[divan]

You'll like Drafts app. Open the app and start typing. Only then decide what you gonna do with the text.

It's a native macOS app, so it starts instantly. I use it for everything – from writing articles to comments/messages, where I care a bit more about not making typos or accidentally sending before proofreading.

[CharlesW]

Why not just use Notes instead of paying $20/year? (Not a dig at Drafts, trying to understand the value.)

[tqwhite]

Finding stuff in Notes is bad. You cannot scope a search to a subset of the collection. It's terrible. Drafts is very fast and, as plain text, is very simple. The automation is fabulous. Good support for widgets. Its sync is instant. It's a good program.

That said, I have returned to it and am abandoning Drafts. Turns out that, once you have a substantial amount of stuff, finding stuff is just as bad as Notes and I do not actually use the automation.

Also, I want Rich Text, too. I believe in plain text but, in the end, I cannot live without being able to easily set text to be bold, colored or large so that I can see the important parts. Still, I am mad at Notes for not supporting Markdown because I do README and such often.

[CharlesW]

> You cannot scope a search to a subset of the collection.

Since you're back to Notes, you might be interested to know that you can now scope searches in a bunch ways — folders, Smart Folder, tags, kind (i.e. limit to notes with checklists), date range, etc. You can even search "notes created last year" to see all of your notes created last year, etc. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/notes/not18ab658ed/mac

[chefandy]

I haven't looked at Drafts, but I stopped using Notes because I started doing work that requires Windows and it lacks native cross-platform support. The in-browser experience just doesn't cut it for me for something I need as much as a notes app.

[tqwhite]

One other, slightly off topic thing... Even if a program has a free version, if I use it in my daily life, as I have done with Drafts, I pay for it.

It is my view that the current market has coerced programmers to have free versions even though programmers cannot buy food or pay mortgages with free versions.

I consider it unethical to gain a benefit in my daily life without giving something in return. $20/year is almost too little.

[bobbylarrybobby]

Drafts is really about the automations you can do on your text in order to get it out of Drafts. The idea is you throw some text into Drafts — because it's quicker to create text in Drafts than in pretty much any other app — and then use an automation to do some minor parsing, reformat, add metadata, etc before sending the data to its final destination.

[divan]

I don't use Pro version and never had a need for.

Notes is clumsy – I never can find what I want there. With folders, pinned notes, named notes, synced/unsynced etc, it's just a mess.

Drafts is just a super-reliable and fast editor that is better than any other textbox/editor. So I mostly use it for copy pasting. Even use it for HN comments that are longer than 10 lines.

[brandonhorst]

If you don't want the automation stuff, it's perfectly usable for free.