Notebooks as a Ulysses replacement

Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 21, 2017 at 02:06 PM

Have to say that the new Keep It (I’m playing with beta 2 at the moment, alongside my usual work) is quite a nice authoring tool in itself. There are still a few bugs (I’m making a list), but it’s already very stable.

It’s got a lot of different options for categorising stuff: folders, bundles (like “virtual” folders, so you can include a single note in multiple bundles), labels (not quite sure how useful they are) and tags. It’s easy to import/export all kinds of stuff, it’s also easy to share all kinds of stuff (it already offers iCloud sharing, presumably based on functionality that will shortly be introduced alongside iOS 11), and it’s got a very nice “window always on top” feature (I wish more notetakers had this) that allows you to float it over other windows in “Compact” mode. Very sensible!

Documents are kept as separate files (albeit in Keep It’s own format) and can be viewed in the Finder. The Search function is powerful, and while it doesn’t automatically highlight hits in the way that Ulysses or Bear do, there’s a micro-search function for each note that automatically picks up the umbrella search term you’ve been using: this does highlight the hits.

Finally, like Together, Keep It is mind-bogglingly efficient: just 12.4 MB in my Applications folder. Presumably because it makes clever use of existing Apple components (rich-text editor, Spotlight etc.). I’m really rather taken with it.

What I’d like to see would be a separate tags tree like Quiver’s (ideally with a tag hierarchy like 2Do’s), and maybe a labels tree too (hey, why not?). And while Keep It supports styles, they appear to be built-in (i.e. non-editable); that needs to change, too.

Very nice version 1.0 coming up, however…

Cheers,
Bill