3/21/2023 0 Comments Simplenote vs letterspaceBear Writerīear is a relatively new player on the scene. The lack of Markdown combined with the Apple walled garden syndrome was ultimately the reason I stopped using it. Yes there’s the iCloud webapp that you can use to edit your notes, but it feels like a second class experience. Where it falls down is where every piece of Apple software falls down. The seamless sync between Apple devices never goes wrong, the editor is nice (especially after they added Checklists) and it allows you to organize your plain text notes into folders. The Notes app is a go-to for many Apple users, and I used it myself for about 2 years. I compared 6 different note taking solutions and gave them each a score out of 5 for each of the requirements. Syntax highlighting is a real bonus as well since it makes code snippets so much more readable. Bonus marks if it also hides the markdown characters when I’m not editing that word or paragraph. Many editors have a sort of hybrid view where you see the actual markdown text but the bold parts are bold and the emphasized parts are italic. When writing markdown it’s nice to be able to see what you’re doing (live preview), and also if I start a bulleted list with a hyphen or asterisk it would be nice if the editor added a new one for me when I press enter, and then cancel out of the list if I press enter again without having typed anything. In addition to the decent on-demand search feature, I really want some sort of organizational structure to keep my brain organized. If you can’t find them then you can’t read them! Notes are useless unless you’re going to read them later. Hopefully this one is pretty self-explanatory. I can live without a Linux client today, but if Apple keeps up its recent trend of bad hardware, that might change… 4. For my purposes, cross-platform means fat clients for Windows, macOS, iPhone and iPad. Side note: To me, a web client does not constitute “cross-platform”. I love to write blog post drafts on my phone for example (I wrote 90% of this blog post on my iPhone), but if I’m working on a personal coding side-project I’ll probably be on Windows and will want to have my notes available there as well. Cross-Platform ClientsĪny given day I swap between iPad, iPhone, Windows 10 and macOS depending on the context. Offline support is equally as important needing to be online to see and write my notes is a total dealbreaker, one which brings me to my next requirement… 3. I am no exception to this as I hop from one device to another many times a day. These days we expect our data to be available everywhere at all times. Most of my notes contain code snippets, but sometimes it’s just a small list of thoughts and occasionally long-form prose like a blog post draft. If markdown isn’t a first class citizen like in Bear or Typora it should at least be supported (e.g. It is flexible enough to allow for long form essays and big paragraph blocks or just simple bullet lists and probably among the most important to me: code blocks. This by far and away my preferred writing format. There might be other features that are useful to me but I don’t consider them deal breakers if they are missing. Must-havesĪny note platform which I am going to use seriously NEEDS to have all these things. I have a pretty small list of reasonable requirements and yet, I frequently find myself repeatedly unsatisfied with the current offerings and therefore repeatedly switching platforms over and over. I need something that can do it all, and keep it all in one place. I draft blog posts, write long-form and also jot down quick to-do lists and random brain dumps of bullet points. I use notes for just about every context of my life, so the ability to separate them (by tags, folders or whatever) is super important. With that out of the way… What Do I Use Notes For Hopefully after doing this exploration I can actually settle on one platform for the long haul and stop procrastinating by switching note platforms and writing blog posts about it. This post is really an exploration into the pros and cons for my own personal workflow and this the things I find important when managing notes. Unfortunately I haven’t found a magic bullet (yet). As I have written before, I’ve used just about every note solution around.
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