Note-Taking Apps Still Can't Link and Order Notes Well
Users are frustrated with the limitations of their note-taking systems. They desire more flexible organization, better linking capabilities, and ways to manage the balance between concise notes and comprehensive information. The current tools lack intuitive features for ordering, linking, and filtering notes effectively.
SOURCES (60)
“Thanks. Day 1, but, I have been using PARA in Onenote for years and it works well. So, the mind-shift is easy. Also, I included several Wikis over on the right-side. I can use these for some of the more frequently used static type info…”
This is great! I redid my PARA structure so it uses the tabs within pages. So much better than a long af page to scroll through
“When this happens, I try to find some other text that might be in the note, or a related note that may link to / from it. Once you find it, you might want to consider renaming the note so that it can be picked up by your original search term, or add a suitable alias. I find naming notes for retrievability is best practice. The notes that give me the most trouble are my meeting notes, which just have a minimal date and project naming scheme. But I also added a 'previous' field, which make”
“I try exact search with terms I might have used, filter by tags (eg note type, topics) or combinations thereof. Or I ask AI”
“I put them anywhere. It's a mess. Because the words are not tags and are not proprieties either. They are a way to find by trying multiple attempts like "date... no, not that one... maybe database... no, too many results... maybe UTC... that note! That's the one." But if you are careful using proprieties you could easily filter notes that belong to the same group, even if they were written in different projects. But that requires discipline. I've chosen mess. I blame Gmail.”
yeah this is a good sanity check before you start rewriting anything
“I navigate my folders for the notes. And I also use onedrive's search, at it can index images and PDFs, besides the Microsoft office documents. And when I find the note, I update it to add more context and terms from what I was searching before, so that next time it becomes easier. Even with almost 10k notes, it is hard to miss something on the search alone, and the rest I catch with navigating my folders. It's been about 2 years since I last used OneDrive for any search at all. My searc”
“A good title is definitely helpful. It's probably not harmful for it to be overly verbose, as you can always change it later if it's troublesome. Using aliases for this can be a good idea, at least in cases where there are multiple terms describing it - eg. "Propositional Knowledge" and "Declarative Knowledge" could be aliases of the same note, instead of putting them into one title, as that would make the title clunky. Explicit search keywords is something I've n”
“I abuse the alias feature for searching for some notes. For notes which I want to have direct access to, I add one alias that is just a very long sequence of words I think my future self will think of when searching for that note. (That is, words that are somewhat related to that note.) Then when I want to search for a note, I open up the quickswitcher dialog, then just type in words like I'm searching Google. For example, for a note about big cats, I might have one alias be big cats lions p”
“Do you have Omnisearch install? It lets you search the body of the note and not just the title”
If search comes up empty I use tags to look for something specific.
“Guess some level of folder organization is still necessary after all. For the search words, do you put them at the top/bottom of the note, or maybe as a bullet list inside a property? LLM would be great especially if doesn't give me a wall of info but only relevant clean results.”
Note composer: When merging files, use source note name in the alias part of the updated wikilink
“Hey I’m coming back to comment in case this comes back up in the future when someone searches. There absolutely there is a way. You set the notes it looks for to search only by property. It was there in front of me.”
“I haven't tried and I may check it out but my main thing is I don't really want each task to its own note rather it live inline on different notes”
“i would like them to be in different notes so they can be in different project notes”
“By orphan do you mean not linked to anything? If so out of curiosity what do you link? Most of the time I can’t think of anything to link a note to, only using links when connecting documents of a specific project. I’m wondering how others link!”
Add a “Daily note” button to the "New tab" view
Edit transcluded (embedded) notes (blocks) in place (likely requires WYSWYG first)
“You can alter your setup slightly and use a query in your daily note as needed. Basically, think of these tasks as data: #projects #reminder #todo You currently have single notes for each of these where you actively add to a list there. Using the front matter you can set up tags for these, and meta data depending on the need for extra info, tags alone can work. Then on your daily note all you do is manually write something like this to show the results of unfinished reminders on your daily note”
“Fair in general, though it can be very helpful for instances where you're linking to a header and want to make the text more clear or if you like incorporating links into sentences and need to adjust the wording a little Biggest issue is that if you change the name for a file later, any aliased link keeps its old alias. Which is good in many cases, but it can be annoying in many others”
“I need to look into this tip about folders and tags. I have never liked how I can't have a parent "Folder Note" that has a cover page then Notes nested underneath it. I'm guessing using Tags as you suggest fixes that.”
“I'm curious to know what people are doing. I collect direct quotes of interest in source notes; a source note may have 1 or 50 direct quotes. Beneath each quote I may add a link to a thought of my own. I then add links to keywords in my own linked thought note. See below. ``` Source note She could still hear her mother’s spirit calling "You will come back," but that voice was becoming fainter and more indistinct. This makes me think of my [[idea that I'm not sharing publicly]].”
I use both, folders and tags, but I have less than 300 notes
“Currently yes, but you can add any notes, files too section in the populated code block.”
[Evernote] ★ 1/5 (v11.25.6) — I used Evernote for 10–12 years and spent about eight of those meaning to find a better alternative. Disclaimer: I always used the free plan, so yes,…
Search results: highlight the note currently focused
Markdown Tables with Spreadsheet-Like Formatting — Without Turning Every Row into a Note
“I keep all kinds of notes in a single vault. Daily notes, people, studies, books etc. I want the graph view to exclude all of these folders and show me notes only within my permanent notes folder. So far, I am not able to achieve. Is there any plugin that can help me with this? I know that local graph exists, But there I have to adjust the depth every time. It would be nice to have a plugin that will just show me the connections between notes within the specified folders submitted by”
Show a complete preview of the canvas (including text) when a canvas is embedded in a note
“Unfortunately you would have to jump into each individual note to do any editing. From the "master" note all you can get is the embed link. But a ctrl + click on the embed link jumps you into the linked note itself, so pretty easy and quick to go back and forth.”
“Does any one have the same problem with relay? I tried to sync 307 notes, 51 folders and it left me with empty folders. I've tried restarting it, login out and in - it stays the same. I even tried to sync smaller folders but it doesn't differ submitted by /u/Bitter-Comedian8777 [link] [comments]”
“I recently made a decision to combine my shorter drafts into longer chapters right at the publishing stage. Naturally, doing this on the fly meant I completely lost track of my own notes. I ended up posting what should have been Chapters 29 and 30, but I accidentally published them as 28 and 29. When I realized the mistake, pure, uncontrollable panic set in. I was sweating. My heart was pounding. My immediate thought was: "Oh no! The timeline makes no sense! The immersion is ruined! My read”
“When you paste text into Notion, it puts it all in one block, regardless of how many "paragraphs" it is. You can see this by clicking on the little "six-dot" move bar to the left of the block – it highlights the entire block. When you add a full return, it moves the content after that return to a new block. So what you're calling "paragraph spacing" is in fact "block spacing" in Notion, and there's no way to change it unless you want to mess with s”
“Eu trabalho sempre com notas atômicas. No meu caso essa nota seria estatural, ou seja teria apenas links para outras notas. No mas imóvel eu incorporo uma nota nela.”
“Assume Daily Notes, often containing a bullet point line such as: - mention something here related to [[This Note]] When I view the linked mentions at the bottom of [[This Note]] I get a very nice list of all the linked mentions in the form of XX/XX/XXX (i.e. the Daily Note Date) Mention something here related to [[This Note]] (i.e. the bulleted text line) I would like to replicate this in a Bases table. I can easily create the basic table by filtering for "has link to [[This Note]]" B”
“Thanks so much, great question, and you spotted exactly the thing that used to be unclear! The short version: a note becomes a task as soon as it has type: task in its frontmatter. Your note will then show up in BeautyTasks — in the Inbox (that's the home for any task without a project). Good news: the latest release (1.14.0) made this much smoother. It worked before, but we simplified it a lot - most importantly, you don't even need to touch YAML by hand anymore: Two ways to turn your n”
“There is no text on the note to export it. It is a reference to the text on the other note. You can print it or copy it and paste there, etc. But copying the file or exporting just the file contents won't export the embeded part.”
“Hi! Is there any plugin to embed a section of a note with actual text (that updates dynamically) instead of only a preview? I'm interested in this because I use an Anki-Obsidian integration (Yanki) and so it needs to convert actual pasted text for it to create the Anki flashcards, which makes embeds unreadable. (It would be even better if it didn't include links in the text so that it doesn't mess up with the backlinks, but I know that might be asking too much) submitted by ”
“https://preview.redd.it/vtwc8l9dwbdh1.png?width=1467&format=png&auto=webp&s=e6cd2890b53772ec97826e7a8a91bba858fcb98e EDIT: I just needed to update the plugin. Oops. I'm trying to reproduce my Notion workflow, when I click on +New on the particular base I'm working with I want it to apply the Template I have setup for the base's folder to that new note. I've tried moving my Base file around to see if I could get the template to apply but it fails to apply the template”
“Most clipboard managers save your copied items. I kept running into a different problem. Sometimes I need to paste 5-10 things in a specific order . API keys, emails, prompts, commands, links… I’d copy one, paste it, go back, copy the next, repeat. So I added a Paste Queue to my app. Now I just: Queue everything once. Press my paste shortcut. Each paste automatically gives me the next item in the queue. No more switching back and forth between windows. It wasn’t even the feature I planned to bui”
“Do a backup of your vault before you are doing anything!!! Personally, I wouldn't do it, as you can't trust AI. And I don't want to manually check every single note, that would kinda defeat the purpose.”
“As u/cobblebrawn wrote below. Click the button "Show files from subfolders" then you will see all notes in "exam preparations" and "statistics" even if you click on "university". Select scope to the left, files to the right.”
“I am using Notebook Navigator as my main file browser. I wondered: I created a folder called “university,” inside it a folder called “exam preparations,” and inside this a folder called “statistics.” All the relevant stats notes are inside “statistics,” but the parent folder “Exam preparations” and its parent folder “University” are empty. Is there a way to have it display the subfolder it has? Or should I create a base in the parent folder that includes the notes that are in its subfolder? I do”
“I use daily notes in Obsidian with link to show entries under linked mentions in other notes. How do I add a multi-paragraph note to a daily note and have it show in its entirety in another Obsidian note without linking every paragraph? submitted by /u/risk0 [link] [comments]”
“You can try Joplin or Obsidian as good Notion alternatives that work on PC and are popular with students. They support notes, organization, tags, and templates. If you want something closer to Notion’s database/template style, Anytype is worth checking too, but Windows 7 compatibility may be limited. A browser-based option like Google Docs + Keep is also a reliable choice for studying on an older PC. Also check if you can upgrade from Windows 7, because many newer apps no longer support it due t”
“Well... I have a series of notes and, out of habit, I ended up organizing them into folders, subfolders, and sub-subfolders. In most cases, it works for me, but sometimes when I need a specific note, I can’t find it. For example, I have a folder where I take notes from classes in different courses. Inside that folder, I have a folder for each course, inside each course folder I have a folder for each module, and then, finally, we get to the class notes. However, sometimes I feel like this organi”
“Hi, well the question is simple but for me, in my course of finding where to write, I'm asking for the more popular options and just not stay with app notes. Btw, I want the app for writing essays and Journaling. So I need a place in which I can be able to save a lot of info, like papers, links, quotes and more, but not to get distracted in the way of writing. submitted by /u/Non-Real_Entity [link] [comments]”
[Evernote] ★★★ 3/5 (v11.24.2) — I’ve used Evernote for like 10 years or something crazy and it’s just gotten too expensive but I feel stuck. Will be looking into something else soon.
[Evernote] ★ 1/5 (v11.21.4) — This app used to be a good free notes app - now every time I open it I am prompted with multiple menus and sometimes even video…
[Evernote] ★ 1/5 (v11.21.4) — Note/update - in an attempt to make this use by use review pop up stop, I deleted the app and reinstalled it. No luck. I’ve been using…
[Evernote] ★★★ 3/5 (v11.21.4) — I used to love Evernote and used it for everything, but in the past year or so, it’s gotten slow, laggy, and can no longer reliably find…
[Evernote] ★ 1/5 (v11.20.3) — I hate the fact that EVERNOTE no longer lists automatically in Reverse chronological order. If you set it to do that, you have to do it all…