camena

In the last year or so, I've switched notetaking apps.

I phrased that in the past tense—really, it's an ongoing process. Day-to-day, I'm using Obsidian for everything, but every once in a while,^[1] I'll run into something I never transferred over and I'll need to open up Notion to copy over the file.^[2] Notion very generously allows free accounts for students and educators and I'm both, so there's no particular rush to delete my account or anything.

The cost also isn't why I switched over. I've used Notion for forever—more than five years—and I really loved it. But they went all in on the AI thing and there was no way to turn it off without emailing customer service directly, which I honestly found exceedingly annoying. The internal search got worse over night: I'd look up the name of a note verbatim and it would be the fifth or sixth result.

Really, more than the frustration, the incident highlighted just how much of my life I'd put in the hands of a company I had no particular reason to trust. Today it's AI; who knows what sort of bullshit will come down the pike tomorrow?

Anyway, I'd tried Obsidian before when it was still quite new and enjoyed it well enough as a diversion, but not seriously considered it as a possible replacement. I decided it was time to give things another try.

The game changer ended up being learning how to use the Dataview plugin. It allows you to query your files to create an approximation of what I was doing with databases in Notion.^[3] I'll be honest: Dataview queries are not as pretty, they're less user-friendly, and initially, they came across as much less powerful, simply because I couldn't figure out how to do anything. But they get done what I actually need, if not everything I want.

And that brings me to the next thing that's changed since I last tried Obsidian: I've learned to do regex find/replace in VS Code. Because Obsidian is just reading a folder of Markdown files, this means that I can change hundreds of pages at a time. For someone who loves to tweak formulae, this is incredible—I'd been updating my episode notes in Notion for so long that before I got to the end, I changed the format again. Now, it's a matter of thinking up the right regex query or, worst case scenario, writing a quick Python script.

To be clear: none of that is necessary to use Obsidian. Well, I'd really recommend getting a basic familiarity with Dataview, but still, it's not a requirement. What I mean, though, is that all of it is stuff I know how to do which benefits me in Obsidian and was useless to me in Notion.

Since, as I've established, I like to fuss with things, I being able to use regex and Python scripts is massively useful. It was also only a matter of time until I started writing my own theme and the time was like a week.

The premise is that the theme colors, including the colors used for callouts and such, are all dependent on the accent color you select in Obsidian's "Appearance" settings. The theme title, "Camena", is a classics joke: the Camenae are the native Roman gods that Livius Andronicus invokes in his translation of Homer's Odyssey to translate the Muses for a Latin-speaking audience.

Honestly, like my blogging framework, this is mostly a personal project. However, I have a couple of different vaults, and keeping the theme consistently updated across vaults was much easier if I submitted it for official inclusion in the theme gallery.^[4] It's here on Github, and can be found in the theme gallery by searching "Camena". (I'll be honest, it's one of the least used themes on there, but the idea that it's been downloaded almost a thousand times is crazy to me.)

It's all part of what I like about Obsidian: if you're willing to fuss with it, and I am, you can get everything exactly how you want it.