I’m struggling with my Obsidian setup–I think it’s too complicated.

In addition to Markdown documents, I work with a lot of Microsoft Word documents, PDFs and Web URLs. Until now, I’ve stored all of those in Obsidian – even the Word docs.

Now, I think maybe I’d be better off keeping Obsidian for just Markdown documents and embedded images. Which is how most people seem to use it.

I’m a Mac user, and I know many Mac Obsidian users use DevonThink in conjunction with Obsidian for just the use case I describe. Markdown goes in Obsidian, everything else in DevonThink.

My question is: Why?

The main benefit, as I see it, is that DevonThink gives each document a unique URL, which can then be integrated into Obsidian. But there are other ways to do that, and these ways might be more lightweight than DevonThink:

  • Use Hookmark.
  • Create a separate Obsidian vault solely for storing non-Markdown reference documents.
  • Just use the Mac filesystem and use path links. In this case, you could never move your reference documents from their existing folders, or else you’d break the link.
  • Another app like Keep it or EagleFiler, which also serve as document libraries with links to documents, but are lighter weight than DevonThink.

Why do you use DevonThink with Obsidian?

(Perfectly valid answer, but uninteresting for this discussion: “Because I’ve used DevonThink for many years, it works for me, and I see no reason to change.” However, this answer can be made very interesting indeed if you tell us why it works for you.)