I use Apple Notes. 90% of what I was capturing in drafts ended up getting sent to Apple Notes anyway so I ditched Drafts for Apple Notes when the Quick Note feature was added.
I have a keyboard shortcut (^+space) set to invoke the Quick Note function, so it’s easy enough to bring it up jot down a note get back to what I was doing. I have ⌥+space set to quick entry for Things so the two along with ⌘+space for Alfred are all muscle memory at this point.
And, on a the iPad with a Magic Keyboard, one can click the Globe key and the Q key to launch a quick note. You can also launch Siri with Globe key and the S key.
I didn’t know that one, nice! Thanks for sharing it.
I couldn’t see the appeal of Drafts for several years. But folks in here kept talking about it (so much enabling goes on in this forum 
) that I thought I must be missing something, so I downloaded it to see what all the fuss was about. I think within a day it was my preferred app. Turns out folks here know something 
I think our approaches are different though (and that’s ok!). Most the time I just need a dumping ground for half-baked things I need to return to at a better time, or I basically just need a blank piece of paper to think on before I action something. So I don’t necessarily want to write directly to my task manager or email or whatever. Drafts (and now Tot a bit) serves that function for me.
Also, I know intellectually it doesn’t really matter, but in reality it does because we are visual beings/thinkers: I have my themes set up how I like in Drafts, and I like that it looks exactly how I want for the task I’m doing. I don’t really want to stare at a white email window while I’m trying to think about how to write something. I’d much rather be in a window with colours I like and a menu designed for me.
Could not agree more. When I’m spending a lot of time in the app it needs to look and feel polished and visually pleasing. I think this is why I download Craft every 3 months to see if functionality wise it works for me because wow, that’s a nice app. 
So, I decided to replace Drafts, with … (drum roll) … Apple Notes! (proceed to laugh and roll eyes)…
I like Drafts, a lot. I use it as my only notes, read-later storage system. I don’t use it as a intermediary where the drafts will end up somewhere (Obsidian, iMessage, Mails, etc). It has about 1000 of my notes, so I don’t think I will migrate them but keep it in Drafts.
(I spent a lot of time customizing Drafts. I customized the theme (using the Theme Builder). I even customized the Markdown syntax, creating my own version of syntax to meet certain look and feel, mostly, basic stuff like highlights, strikethroughs, footnotes, block quotes, programming codes ,etc. To do all these requires Drafts Pro, so I paid my dues. This is just to say that I really like Drafts to the point of spending money and time to customize it to how I like it).
But, I notice that in the past 6 months, I do a lot more photo taking and then jotting down my thoughts about the photos. Specifically I do this a lot during business meetings where I will capture a photo on the projected screen (or taking a screenshot in Zoom, if it were a remote meeting) and then writing my summary of the slide. I can’t put that photo into Drafts and so I will take a photo, type the slide title and then type my thoughts in Drafts. As I reviewed these notes later, I find myself struggling to a coherent thoughts as I tried to match the notes to the photos.
Checking on the Drafts forum and Agile Tortoise said that he has no plans to put photos into Drafts in the foreseeable future. Drafts will always be plain text only.
There are a few things about Drafts which I really can’t live without and after taking a look and customizing Notes, I think I have strike a balance:
Drafts Quick Capture is a must. My muscle memory of ⌃ Space is too ingrained to live without. Thankfully, I can go to Settings-Keyboard-Keyboard Shortcut-Mission Control to map it to Apple Notes’ Quick Note.
On the iOS front, I created a Shortcut to launch Quick Note and replace Drafts icon in the dock
I love, love, how I can highlight a paragraph in Safari, click on Share Extension and click Drafts and it will create a link to the URL and the highlighted paragraph as a quote, basically building my own Read Later with my notes. Here’s how it looks like in Drafts:
Highlights, strike throughs, bold, italic are important to me.
Not too shabby in Notes
I can certainly get used to not seeing those Markdown symbols anymore. I used to train myself to accept the symbols, just because of Drafts. Now, it’s such a relief to fall back to the way things were, in any other word processing or note taking app. It’s nice to go back to a generally accepted norm.
When Obsidian was released, it introduced me to wiki links, which lets me create a back-link to other Obsidian notes for reference. Drafts support it too:
So, do Notes:
Other bonus things that Apple Notes provide: Spotlight to search notes content (I think Drafts can’t do that), handwritten notes using Apple Pencil (on the iPad), easy tagging by just typing #tag.
The only feature I miss from Drafts is the ability to create and write footnotes:
Ok, this ends my rambling. Thank you for reading!
Does anyone know if there are shortcut keys (on the mac) to quickly add a reminder to reminders? I haven’t found any but it would be great to be able to do that much like adding a Quick Note to Notes
