And plugins! I can put a search query right within Markdown and it works. I have a unified interface over Markdown's to-do syntaxes I've left in various files. I can put a button that triggers some internal Obsidian command. I can have templates that pull from APIs and auto-populate some fields. I have variables I can easily query over. There's a git plugin you can use to auto-push/pull. There's a fully-featured mobile app (nearly feature compatible with the desktop app, plugin support and all). I have some subfolders that automatically get published on multiple websites that use a different CMS/SSG.

It's nothing you can't achieve with some custom bash/python scripts, but I don't like to spend my free time maintaining custom scripts, and Obsidian is truly a remarkably extensible product that allows me not to do that. It's easily in top 3 software products I use the most (next to a browser and a terminal emulator), I can't praise it enough.

Two example of easy of use:

- You can type "[[" anywhere and start entering the title of a new or existing note (and follow that link). If the note already exists it will fuzzy match inline as you write.

- While on a note, you can change the title and all the references get updated.

There are also plugins with extra feature like note of the day, which creates and opens a file in the format 2022-10-13 so you can easily have a file for each day. Vim node also works very well.

Editing in a somewhat rendered markdown - it's not quite full wysiwyg, but e.g, your heading blocks are sized right, your lists are rendered as bullets until you're editing that line, etc.

Notes first UI: Stuff like the rendered view toggle, links, inline image previews are more acccessible than in vs code due to their higher relative importance.

> I guess the target is not directly developers when looking at their paid sync addon, because I would simply put this into a free closed gitlab repo.

You could, and people do, but there's a bit less friction with the built-in sync.