P.D. Workman
2 min readMay 10, 2021

--

You've been given a few note taking apps that now support the double-bracket links.

One of my problems with all of these note taking apps is that they use proprietary databases and lock all of your notes into it. If your database gets corrupted, you lose your notes. Many of them either only exist in the cloud or require all of your notes to be synced to your computer (no ability to selectively sync). They take up massive amounts of space and become slow and unwieldy. OneNote lets you store notes in separate notebooks, but you still can't get anything out of the database without copying and pasting or printing to pdf.

I made the decision not to get locked into any of these databases again. My notes get saved as docx, pdf, or text/md files. These files are ubiquitous and can be opened by dozens of different apps. My "notebook" structure is the system folders. They are synced across my devices using Dropbox (the version of dropbox I use saves previous versions, allows selective sync, etc.)

I have been using the Notebooks App as part of this system. It acts as a browser/viewer and also as a text editor that will let you write in markdown and create a wiki structure using the double square brackets. It will let you compile a number documents into one and to convert from one format to another. (So I can write books in md, compile the chapters into a book and convert them to docx, for example.) It has a bunch of other cool little features as well.

I do jot down or collect information in Apple Notes because it is easy to share information to in the Apple/iOS ecosystem, but they don't get to stay there, it's just a collection bucket. I sweep through every day or two to make sure that everything gets set up as a document in my file system.

--

--

P.D. Workman
P.D. Workman

Written by P.D. Workman

Writing riveting mystery, suspense, and young adult fiction about real life issues.

No responses yet