I switched from Obsidian to Neovim mainly because of Vim-motions and keybindings. Obsidian has Vim-motion support but it’s pretty basic and some stuff doesn’t work… it’s just not the same.

I have a pretty minimal Neovim setup and don’t use any special plugins for markdown. I just use Treesitter to create some custom highlight groups to highlight links, codeblocks, headlines and similar stuff. I don’t do images or complex tables or all of that other jazz and I know markdown by heart for the most part so I don’t really need any markdown preview plugins. But there are plugins that render markdown in the Neovim buffer itself, instead of having you go to your browser to see your changes.

It’s way simpler. I use gO to see the outline of my file, also mini.pick which is just a grep and fuzzy finder to find specific lines, words, files and navigate between them. I have been using Neovim for over a year so and use it basically everywhere so the benefits keep compounding as I learn how to navigate where I want faster. It’s a powerful tool. One thing I will say is because you use Neovim you don’t need to really organize your notes as you just use your picker to find stuff for you and it’s sooooo much faster and better than whatever Obsidian had. You never have to go to your file tree or whatever and search for that file.

This wasn’t a switch that I did fanatically. I went back to Obsidian a few times for a couple of days / weeks and just used that. It’s fine … It works… But afterwards every time I just went back to Neovim, did some modifications to my config, and started using it more and more until it just became way better.

All of that being said … would I recommend someone start Neovim just to write markdown? No. As you said it has a pretty steep learning curve and you will never get back the time you spent on it, it’s also a bit overkill to use it just for markdown, you will need to make some modifications as well… But I find it more fun and enjoyable to work with.

I don’t think Vim has a way to show all my notes in one place, or any way to organise notes? (unless it does, you never know)

Many use the “Nerd Tree” plugin for this, but there’s…too many options.

I want to explore other options before I fall into the rabbit hole

I respect that. The rabbit hole goes very deep. In your shoes, I might still take a look at an editor with a strong plugin ecosystem, like Emacs or VSCodium. Is Atom still around? Atom was nice.

Does Vim have any live markdown preview or plugins that enable that? If it does that would be quite interesting

LoL.

I’m just sharing what I use. I can’t help that I was indoctrinated so young into the cult of Vim.

It can. Silverbullet can do quite anything, that’s where it’s name comes from. You can code your own logic directly in markdown through lua like code, get pages tags, generates tables etc… but the tool is very “hacky”. Either you love it, either you hate it. And if you are not a hairy nerdy guy, you will hate it.

For the basics the tutorial that comes with stock emacs is GOAT. You navigate the tutorial in the program you’re learning the navigation in, that’s how I learned it. It covers the basics, moving, killing/yanking (cutting/pasting), moving the view without moving the point (the cursor), handling buffers (open files), windows (subframes in the emacs window) and frames (multiple emacs windows). There is a bit of a translation required as emacs is old and some terms come from a time before the concepts were in common english but it’s nothing really. I’m rather new to emacs as well, and this is how I learnt it.

After that what I found most useful was the following packages

(require 'use-package)
(require 'diminish)
(require 'bind-key)

(use-package eldoc)

(use-package which-key
  :bind ("M-H" . which-key-show-top-level)
  :init (which-key-mode t)
  :config (which-key-setup-side-window-right-bottom))

(use-package marginalia :init (marginalia-mode))

(use-package embark :bind ("C-<return>" . embark-act)
  :custom (prefix-help-command #'embark-prefix-help-command))

(use-package embark-consult
  :hook (embark-collect-mode consult-preview-at-point-mode))

This binds Alt+H to show all the keys available (use Ctrl+h n to scroll) as well as automatically pops up a buffer when you entered a command that isn’t complete, e.g. Ctrl+x. And it binds Ctrl+Return to a kind of right-click menu that tries to guess at all the actions you could do with the thing you have at under the point.

But most useful, is Ctrl+h f to describe what a function does and Ctrl+h v to describe what a variable does as well as the customize menu Alt+x customize.

For a theme I would suggest one of ef-themes but that’s up to you ofcourse.

Emacs is a bit daunting to set up but I’m really loving it. See also https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs/tree/master for some ideas for how to set up some other stuff, although I went with the stock completions.

There are also non-emacs ways of interacting with org files https://orgmode.org/tools.html but I don’t know anything about them.

Just use Obsidian without using folders, then? They’re completely optional.

It sounds like you could use any markdown app that supports tags or links. You can search for file by tag or create index notes that you link other notes to, letting you view all of them from the backlinks pane.

A lot of Obsidian users do not use folders for organization at all, both of the methods above are common. You could also look at Logseq which has similar features.

Apologies if I’m misunderstanding your requirements, lmk if I did.

What about tags?

Nice! Hope you get some help. I am also interested in a notes organiser but don’t have the folder-structure constraint.

I use Joplin with Syncthing and it works fine, so far?

Is there something about it that’s known to have issues with ST that I just haven’t run into yet?

Yea, not having a better view of note titles is a downside. I really like having that high-level view