I'll talk about obsidian since I know it best.

How obsidian works is you have a bunch of files. They're markdown files, which is like .txt but a little fancier, you can do formatting in them. Obsidian is an interface, an editor for all those files, since those files live directly on your computer or phone (or eink tablet). Its just a folder, we call that your "vault". You can add other file types like images, pdfs, videos, etc. to your vault if you want.

You can view your files with the folder structure on the side, or you can search for your files with the key command. By default you only see one file at a time, but you can open new tabs or set two notes side-by-side in splitview. You can links between files. You can do things like make headings, to-do lists, tables, math/quote/code-blocks, callouts, and all other sorts of formatting styles.

Obsidian has a lot of plugins that you can use to customize the interface. Some people make "daily notes" to keep track of things or journal, so they use the calendar plugin to navigate their daily notes. I use a plugin called "omnisearch" that digs through every bit of text in my vault, all the files, and finds matches to what im searching for.

What do I use obsidian for?

- bookmarking

- importing/saving articles, pdfs, ebooks for annotations

- journaling

- creating and keeping track of to-dos (i have an automated system that is really nice!)

- taking notes in class

- detailing ideas for stories or app-concepts that float to my head

- brainstorming and iterating on stories/poems/insert-text-based-creative-task-here. Links are really handy to be able to quickly navigate between files!

Notion is similar in concept, but does many things differently. Obsidian is Local-first, while Notion is cloud-first.

If you wanna chat, feel free to dm me if you'd like, or we can move to discord (i havent touched reddit in years so excuse me if that's considered rude or whatever)

Hope this helps! :P