I’ve been on what David used to call a “spirit quest.” My work requires me to write articles for marketing purposes. For each project, I will have plain text documents, Microsoft Word douments, and email messages, often along with PowerPoints, PDFs, audio and video files, and Web pages. Plus I have the usual things to keep track of that everybody does – bills, receipts, product manuals, HR documents, and so on.
I had been using DevonThink for all of that, but I decided a few weeks ago to find something else. DevonThink just seemed too complex for my purposes, and I worried that the database format might prove too brittle for long-term storage. I wrote about this here:
Since then, I’ve looked at Obsidian, IA Writer, nvUltra, Notebooks, FSNotes, Zettlr, Quiver, and a couple more, and none of them are entirely satisfying.
How do you manage those types of documents?
I’m starting to think that maybe the Finder, supplemented by the new app Hook for linking documents, is the way to go. But that still seems like it could be better?
I am in the position on this that I often am when I search for new apps – I feel like the solution I’m now using isn’t working, but I don’t quite know what I’m looking for or what the problem is that I’m trying to solve, other than making it easier to organize and move around between documents.
We had an earlier topic on this in 2018 – has anything changed?
As a side-project, I looked at NotePlan as a replacement for Things. Not the first time I’ve done that, and not the first time I’ve concluded that NotePlan is a nifty idea but it’s not for me. I like the idea of having a journal and my to-do list in the same documents, but in practice it seems to become unwieldy in a matter of days.
Also posted to my blog.