Notes and outliner apps

Software
21

I’m finding with Claude my configuring is now much faster and less frustrating. I also find my desire to configure everything has waned and I only configure something when it’s actually needed.

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22

It’s an essential part of the process!

Allegedly…

23

Following this one closely, liking the development direction.

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24

Nice! I like outliners where we can zoom in.

26
27

I’ve got trouble incorporating any kind of notes (i.e. in a standalone notes app) into my workflows (although I would have loved to use some of the apps in the list), I just can’t see my self taking so many notes.

I use Reminders, Todoist and Calendar, anything I need to make a note of, is usually part of what goes into these apps.

I’d love to know what kind of workflows require people taking so many notes!

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28

I take a lot of notes. I have 870 notes in Apple Notes, using folders, sub-folders, and hyperlinks within Notes and to documents, websites, and more.

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29

Don’t forget Tana (now Tana Outliner)… still the cleanest/most powerful outliner I’ve seen.

30

I was a huge Tana fan for years, having used it since early 2023. The changes the company has made this year have completely soured me. I still check in on Slack weekly, and it’s in a sad state.

I won’t bore everyone here with the details, but I’m not sure Tana is a reliable recommendation anymore.

I do agree that it is/was the best and most powerful outliner I’ve used. I truly love the product, but I cannot trust it or keep putting data into it anymore.

31

Do you do much hand written notes in Apple Notes?

The ease of combining both typed and written notes is really appealing.

32

Yes, I periodically take handwritten notes. I also like to outline presentations with the Apple Pencil. For some reason, I think better when writing by hand. I can then upload the scribble to AI and have it convert to a textual outline for me.

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33

Thanks for providing the screenshots, gave me a few ideas on how I could get started

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34

You are very welcome. And remember, Apple Notes now supports markdown, so if and when needed, you can export notes to markdown.

35

A lot of us are writers, teachers, or clergy, or all three.

I don’t read my notes aloud when I’m teaching, but creating them gives my lectures shape, and helps in planning and organizing a coyse as well as individual classes.

36

I usually use Octarine as a daily journal for work and somewhat for personal use. My first daily note was January 1, 2021. I’ve got at least 1900 notes now in that section alone.

Octarine‘s main feature for me is the daily folder that powers the calendar; I never see a list of my daily notes, but the calendar has a dot underneath the day for every note. searching is really easy when you find the right place to search from.

The rest of my notes are topics I need to remember for business and personal use. Most of my business notes are web articles so I can remember what to do when I’m in the field.

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37

I cannot stress the usefulness of Notenik enough, if you’re working with notes as structured data and/or want to leverage them in various contexts (e.g., static websites, EPUBs, presentations, TSV/CSV, JSON).

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38

Reflect Open (which is the newer product, in beta) is open source. Seems nice so far. The key feature I wish other note apps would add are:

  • Optionally auto-completing wiki-links based on names in your address book
  • Allowing one-click adding of a meeting on your calendar to the daily note, including details of who attended etc. (This isn’t very flexible in the current beta—but I suspect that will come later)
39

Some years ago I developed the habit of catching my stray thoughts. They kept appearing since. I found myself creating more than 1000 notes annually withe the tage #thought. Reviewing them randomly is fun. Other notes are tagged with e.g. #recipe/simple, #code, #travel and of course #work.

40

I use Bear for note-taking. Back then the app does not have proper Mac automation support other than Apple Shortcuts. Earlier this year the devs added CLI scripting. Now it’s a simple Script Filter to search my notes, using Bear’s search syntax, in Alfred:

query=$1

/Applications/Bear.app/Contents/MacOS/bearcli search -q "$query" --format json --fields id,title,tags | jq --arg query "$query" '
	{
		items: (
			map({uid: .id, title: .title, subtitle: (.tags | join(" ")), arg: .id}) + [
				{title: "Open Main Window", "arg": ("bear://x-callback-url/search?term=" + $query)},
				{title: "Create New Note", "arg": ("bear://x-callback-url/create?new_window=yes&show_window=no&edit=yes&title=" + $query)}
			]
		)
	}
'

# I can then open the note in an external window (not the main Bear window) using x-callback-url. 
# This has been a huge QoL improvement for me.
1 Like
41

I use since 10+ years Joplin:

Recommended by PrivacyGuides community: Notebooks - Privacy Guides

Very happy!

2 Likes