A ramble about various note-taking applications

Posted by Amontillado
Jun 19, 2023 at 07:10 PM

I uninstalled TheBrain as well, but not without some appreciation and with some ideas how to get more out of Devonthink.

Every document - group, smart group, tag, anything - has an annotation which is like a Markdown or RTF document joined at the hip to the main document.

I’ve never made much use of annotations. Now, I realize I’ve missed some opportunities.

Back in my youth, I did a lot with a misunderstood and now mostly extinct language called Forth. (Long parental pride dialog redacted here….)

Anyway, really primitive bare-bones Forth text editors supported a concept called a shadow screen. You had your main editing screen (1 kilobyte block) and then you had a shadow block - a second one kilobyte block where you could put whatever notes you wanted to.

Annotations in Devonthink aren’t so different from those shadow screens in Forth from 1970.

I’ve started using them extensively. Logging the evolutions a file goes through is an obvious thing.

I also like the idea of a bulleted list of links. Maybe one major bullet would be called Jump thoughts, out of homage to TheBrain, with a list of general associations. Another major bullet could be Citations.

The tiny annotations window in the Devonthink inspector isn’t much fun to use, but control-option-command-O will open it in a separate window with all the room you need.

And, son of a gun, Devonthink’s little-used see-also inspector will follow those annotation links bidirectionally. The see-also feature is often cited as something of no use. I think it’s awesome, but you have to feed it.

TheBrain is fast and easy to use. Devonthink is more flexible. I’m pretty happy with my new annotation workflows right now. I don’t anticipate looking for alternatives until at least mid-afternoon.