For me, Notes tries too hard. The auto-heading of the first line of text, all the editing and markup options, the sharing, etc. are all more than I want, and they end up being distracting and getting in the way. My mind will easily wander to “what if I make all subjects this font and this color and bold etc.”, and then I lose the context of whatever I wanted to write down.
TextEdit, new .txt file, name it “{subject} notes.txt”, throw it in the “old notes” folder when it gets too unwieldy is the only notes workflow that I’ve found actually works for me.
I’ve tried many, but the featurelessness of TextEdit is what I like about it. “Better” ends up being more distracting. I do like Sublime for actual dev tasks, though.
Sublime is my go-to for this. It can be customised to be much more comfortable to use, and projects let you have a set of files accessible with Cmd+P. I have different projects for each of my static sites. It's fantastic.
Counterpoint: syncing across devices, sharing, embeddable media and searchability are actually all kinda table-stakes if I'm going to be using these notes for the rest of my forseeable life. I have shared notes with my wife where we have shopping lists, shared notes with my co-founder on roadmaps, have my vaccine cards and IDs in there for presenting at bars, and all my code snippets in a folder called "Snippets" that is searchable and available to me at my work and home computers. Kinda hard to replicate with a folder full of text files without even more complexity and crud.
Oh for sure. For those use cases, more features make sense. My use case here is “swap file for disorganized thoughts”, and I don’t need them to be replicated, archived, or searchable—and the mental overhead of those features is a detriment.
A notes .txt represents my current unit of work, and moving it into the archive folder is equivalent to deleting it in that I will likely never need or use it again. Documentation goes into the repo or Notion or whatnot, grocery lists are shared with my wife, etc., and I see the value in additional features there.
TextEdit, new .txt file, name it “{subject} notes.txt”, throw it in the “old notes” folder when it gets too unwieldy is the only notes workflow that I’ve found actually works for me.