Best learning app with integrated task management for Academics?

Posted by Amontillado
May 19, 2025 at 02:40 AM

Darren, you do me great honor.

Devonthink support often says they don’t believe DT is a note-taking app but I don’t understand why it isn’t.

For note-taking, I imagine I use it much the way Obsidian users do.

I have a Keyboard Maestro shortcut for creating a new Markdown document, which is my favorite kind of text document. The shortcut doesn’t really do much. It prompts me for a name, creates the document, and opens it in a separate edit window. Devonthink supports Mac keyboard shortcuts, so you can add many functions that way, too.

Or, in the middle of one note add a double-bracket reference to a new note name. That’s called a wikilink in Devonthink.

When you click on it (or right click to open in a new tab), it creates the new file.

The Devonthink see-also Inspector tab is not terribly different in strategic function than Obsidian’s node map. It’s a list of files, not a graphic, although I think DT version 4 has a graphic node map. I’m stuck on V3 until I can run a newer MacOS.

Lately, though, I’ve been using Devonthink to evolve something that serves the function of an outline.

I have a couple of posts on my blog at https://thirdreef.wordpress.com about my new favorite outlining technique. I called it object outlining because for some reason I wanted a fancy name for it.

Basically, create notes of two types. A fact note covers a single isolated fact. A description of the Genii’s lamp, a character description, or a thumbnail description of a McGuffin, for example. It’s about a person, place, or thing without any story narrative.

The other note could be called a story note, a beat, or a narrative note. Here, you get to tell the story but you should reference facts rather than write them.

For instance, Jack and Jill fell down the hill. That’s fine in a narrative note but you need to direct future-you to notes about Jack, Jill, and that fateful hill.

I generally don’t do that with links, I use transclusion. That way, notes for Jack, Jill, and the hill will appear inline and will be in my face. If the hill becomes important to the story again in chapter 20, its note will be transcluded in the chapter 20 narrative note.

Better yet, if chapter 20 requires some new element to Jill’s character, I can edit Jill from chapter 20 and the updates will appear everywhere else Jill is transcluded.

Every narrative note becomes sort of a dossier on what happens at a point in the story. Facts, as they are refined, are consistent across all references to them.

I’ll confess I’m very happy with Devonthink. However, outlining via transclusion can be done just as well in Obsidian.

You can convert a wikilink to a transclusion by replacing the square brackets in the link with curly braces. In Obsidian, add a “!” character in front of the square brackets.

Devonthink will convert name-based wikilinks to UUID links. That’s a little better than linking by name because UUID’s avoid confusion if a second note is created with the same name.

There are only three Obsidian plugins I use, although that might change if I really dove into it. For what I’ve done in Obsidian so far, Tasks, Dataview, and File reorder cover the features I want. That’s about an extra megabyte per vault. Not that much.

Devonthink’s Smart Groups do what I need Dataview for. File reorder is a native feature of DT, and while DT is not a credible task manager on its own, I’ve recently discovered it’s not useless for tasks. The trick is to use it in conjunction with a task utility. Just about anything will link to DT notes through x-devonthink URLs.

But none of that is any more than how I’ve used DT for a specific use case or two. Please update this forum with how you discover the best in any note utility you favor. That’s the important stuff, and I look forward to learning from your experiences.

Darren McDonald wrote:
@Amontillado, I have seen you post several times about how you use
>Devonthink in your research work.
>I am most interested in how you use it for notetaking. (I have a memory
>of reading how you use Devonthink for notetaking along the lines of
>Obsidian or other such software. I tried to search where you wrote about
>this in the forum, but could not find your comment. Apologies if my
>memory is wrong).
>If you use it for notetaking can you point me to some resources in how
>you do this?