Bicycle For Your Mind
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Antinote: A Beautiful Scratchpad
Product: Antinote Beautiful Temporary Notes and Calculations
Price: $5
I am all-in on Emacs. I use it for everything and have been consciously avoiding every other application which handles text in any way. It was going well. Antinote changed that.
The developer describes Antinote as:
Antinote is a productivity scratchpad exclusively for macOS. It’s meant for temporary notes, calculations, and quick text manipulation; and designed to be beautiful, fast, keyboard-driven, and privacy-first.
In other words, Antinote is a scratchpad which you use for temporary notes. I have a note for URL’s I want to read later.
links
I create notes to write elisp snippets of code which I want to add to my config.
I have notes containing information which I need for some task on the horizon. It is a dumping ground of little ephemeral notes for me.
Antinote is beautiful software. It is well-designed and performs its functions admirably well. I must admit that I don’t use it for calculations or quick text manipulation. For calculations, I use Soulver 3 and for text manipulation I use Emacs or BBEdit. I use Antinote only for temporary notes. And it shines in that task.
It is easily accessible. ⌥A anywhere and Antinote is active. Make your note. Press ⌥A again and you are back in the application that you were in. Quick and convenient. I love it.
Antinote comes with a good manual online. Antinote Manual. Read it. Antinote is feature-rich and does things you don’t expect. The manual is essential for discovery.
Preferences Galore
You get to setup Antinote according to the workflow you want. The preferences are extensive and easy to understand.
preferences
There are nice themes which ship with the product and you can get more at antinote-extensionsthemes-community. There is also a site where you can design your own themes. Check out Antinote Theme Maker
I made a theme for myself. Here it is:
{
"name": "macosxguru Solarized",
"isDarkTheme": false,
"background": "#fdf6e3",
"backgroundFade": "#ECECEC",
"typeMain": "#586e75",
"typeSubtle": "#1F4F79",
"typeSubtlePlus": "#085EA3",
"typeHighlight": "#eee8d5",
"typeLight": "#B2B2B2",
"typeSuperlight": "#DAD9D7",
"typeHyperLight": "#F2F2F2",
"typeReverse": "#FFFFFF",
"accent1Main": "#1EBDFF",
"accent1Secondary": "#0F8C8C",
"accent1Tertiary": "#417863",
"accent2Main": "#C14DFB",
"accent2Secondary": "#C14DFB",
"accent3Main": "#4DA425",
"accent3Secondary": "#3C7F1C",
"accent4Main": "#FF9E3C",
"accent4Secondary": "#CE741A",
"accent5Main": "#FF3B30",
"accent5Secondary": "#AC2E27",
"gridSuperlight": "#D9EEFA",
"gridClear": "#CBE1ED",
"gridBold": "#ABCBDD"
}Not going to teach you how to setup the program. Read the manual. Try out a few things for yourself. Come up with a customized app which fits your needs.
I am going to talk about a setting which made life better for me. Antinote doesn’t fully support Markdown. It lets you export to Markdown but doesn’t help you write in Markdown. I tried using Keyboard Maestro macros which help me write Markdown and that didn’t work. I realized that I have Markdown Service Tools from Brett Terpstra and that would take care of my need for aids to write Markdown. Services are available to Antinote but you have to set up Antinote just right.
preferences 2
You have to choose this option to have the Services menu available to you. Highlight some text and the Markdown Service Tools show up in their full glory.
services
I have a habit of pressing ⌘+s to save the document I am working in. I press that almost convulsively. Antinote saves files automatically. You don’t need to do that. Unfortunately, that keyboard command is assigned to Quick Export in Antinote. You can change it, and I did.
quick export
Now when I press ⌘+s, the program just beeps at me and I can move on with my note-taking.
Working With Antinote
slash
You can type / and get a list of Antinote keywords which you can use on a note. You can’t mix and match these but they are useful for individual notes.
Paste is an interesting keyword. You can type paste in your Antinote note and copy text to the clipboard in another program in the background. It automatically gets pasted into Antinote. So you can copy text in batches in another application and the clipboard contents get pasted into Antinote. I use this a lot.
Code is another useful keyword. Syntax highlights the code if you specify the language that you are using. For example: code: lisp will syntax highlight your elisp code.
code
Timer is a keyword in Antinote which I find useful. It has a pomodoro function too. Love that there are these little features which I don’t expect in a scratchpad application. They are useful and they make Antinote unique.
Antinote keeps its data in a sqlite database. So you are not dealing with text files in this program. The program makes it possible for you to export your notes to plain text files, Markdown, Obsidian, Bear, Apple Notes and any application which supports URL Schemes.
export
I export to the Markdown format. You can export all of the notes into a zipped text file if you need to. There is no lock-in.
Improvements
As you can tell, I am impressed with Antinote. I have been recommending it to everyone I know. However, there are certain things I would like Antinote to do or do better. They are:
- Keyboard commands for Markdown. Antinote is not a Markdown-based text editor. But it does export to Markdown. Let me write my notes in Markdown and let me have some help in doing that.
- Support for lists other than TODO lists: numbered and bulleted lists. I live in lists but they are not all TODO lists. Please let me make different kinds of lists.
- Automatic continuation of numbered and bulleted lists. If you are going to let me make lists help me in that process.
- Support spell checking from macOS.
- Fix full-screen mode. Full-screen mode is unusable. Let me show the text in the middle of the screen in a reasonably sized window. I don’t want to work on a line which covers the width of the screen. That is insane, no one can work like that.
- Let me use my own fonts. This is a biggie for me. I want to use my own fonts. One for text and the other for code. Please let me set the size of the font. The preferences that are available makes me do the following to enable font sizes which I can read on screen. I am 64 years old, my eyesight is screwy.
font size
Conclusion
I love Antinote. I think it is an useful addition to my workflow. It has a lot of competition in the scratchpad space, but it is unique in that space. It does what it sets out to do well and adds some features which are not usually supported by this category of applications. It’s priced well and is supported by the developer.
Antinote is recommended heartily.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie.
Notes: I was provided a license code by the developer to write about the product.
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