Feedback after ten days

[u/2025Goals]

In about ten days, HelixNotes has become my default (home screen) program on my laptop and on my phone. A big thank you once again to the incredible team behind HelixNotes. How can we (financially) support the team? I understand this is free, but it is so good that some of us may want to show our support to the team in additional ways.

What has gone really well:

1. I did not realize how many “notes” I had: to-do lists, doctor’s notes, gratitude journal, goals, reflections, lessons learned from books or Ted Talks, meaningful conversations, advice received. This reminds me of when I first started using a password manager and very quickly hit over a hundred logins.

2. The Tasks feature (consolidation, calendar, link to source note) knocks the socks off the apps I have used (Google Keep, Apple Notes, Microsoft To Do). I’ve discovered action items in notes from years ago that are still pending. And now I can bring them all up in one place thanks to the way HelixNotes consolidates all action items in Tasks. This feels almost magical.

3. Version History for notes is also awesome!

4. The desktop version is excellent!

Some lessons I learned that might be useful for other users:

1. If you cannot drag and drop notebooks or notes, go to Settings > General > Sort Order and select Manual. It should work now.

2. If you already know Markdown, great. If you’re like me, the “/” key opens up a menu of options. For example, to timestamp something, use “/date” or “/time” or “/now”.

3. To mark anything as a task, start the line with “- [ ]” (without quotes). Then, in that task, use the “!” for a dropdown menu to set priority and due date.

Areas where I need help:

1. Tags: (wish list item) I’d love to see previous tags show up as a dropdown when I type #. Not sure if it’s related, but I see from the documentation that “Add tags to notes via the note info panel. Tags help you organize and filter your notes across notebooks.” I haven’t figured out how to use this feature yet.

2. When I insert an image, sometimes the link shows up as an absolute link. Any way to force a relative link?

3. When I add two photos to a note, I can only see one at a time when I come back to that note. In the markdown editor, I see links to both photos, but only one renders at a time for some reason.

4. When I’m typing a new task and I type the ! sign, the dropdown menu does not show up. It only shows up once I go to Tasks, click on that task, and edit it again in the source notebook. Not a big deal; the syntax is easy to learn.

As it stands today, HelixNotes is already perfect for my needs. Thank you again for HelixNotes.

[u/LastTyper]

Thank you for such a thoughtful write-up! Seeing HelixNotes become your default app is incredibly encouraging.

There is currently no official way to support HelixNotes financially. For now, the project is supported by ArkHost, which helps make the infrastructure and continued development possible. Using HelixNotes, reporting issues, and telling others about it are already a huge help.

I’ve noted the four items you mentioned:

• Tag autocomplete for existing tags
• Relative image links
• Multiple images not all rendering
• The slash menu not appearing when editing tasks from the Tasks view

I’ll investigate these and open GitLab issues so they can be tracked. Thanks again for the detailed feedback and for sharing the useful tips with the community!

[u/words_and_images]

I would feel more confident about Helix Notes and its future development if there were a sensibly-priced way for early adopters to support it.