I previously maintained ~2000 quotes in a Notion with a second column for names and third for tags, but I’m seeking a new home after leaving the platform. Key requirements: easy and quick input whenever I find a new one and retrieval.
Some options I’ve considered:
Apple Numbers feels too cumbersome
Thoughts app (iOS/iPad) looks promising but lacks Mac support
Current consideration: create an Apple Notes “quotes” folder with individual notes per quote, using plain text for tags and leveraging search/Smart Folders for organization
Honestly? I use just plain old files and folders in the Finder. The topics (folders) are very broad, and I simply use #'s in the notes to tag them. It’s not very sophisticated, but I have about 2000 items in a folder structure that I don’t think goes below 2 deep, and am able to find things quite easily with spotlight, good naming conventions, and the use of hashtags within the notes.
For instance, I have one “Illustrations” folder where I store stories, quotes, insights, that I might use to illustrate a sermon, teaching, or talk. I can just open that folder, search for a few words, and find what is relevant. (When I use an illustration, I then add a line to the text file “Used YY.MM.DD” so I can be mindful of not repeating the same stories too often.)
I’ve used Bear for this for some time. I really like it because:
It’s easy to import content.
It’s an elegant app to use on all platforms in the Apple ecosystem. I may add notes on my Mac, but browsing, happening upon, or rereading a quote or other bit of text seems to be something I often do on my phone or iPad. Some of the apps mentioned in this discussion I find to be less mobile friendly.
I like that organization is tag-based. I may have a quote that addresses multiple topics. Instead of having to choose where to file it, I just add a few tags and can find it either way.
I really like using this app!
It supports Markdown, which I rely on heavily. You don’t have to use it, however. (It’s perhaps one of the reasons I’ve never really gotten along with Apple Notes.)
It has robust Shortcuts and URL scheme support.
It’s easy to export notes if I ever want to stop using the app.
I’ve kept a “commonplace book” for ages, and it’s important to me—a source of inspiration and the closest thing I have to a diary/journal. I use Bear exclusively for this—in other words, I have others apps in my tool kit for working with notes, but I don’t keep these in Bear. (Drafts is a kind of scratch pad/sticky note, I have all kinds of notes in archived in DEVONthink, various text files in the Finder, and so on.)
What a great idea. I used to have everything in Bear, but moved out of it a couple of months ago. However, I actually miss it. I was hesitant to add the notes to Apple Notes since it would just flood the app with thousands of quotes. Using Bear only for quotes seems like the solution (and it’s very stable). Thanks for the reasons! One question, since these are my last two options: do you think bear would be a much better option than just having a quotes folder in finder and keeping them in .txt or .md files?
Plain text. Sometimes PDFs, which make tagging a little more difficult, but not impossible (using the text annotation tool, for example). I have a shortcut that I run from the Share Sheet that takes the current web page (or a selection of it) and puts the text into Drafts with the URL appended. Then I save it out of Drafts.
Mostly, separate documents but I do have documents that aggregate quotes in addition to separate documents for each, e.g., I have separate documents for Aristotle quotes but I also have one document containing all of them.
I think that depends on how you want to use it. As I mentioned, I find I am often pulling out my phone and saying “what was that quote again…” while out and about. Therefore, keeping them in the Finder wouldn’t work for my use case. (Yes, you could do this with Obsidian as mentioned, but I’m not a huge fan of using Obsidian on mobile devices.)
The first web app I sold was a quote site.