Obsidian is a minimal, fast, free note-taking app trying to carve a place of its own in a world dominated by Notion, Evernote, and even Apple’s own Notes app. The hook? You own the data.

A few years ago, Nick Milo was using a folder full of plain text files for notes when he found out about Obsidian. The app had just launched in beta, and was getting some buzz on a productivity ...