This Extension Turns Apple Notes Into a Full-Fledged Word Processor
Apple Notes is my favorite note-taking app on Apple devices. I love the Notes app on my iPhone, but on the Mac it could use some extra features, like the ability to use Markdown or search my notes from the desktop. Enter ProNotes , a Mac app that serves as an extension to Apple Notes. You can think of ProNotes as an app that doesn’t do anything independently, but that adds power user features to Notes. The improvements are so good that they actually turn Notes into a full-fledged word processor.
Spotlight-style shortcut for searching in notes
Just like you have Spotlight search (or better alternatives) for finding things on your Mac, you can use ProNotes to set up a keyboard shortcut for searching your notes without even opening the app.
ProNotes shows all your results in a floating window where you can copy a note or a link to a note directly from your desktop. This is a revolutionary addition that makes finding specific notes much easier. To customize your keyboard shortcut, open ProNotes preferences and select the Global Keyboard Shortcut option.
You can use Markdown in Apple Notes.
Markdown is a markup language that makes it easy to add formatting to plain text. It allows you to easily add HTML headers, such as: # for h1, ## for h2, etc. The Markdown tutorial has an excellent guide to using this markup language, and I recommend checking it out to learn more.
My favorite writing app for Mac, Ulysses , already allows me to use Markdown. Thanks to ProNotes, I can do the same thing in Apple Notes . Once ProNotes is installed, Markdown support is automatically enabled. You can start using Markdown right away to add headings, checklists, block quotes, and bulleted or numbered lists. The entire list of supported Markdown syntax is available on the ProNotes website .
Improved deep linking
Apple Notes allows you to add links from one note to another , which is called deep linking. ProNotes allows you to quickly check all the places where a particular note has been deeply linked. The next time you want to check all the notes that mention your best coffee recipe, you can click the “Backlinks” button. You can see this button by opening any note in the app and clicking the small arrow icon in the bottom right corner. This will display a pop-up window and show you all the other notes where you are linked to the selected note.
Use forward slash to run certain functions.
If you prefer to use the keyboard for everything, you may prefer to use forward slash to access common formatting options. If you have ProNotes installed, type / in Apple Notes on your Mac to display a list of many formatting options, including adding links, aligning, and creating a table. You can use any of them to speed up your workflow. Simply press the slash and use the arrow keys to select the function you want.
Best Popup Menu
When you highlight any text in Apple Notes, ProNotes adds a pop-up menu that puts useful tools like formatting and linking options at your fingertips. This is easier to access than using the toolbar at the top of the window.
Artificial intelligence capabilities and prices
ProNotes has some AI features that use ChatGPT to let you generate text, summarize articles, and more. I don’t care about this and I think it’s the only flaw in an otherwise great extension. The last thing I want is for AI to generate potentially unusable text in my Notes app. Fortunately, this is the only part of the ProNotes application that requires payment. If you want to use AI, you can pay $8 per month, but otherwise ProNotes is completely free. It appears that ProNotes uses its own ChatGPT API key to handle all AI-related requests.
With AI features, you always have privacy concerns. Ideally, I wouldn’t want anything from Apple Notes to be uploaded to third party servers. That being said, ProNotes has a clear privacy policy that details when the app will connect to servers and exactly what data will be exchanged. There’s nothing terrible here, but frankly, without AI, the application would lose little.