Linking Supernote and Obsidian

What if your thoughts could be unified? What if you could carry with you all the knowledge of a second brain, filled with the tactile creativity of words formed by the nib of a pen?

Discovering PKM

I learned about Obsidian from my writing mentor, Tobias Buckell, during a lecture at the Stonecoast MFA program back in 2019. He showed us a new application where you could take all the atomic pieces of your knowledge and link them in a vast web. And he showed us this web on the screen: Obsidian's incredible graph view. I was hooked.

As someone who has always struggled to find confidence in the knowledge he possesses, this idea of a tool that could help me make sense of my life seemed almost mystical.

But there were still gaps in my flow. For one thing: I love writing by hand, and I wanted a device that could be the best of all worlds: long battery life, readable in the sunlight, and yet capable of connecting all my knowledge under a single umbrella.

Cut to a year later, when the Supernote entered my life.

While working for a tech news company, I formed a passion for electronic-ink (e-ink) devices. I purchased the Supernote A6X, a tablet with weeks of battery life and a sexy metallic pen, and fell in love. Ratta, the company that makes the Supernote, eventually sent me the larger A5X for free, and I still use that to this day.

But a problem emerged.

The more I used Obsidian to house my personal knowledge, the less I used my Supernote. Human beings are driven toward the easiest options and, when you are as busy as me, even a little bit of friction can break a habit.

For years, the fixes available for running Obsidian on the Supernote were clunky and difficult to implement.

Then Brandon Philips developed the Unofficial Supernote Plugin for Obsidian and things got brighter. You could transfer files from the Supernote using either a cloud drive, or a physical connection, and they would actually show up within your Obsidian vault -- readable!

Still, I wanted more. I needed Obsidian itself to be visible on my Supernote, and I needed there to be zero friction getting my Supernote files into Obsidian.

Adventures in side-loading Obsidian on the Supernote

After building my own PC, installing CalyxOS on my Android phone, and diving into the world of Linux, the thought of side-loading an app on the Supernote didn't seem so crazy. With an active community, the instructions were right there, I just had to act.

"Side-loading" is a term for unofficially adding an application to a device that wasn't designed to run it. The Supernote runs on an older version of the Android operating system that is customized for the e-ink experience. But Ratta has allowed side-loading openly from the start, making it easy to experiment. And, lo and behold, it's possible to side-load Obsidian.

With a few tweaks, I had the app running. I even had Obsidian Sync on in the background, transferring over my files!

But a huge problem remained. A problem that, as far as I could tell after watching dozens of videos and reading hundreds of posts, nobody else had solved.

Because of how side-loading on the Supernote works, the files in my Obsidian vault would forever be kept separate from the handwriting files. Like a brain with its hemispheres severed, the different parts of the Supernote's hard drive could not speak to one another.

As I lay down to sleep on this problem, the solution struck like a thunderbolt. Surely, there must be an Android app capable of file syncing locally? Not to a cloud service or another device, but to a different folder on the same hard drive.

I was right.

I side loaded a new application that did just that: I could mirror the whole Notes folder on my Supernote to a location within my Obsidian folder (which I aptly named "Supernotes"). And magic happened.

With the Unofficial Supernote Plugin installed, I could see my handwritten notes, alongside their extracted OCRed text (Supernote has fantastic handwriting recognition), right inside the Obsidian app! And it synced across all my devices like a smooth dream. Suddenly, the world of e-ink exploded, offering the opportunity to explore a whole new ideal way of interacting with the content of my mind.

I'm looking forward to the opportunity to try the new Supernote A5X2 with this same set-up one of these days (I wouldn't say no to another product review copy). The Supernote is by far my preferred device from all the e-ink offerings out there, largely due to the incredibly responsive team at Ratta. Obsidian is, likewise, my favorite personal knowledge management software. Paired? It's like a futuristic fairytale.

Want to follow in my footsteps and install Obsidian on your Supernote? Read all about the process, here.

👋 Hi there! I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian 📚, independent scholar 📖, film fanatic 🎬, fiction author 📝, and tech enthusiast 💻. If you like my work and want to support me, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month! 📣

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