Use Type for Mac to Capture Ideas Before You Forget Them
An idea comes to your mind while you are working on something else. How to deal with this and get back to work?
You can open a document and save an idea there, or quickly open your note-taking app of choice, but both of those things will take you away from what you’re currently working on. Apple has partially addressed this issue with the Quick Notes feature in macOS , which allows you to move your mouse to the bottom right corner to quickly take a note. Problem: This depends on Apple Notes, which you may not be using. Another problem: you have to move the mouse, which can distract you from what you’re working on.
Type allows you to quickly take notes better than Quick Notes. This $4 Mac app combines the speed of a launcher like Spotlight or one of its replacements with the ability to take notes. Essentially: you use a keyboard shortcut to open an app that floats above whatever you’re working on, just like an app launcher does. Type what’s on your mind, then press Enter and the app will close, allowing you to return to the task at hand.
You can view all your notes using the app if you want, but the best part is that everything is date stamped and stored in a word document on your computer. This means you can view and manage your notes using the text editor of your choice.
This is especially useful if you, like me, are an avid Obsidian user. Simply save the type note as a Markdown file in the Obsidian repository and you can quickly add random references to the file that you can later reference in Obsidian. You can do the same with any note-taking app that uses text files.
Type can optionally store your notes in multiple files that you can store anywhere. When you enter a new note, simply use the up and down arrow keys to make sure your notes end up in the right place.
There aren’t many settings. You can customize the keyboard shortcut; you can choose which app to open your note files in—TextEdit is the default. You can also change the format of the timestamp added to each note you add, or remove the timestamp entirely and decide whether to add new notes to the beginning or end of your files. It’s not a complicated app, but it does one thing well. I think I will use it every day.