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File over app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.
In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.
The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them.
The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs.
Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems.
Paraphrasing something I wrote recently:
> If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.
You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.
These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian (@obsdmd), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.
kepano retweeted
Pain is information
As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things.
When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. In Haruki Murakami’s words “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”. You can choose pain without choosing suffering.
Pain is information, and information is painful. Rewiring your brain is not a frictionless process. Some knowledge can only be discovered the hard way.
The sooner you can convert pain into knowledge, the sooner you can experience the next useful pain. Don’t put yourself through the same pain too many times. To access new information you must experience new pains.
They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power. To do so, you must learn to control your suffering, accept that scars are beautiful.
If you felt pain, ask what information it gave you. If that information was useful, seek the next pain. You are learning.
ALT As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things. When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. In Haruki Murakami’s words “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”. You can choose pain without choosing suffering. Pain is information, and information is painful. Rewiring your brain is not a frictionless process. Some knowledge can only be discovered the hard way. The sooner you can convert pain into knowledge, the sooner you can experience the next useful pain. Don’t put yourself through the same pain too many times. To access new information you must experience new pains. They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power. To do so, you must learn to control your suffering, accept that scars are beautiful. If you felt pain, ask what information it gave you. You are learning.
This is Pele, my new rendering library for diagrams and charts, compatible with the latest Mermaid syntax.
- 100-500× faster than mermaid.js
- 6× smaller bundle
- No dependencies
- Easy to theme
- Responsive to device width
In pursuit of making Obsidian insanely fast and cohesively designed, I always found the Mermaid library to be too big, too slow, and too hard to theme. Pele will be the new renderer in the next version of Obsidian, but you can start using it now.
Pele [ˈpɛlɛ] is named after the goddess of volcanoes and fire. It's open source under the MIT license. Try the playground!
Pele renders Mermaid diagrams faster than you'd run from a volcano! Read the docs and try the playground:
pele.run/
ludicrous is not fast enough, I am going for teleportation
I have always loved reading annual reports like Stack Overflow, State of JS, etc, so we created our own survey and will share a public report by the end of the year.
As always, Obsidian doesn't collect usage analytics or personal data, and this survey is anonymous.
if you understand this you can see the future clearly
When Obsidian started in 2020 its main point of differentiation was the idea of links: connected sets of notes.
There were already many Markdown editors for single files back then that interoperate with Obsidian.
We didn't expect Markdown to become the file format that the whole world runs on, nor that Obsidian would become people's favorite editor for those loose files. We were focused on making it work well to manage knowledge bases.
So during that time Obsidian became more feature-rich which in a way made it much harder to add single note editing because we want it to work well with all the expectations people have of Obsidian including non-trivial things like
- Cross-platform support
- Compatibility with plugins and existing APIs
- Updating instantly based on external file changes
- Displaying relative path embeds like images
Plus a long tail of questions we to answer to make the experience smooth like what vault settings does it open with?
So that's why it took a while ☺️
kepano retweeted
another way of thinking about this — much of my life's work is in @obsdmd and these 12,000 text files only add up to about 200MB
kepano retweeted
Great time to repost this I think. Very much at the core of @elyxdesign too; if they're your files you can do with them whatever you want, store them wherever, manipulate them however - and with Elyx being plain text on your computer there's no barrier or limit, no MCP gate, nothing. All yours, go nuts, be creative.
File over app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.
In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.
The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them.
The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs.
Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems.
Paraphrasing something I wrote recently:
> If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.
You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.
These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian (@obsdmd), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.
kepano retweeted
I am prone to existential depression... My mind easily drifts towards thinking that in the grand scheme of things nothing we do really matters, so why bother doing anything at all?
But within this fear is a desire for some kind of external validation. I like this quote by Kubrick: "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
It helps me reframe life from being outside-in to inside-out. Inside of you is a tiny candle and you are in control of it. Keep it alive and continue to expand that light. For yourself. That's all.
Yes, nothing matters. But also, nothing matters! You are free. You are free to take that inner candle anywhere you want. Its glow will naturally grow the things around you.
xitter.cf/kepano/status/10590998…
