What’s Unique About The Archive (Relative To Nota)?
I really enjoy working with both The Archive 202207051453 and Nota 202207051532. At the moment, my primary note-taking tool is The Archive, although I’ve been playing around with Nota and I’m starting to like using it more and more. I’m going to try enumerating the advantages of each to help better understand which one I should be using.
Advantages of Nota
- Go to the heading
- Better support for multiple workspaces
- Folders for categorically different things (as well as templates).
- Doesn’t use the UUID wikilinks, instead linking directly to the note title, which is what most note-taking apps do these days. This doesn’t mean that my The Archive notes are locked in 202207051341, but it does mean that the notes aren’t interoperable.
- Has auto-complete built in, so basic operations like autocomplete while doing wikilinks and tags work better. It’s yet to be seen if this will make a practical impact in how smoothly I can use the app, but it’s something to note.
- I like that it has the Tangent 202207051621 feature of having red links for notes that haven’t been created yet. It just looks really cool.
- Search results seem to be somewhat intelligent. In The Archive, search results seem to be returned in the default sort order (reverse chronological). This isn’t that big of a deal however.
- Having backlinks visible by default on a side-panel is a UX game-changer. I didn’t even realize what I was missing out on by not having this. I think would increase the depth of my traversals by quite a lot.
Advantages of The Archive
- Better-feeling search — links as searches feel extremely natural
- Nota doesn’t have anything like Saved Searches.
- Has a well-developed URL scheme. It doesn’t seem like Nota has anything like this. #update 12-31-22 — this is no longer true
- Most of my notes are already in The Archive. I’m going to have to convert them if I want to use Nota, and it’s not very easy to do so. #update 12-31-22 — this is no longer true.
- Creating a daily note feels a little clunky in Nota 202207051532. You have to name the note before being able to create it.
- The wikilinks in Nota don’t work very naturally. If you link to a file in another folder, the wiki link itself doesn’t contain any information about the other folder — you would think that the link is to a file in the same folder. To be clear, this behavior is totally fine, it just makes converting from
- Better tag management system. (To be clear, The Archive doesn’t come with any tag management by default, but the ecosystem I’ve created on top of the app makes it so that tags aren’t half bad to use. Nota currently has auto-complete built-in for tags once you start typing
#, but there’s no other way of interacting with tags or seeing all of your tags in the same place.) - There isn’t a dedicated way to go to the previous note in Nota. (There’s a way to go to the last edit, but it doesn’t work super seamlessly.) As a result, basic navigation doesn’t work super well.
- A native app, so it’s easier on the battery. (Not that this matters so much with my current computers, at least for the next few years)
- It’s a native app, so auto-correction while typing works beautifully well. Electron apps don’t have this, and it’s so nice. I can type fast without worrying about typos, and my notes will be perfectly formatted.
- I’ve figured out a way to sync Instapaper highlights directly into the app, which I’m really happy about. (To be fair, I could also do this with other local file-based apps like Obsidian 202006031443, Nota 202207051532, and Tangent 202207051621).
- Nota doesn’t have a way to go back to the last note / search / browsing context. (There’s a way to go back to the last edit, but that is definitely not what I’m looking for.) This makes recovering prior contexts in Nota very difficult. The Archive doesn’t do this perfectly - it has some weird behavior with the back button - but it still works so much better.
Created from: The Archive 202207051453
uid: 202207051535 tags: #notetaking