My markdown notes system

I tried many note apps (the obvious suspects as well as Simplenote, Google Keep, Bear & Dropbox Paper), but I (surprisingly) couldn’t find one that would fit my needs, so I hacked something on top of Alfred.

I wanted to design a solution that has low friction & easy access.

Low friction

Physical notebooks have low friction to start writing: there’s no need to think about folders, filenames, or document titles. Similarly, it’s effortless to review recent notes by merely looking at the previous pages. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find an equivalent digital implementation.

To stop using paper notebooks, I needed to have:

1. Writing Speed — Writing a note should be one click away, similar to flipping a page in a notebook.
2. Retrieval Speed — I want to be able to retrieve the information without too much thinking or dependency on the input.
3. Daily summary — When I’m reaching the end of the day, I would like to view a daily digest.

Easily access

There are certain cases where I would like to have a Canonical note on a certain topic (e.g., my interview questions template, one on one notes with colleagues). For that use-case, I would like to have:

1. Easy retrieval — Open the running doc with a single command.
2. Speed — Document should be loaded extremely fast.
3. Offline support — Ideally the solution should also work when I’m offline.

Introducing Fastnotes

Fastnotes is a simple Alfred workflow that provides 4 simple commands:

• log — Opens a text editor on a file called ~/Notes/log/yyyy-mm-md.md.
• new xxx — Open editor on file ~/Notes/live/xxx.md.
• open xxx — Searches ~/Notes/ for a filename that contains xxx in the filename
• search yyy — Show all the files that have the string yyy in them

Fastnotes in action

Fastnotes Commands

Once Fastnotes installed, type ` to see all commands.

Start a note

Open a Canonical Notes

My favorite interview questions accessible in few seconds

Workflow & Source

https://github.com/NirDremer/fastnotes

My Setup

• My favorite Markdown editor is Visual Studio for Mac with few tweaks:
  - Markdown All in One extension
  - Zen Mode (⌘K Z)
  - Auto-save enabled
  - Spell Right spell checker extension
• Every new note starts with a heading (#). To avoid overthinking and to make it easy to find past meeting notes, the heading is the subject of the meeting (I’m using Fantastical enables me to do it in 3 clicks).
• For canonical notes, I often add heading with the date, and doing it fast, I’m using Alfred Snippets feature that can add the current date in one click. My favorite layout is {date:medium}.

Settings

Fastnotes is fairly simple and includes a few hard coded parameters:

• My editor of choice for markdown is Visual Studio, and it’s hardcoded in the scripts. You can easily change it to the editor of your choice.
• ~/Notes is my notes folder. Changing it to any other folder is fairly simple but requires changing both the script as well as workflow settings.
• all commands start with the `(backtick) prefix.

Feedback?

I would love to hear your feedback and improvement suggestions. Leave a comment or say hi on twitter (My DM is open).