Consistent Note Editing Experience
Writing notes is up there with capturing and organization in terms of importance. After all, if I can’t effectively edit my thoughts, what’s the point?
When it comes to taking notes, I like to style them as I go. This helps me create visual hierarchy as I type, and allows me to mark items with colors or formatting to help make important information pop out for later.
This was, and still seems to be, Evernote’s achilles heel. Formatting and layout still seem to be different across devices, and, as we’ll get into later, their formatting seems to use HTML (or something similar to Microsoft Word), so there’s no telling what formatting is hard-coded into the note.
Back in 2017, this is why I was originally drawn to Notion: Their mobile app seemed to have all the same formatting features that their desktop app had, and it was clean. OneNote did not, and still does not, have support for headings on iPhone, a crucial feature I use all the time. Unfortunately, Notion has also began to make some of its functionality desktop-only (such as creating a Team Space), which makes it impossible to use with just a phone or a tablet.
Okay. Also. Keyboard shortcuts are essential. A “command palette” is also cool. As long as I can keep my hands on the keyboard to navigate around the UI, I’m a happy camper. The same applies to gestures when I’m on mobile.
Markdown Support
Mentioned briefly above, I would love for my note-taking app to have support for Markdown. Preferable I can still use shortcuts like CMD+B for making text bold, or have the markdown syntax hidden while editing, but in general I would prefer all my notes have this standard markup syntax.
The benefits to Markdown are numerous: data portability, ease of reading, simple to learn and use… but most importantly, for me, is that other, more legacy, document writers or experiences (typically in the Microsoft or Google camps) tend to junk up content with syntax. Especially when it comes to fonts.
Listen. I’m writing a note. I could not care less what sans-serif font my document is using. Let me bold, italicize, and maybe even color text. But I don’t need the option to set a different font for every single letter. Knowing that solutions like Word and Evernote (and maybe Apple Notes) are out there using custom styling and structures to handle fonts, sizes, line spacing, and other customizations on a letter-by-letter basis bogs my mind down.
How many times have you pasted something into an email, and now the second half of your email looks different than the first half? That’s what I want to avoid. I know that you can paste without formatting, but not always (especially on mobile), and I would prefer to eliminate that possibility altogether.
I feel Markdown solves all of these issues. At least to my mind, it feels like it’s a lighter experience, and it translates well to other apps. After all, what’s lighter than plain-text? Plain-text is the best text.
Portable Notes and Data
They’re my notes, it’s my data. I should be able to move my data to-and-fro without any hiccups. Please no proprietary formatting… especially if the documents are saved as Markdown, portability should be easy-peasy.
Please keep my note-to-note links. Keeping my “date created” would also be nice. All the ways I’ve customized my notes should be portable, somehow. As spec’ed out above, I’m not asking for a lot of customization here.
Ultimately: If I cannot export my data from your system, and import my data back into the same system, AND have my imports look the same as when they were exported, you have failed. So much software drops the ball HARD in this area. I’m looking at you, Google Photos.
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