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For me, Notes tries too hard. The auto-heading of the first line of text, all the editing and markup options, the sharing, etc. are all more than I want, and th
by el_benhameen 3y ago
For me, Notes tries too hard. The auto-heading of the first line of text, all the editing and markup options, the sharing, etc. are all more than I want, and they end up being distracting and getting in the way. My mind will easily wander to “what if I make all subjects this font and this color and bold etc.”, and then I lose the context of whatever I wanted to write down.
TextEdit, new .txt file, name it “{subject} notes.txt”, throw it in the “old notes” folder when it gets too unwieldy is the only notes workflow that I’ve found actually works for me.
- nicbou 3y agoIf you like plain text, you'd probably love it even more with a better text editor.
- el_benhameen 3y agoI’ve tried many, but the featurelessness of TextEdit is what I like about it. “Better” ends up being more distracting. I do like Sublime for actual dev tasks, though.
- nicbou 3y agoSublime is my go-to for this. It can be customised to be much more comfortable to use, and projects let you have a set of files accessible with Cmd+P. I have different projects for each of my static sites. It's fantastic.
- evrimoztamur 3y agoP.S. Auto-heading is a setting (I turned it off).
- xmonkee 3y agoCounterpoint: syncing across devices, sharing, embeddable media and searchability are actually all kinda table-stakes if I'm going to be using these notes for the rest of my forseeable life. I have shared notes with my wife where we have shopping lists, shared notes with my co-founder on roadmaps, have my vaccine cards and IDs in there for presenting at bars, and all my code snippets in a folder called "Snippets" that is searchable and available to me at my work and home computers. Kinda hard to replicate with a folder full of text files without even more complexity and crud.
- el_benhameen 3y agoOh for sure. For those use cases, more features make sense. My use case here is “swap file for disorganized thoughts”, and I don’t need them to be replicated, archived, or searchable—and the mental overhead of those features is a detriment. A notes .txt represents my current unit of work, and moving it into the archive folder is equivalent to deleting it in that I will likely never need or use it again. Documentation goes into the repo or Notion or whatnot, grocery lists are shared with my wife, etc., and I see the value in additional features there.