than content?
- When you have a thought to capture, is there a decision — where it goes, what template — before the typing?
- Would breaking a plugin update genuinely disrupt your week?
Two or more yeses, keep reading. The issue isn't Obsidian — it's that infinite configurability is a cost you're paying for flexibility you use as a toy.
Simpler means fewer decisions, not fewer features
What most vault-tinkerers actually run on Obsidian is the daily-notes stack: today's page, a template, checkboxes, backlinks to yesterday. That stack, hand-assembled from Daily Notes + Calendar + Templater + a theme, is what Hejour ships as the whole app — with the decisions removed rather than the capabilities.
The app opens on today; there is nowhere to file anything, so capture costs zero decisions. Todos carry forward on their own. #tags do what you used backlinks for — pull one topic through many days — and ⌘P does what search plugins do, across every line of every day. Snippets replace Templater for the two templates you actually reuse. There are no plugins, which is the feature: nothing updates, nothing breaks, nothing asks to be tuned on a Tuesday night.
The honest trade
You give up real things: the graph, folders, wiki-links between concept notes, the thousand plugins. If your vault is genuinely a knowledge base, keep it — plenty of people run Obsidian for the library and a day-based app for the days. And because both sides are plain files, trying it is cheap: Hejour imports your vault — daily notes land on their dates — and exports everything back as Markdown if you return.
Hejour is a free download. Give the tinkering energy a week off; see what gets written.