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by atleta 1927 days ago
My biggest gripe with note taking apps is that basically all of the ones I've seen take the IDE approach. They are not as much note taking apps as specialized document editors. Because of this I'm still stuck with Tomboy which is very far from ideal but at least it's quick and easy to start typing a new note . (Unfortunately it doesn't support markdown, only starting bullet points with typing a *, it does support wiki links, which I don't use much but it uses some xml format.)

Most notes, at least the way I work, start as just that: notes. Then some of them grow more complex and evolve into a larger document (or ideally, could evolve into multiple linked ones), but Tomboy doesn't really support it (at least if it had support for copy-ing away text as markdown...) and I really don't feel like having yet another IDE like app taking up the whole screen for every small note.

4 comments

I like this way of thinking about notes - trying to move them up a ladder of utility (from short -> long term): https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6f6xgGG4NKjkA5NA1kDd46whJh2...

It's ideal to have a tool that is extensible enough to handle scratch notes all the way to densely linked evergreen notes.

Have you ever looked at jrnl? iirc it was debuted here on HN

https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/

I use it and like the way it's implemented md and other format support in that you can either create a new note formatted as markdown, or update existing and previously created journals and the tool will re-render them to md: https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/formats/#markdown

I realise part of their marketing is in that their filetype is readable in 50 years when all the iPad apps are gone, but does anyone know of any iPad apps that are compatible in the meantime while it is still being used?

Phone actually, specifically. I'd love to be able to just drop in a jrnl entry without faffing with text files on iOS

If you're on the Apple ecosystem, Bear is quite nice. It's basic markdown and the only hierarchical structure is parsed from "tags" which are created by typing #tag in the document. There is some nesting too, so you can do #work/project or #personal/ideas. I've found it really intuitive and the UI/UX is clean.
Collecting, writing and managing notes are each different steps, demanding different UI&features. But writing is the step taking most time. So naturally the focus is there.

And collecting is more a matter of your setup. It's unhealthy easy to collect stuff with any mature noteapp this days.