Gary Lucero Writer

Category: Google Drive

  • I Don’t Miss Obsidian One Bit

    I Don’t Miss Obsidian One Bit

    When I found Obsidian it felt like a major score. OneNote by then was long in the tooth. Useful, yes, full-featured, absolutely, but also old and hard to work with. Plus, OneNote often creates ugly notes as you copy from various sources and paste into it. If you don’t take the time to format notes consistently, the fonts and other formatting get out of control quickly.

    Obsidian not only offered a gorgeous font that was consistently applied to every note, but notes are plain text (markdown), easy to back up, and formatting is as simple as typing a few characters.Then there’s plugins. Thousands of them. Able to handle just about any task Obsidian can’t handle on its own. 

    Problem is, it seemed like I needed a new plugin every week. Every single shortcoming in the application could be overcome by a simple download. This became tiring. Exhausting even.

    Suddenly I was a slave to an application instead of its master. What at first was simple, beautiful even, became ugly, tiresome, and I began to hate it.

    Yes, I hate Obsidian. I can’t stand using it anymore. 

    Then someone at work mentioned using Google Docs for notes. 

    I investigated and it appealed to me for a number of reasons.

    1. While Obsidian requires a plugin to allow semantic search, as long as what you store in Google Drive, which is where Google Docs is hosted, is in a format and structure it understands, it’s fully searchable with Gemini
    2. Similar to OneNote, and unlike Microsoft Word, a Google Docs document can have multiple tabs, or sections, which means one document can serve as the container for many different notes
    3. It’s all backed by Google, which is already my main provider of mobile operating system, e-mail, reminders, calendar events, and AI
    4. It gets me away from plugins, which are a blight on humanity as far as I’m concerned
    5. It offers the same sorts of formatting options as OneNote, but is less complicated

    There are a few downsides because it’s mostly web-based, at least on PC. But so far that hasn’t been an issue. And it has excellent native support on Android.

    In the end, it’s yet another note taking application, but it’s also more than that. Similar to Microsoft’s Office suite, I can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations all in one place, and I no longer have to keep notes in a completely separate application.

    It doesn’t mean I’ve done away with a family subscription to Office 365. My daughter and I need all the cloud space it provides for our legacy documents, photos, and other files, and I still use Excel on occasion, but I’m finding Google Drive and Google Docs a welcoming new home for most everything else I do.

  • I Abandoned Obsidian for Google Docs

    I Abandoned Obsidian for Google Docs

    My note-taking journey started with Evernote in the early 2000s. Back then, there were no smartphones, so Evernote was only available as a desktop app. I soon switched to OneNote, which was superior in most ways. I stuck with the desktop version of OneNote for 20 years, although I tried a lot of different note-taking apps on mobile devices.

    A couple of years back I settled on Obsidian as my main note-taking app, but it didn’t take long to tire of it. While I loved the clean text, the solid markdown editor, and the expansive plug-in ecosystem, search was a mess, and using an AI plug-in like Gemini Scribe only partially solved the problem.

    In the end, I couldn’t reliably find my notes in Obsidian, and I got tired of using plug-ins as a band-aid for a fundamentally broken application. After hearing about a project at work to migrate notes from OneNote to Google Drive, I did some testing and found that Google Docs works well as a repository for my notes. And even better, it’s simple to reliably search those docs using Gemini.

    Also, Google Docs is fully integrated with Gemini, allowing me to leverage the technology as a writing assistant, something Obsidian doesn’t natively support. All of the solutions it offers are via plug-ins, which require creating API keys in platforms like Google AI Studio. 

    The big hurdle was determining how to migrate my existing Obsidian vault to Google Drive. For this task I used Cursor to write a Python script that leverages Google Cloud and the Google Docs API to seamlessly take the notes, convert the markdown and images, and create folders, docs, and tabs to correspond to every note.

    After some trial and error, I migrated all my notes into Google Drive, and I’m happy with the outcome. Using Google Docs on my phone isn’t quite as convenient as a phone app, but it works. And Google Docs works well on the desktop.

    If you’re interested in migrating your Obsidian vault to Google Drive and Docs, I open-sourced two scripts:

    Obsidian-Vault-2-GoogleDocs-Migration

    Obsidian-Folder-2-Google-Document-Migration

    The first script migrates an entire Obsidian vault to Google Drive. The second migrates only the .md files in a single folder to a folder in Google Drive.

    I created the second script because I want to continue creating notes in a single folder in Obsidian, and then migrate those notes to Google Drive. The script only moves notes that don’t already exist in Google Drive, and it creates a new doc for each new note.

    This differs from the first script. Its main focus is to take each folder of .md files from the vault and create a corresponding doc in Google Drive, with each appearing as its own tab. Folders in the vault that don’t contain files are still recreated in Google Drive if they contain subfolders with notes. 

    If you have questions about my journey, or about using either script, feel free to reach out.