It has been long time in the making, but I finally transitioned my journaling (and also blogging) to Obsidian from Bear. Year ago I seemed relatively content with Bear, but not apparently any more.

Why?

I have looked (somewhat enviously) at the Obsidian users in the past. It has lots to go for:

  • A lot of plugins ( some unmaintained messes, admittedly ) with plenty of extra value
  • Mobile app ( no need for my custom Apple Notes integration )
  • Markdown as a native format (making it more convenient for use with e.g. Emacs, or AI tooling)

Why not before?

I am very much anti-subscription for tools I actively use. Before 2025 Obsidian did not allow ‘commercial use’ without subscription. I also started using Bear in 2019 or so. I am reluctant to change what works, and so far it has worked quite well for me.

However, in 2025 Obsidian license changed and after that I have been just looking for good reason to switch. Now I finally did. It feels bit dirty, as I’d rather use open source tool than ‘free’ closed-source one, but as I did that with Bear too, I don’t feel too bad about it.

So what did I need to do for the transition?

Plugin choice

I needed to pick up plugins which would roughly replicate my Bear usage:

  • Tasks + custom keymap: Bear todo equivalent (ish)
  • Chronology: Bear ‘what happened in month’ (kind of)
  • Importer: Way to get Markdown in (but it turns out that copying Bear markdown as-is was actually better than Bear ‘import’, as it inserted tags to front matter which were not good)
  • Linter: With it, I add created/updated metadata to Markdown automatically (so Chronology works well, even across SyncThing syncs and possibly misbehaving clients, although who knows if such really exist)
  • Iconic: I want icons for my stuff (mostly boring files but not always! e.g. it is nice to have todo list with custom icon)
  • TagFolder: Tag-based view hierarchy

This is unlikely to be final list, but with these + appropriate theme it is ‘close enough’ to Bear for me not to feel bad about it.

Think about how to transform my data

In the end, I chose not to, as I mostly use day notes (which Obsidian provides) combined with tag based views (from TagFolder), I plan just to keep using my old set of tags for both personal organization, as well as for identifying which of the entries are suitable for public consumption (you are here).

So I exported all of my Bear notes as markdown, and moved them to Bear/ subfolder in Obsidian vault. Mission accomplished.

Find replacement for bhugo

I have used my fork of bhugo for my Bear to Hugo pipeline for this blog for two years and change. I decided just to keep similar formatting for entries in Obsidian too, so I needed to get a tool which does Obsidian to Hugo transformation.

I looked at few, but in the end, as my requirements are quite specific, I just vibe coded new tool for this: tagged-obsidian-to-hugo. It is not pretty, but it is what got this post to you too.

Obsidian fan for good?

Probably not. This is my third iteration at finding a tool for this - see How I write notes.. and why? for the earlier post.