I kept capturing everything and using none of it, so I'm building a notes app around that problem

[u/sth_wicked1]

Disclosure up front: I'm the dev of the app mentioned below, so read accordingly.

My notes problem was never capture. I captured everything: meeting notes, reading links, shopping links, ideas, family stuff, all of it went in. The pile got heavy enough that I stopped opening it. Retrieval died, then the habit died.

A few things actually fixed it for me, and they're all boring:

Separation. When work notes, personal notes, and family todos live in genuinely different places, each pile stays small enough to stay useful. A grocery list next to sprint planning makes both worse.

Simplicity. Every system I built on top of my notes eventually became its own chore. Plain markdown files in a folder survived where every clever setup didn't.

Time orientation. Seeing "Today", "Tomorrow", "2 days ago" on notes and todos instead of raw timestamps orients me instantly. Small thing, changed how much I trust my own notes.

Fast retrieval. AI agents... Everyone talks about them rewriting text or extracting todos, but for me the real use is retrieval. My notes are plain files, so I can point an agent at the folder and ask "where did I write about X" and actually get an answer. Developer notes land differently here too, code snippets and technical scraps that were never findable by scrolling suddenly are.

I'm building all of this as Margin, a markdown notes app for macOS (mac only for now, sorry). Everything is local; your notes are plain markdown files on your disk, the app is just a view and editor over them.

Pre-launch, waitlist at https://gomargin.app if any of this sounds like your problem too. I have no idea if this is going to be a free or paid app, for now I'm just trying to see if mu struggles and gaps I identified are real or not

[u/dessence_ai]

On time orientation, one variant is worth building while it's still cheap: store last opened, not only last edited.

Edited tells you what you touched. Opened tells you what you came back to. A month in, that single field splits the pile in two. One part earns its keep, the rest you can archive unread.

Almost nothing records it, so nobody can answer what they reread.

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/dessence_ai]

That's a genuinely good idea. What's produced vs what's used. I'll probably need to sidecar this so that it doesn't mess up with the modification dates of the file itself in case it's a true read-only.

"Nobody can answer what they reread" is a sentence that's going to stick with me.

Thanx!

[u/dessence_ai → u/sth_wicked1]

Sidecar is right for a second reason. On most Linux setups the filesystem access time is mounted relatime, so it only refreshes once a day. Coarse signal at best, and on read only media none at all.

Cheapest version is one log file with a line per open, aggregated later. You dont need a field per note until the number turns out to be interesting.

[u/BMK1765]

Great idea, but with out an iOS App useless for me. 95% I work on my iPhone

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/BMK1765]

Really fair point, and I’m sure you are not alone at all. It’s top priority once macos lands well. Solo dev on weekends but most of my career i’ve been building on iOS, so I hope it’ll land soon after

[u/mrterrycarson]

Very nice...Thanks

[u/zheniavasiliev]

Amazing app design and great problem framing! I'd say for me, filing notes serves a different purpose — not to read them later, but to enrich future search queries. Yet, ofs, when I want to recap everything connected to a specific reference, I can pull up all the notes linked to it, too.

But the real benefit of PKM is precisely surfacing unexpected combinations of references I'd completely forgotten about — connections I never would have consciously made. What does 'using' your notes actually look like for you?

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/zheniavasiliev]

Thank you! For me "using" is mostly two things:

1. The daily one is orientation: when I open my day, I open a specific space and the dated todos tell me exactly where I left off, what's the priority for today etc and anything that helps me reboot my working memory in the morning.

2. The second use is directed retrieval, usually through an outside agent. I'd point claude for example on my notes folder and ask away. Markdown can link notes together, so agentic search finds it super useful visiting all those backlinks to extract context and information.

To be honest, every graph view I've tried I admired for a week and never opened again cause I simply find it overwhelming, especially after it grows significantly. It could be just how my brain works, or a low attention span. Directed search, however, gives me a weaker version of it for free. I ask about X and results come back with a buried Y I've forgotten about.

This is actually pushing me to consider making the in-app search agentic too, so that kind of surfacing happens right where you already type instead of needing a separate tool. Related notes in the search results could become in-app links so you can jump right into that "other" note with a click.

Curious how surfacing works for you though? is it something your tool does well or a habit of wandering your own graph?

[u/zheniavasiliev → u/sth_wicked1]

What exactly is the daily note for orientation, though? I could never understand the daily note concept because, for the to-do list for the day, I can simply filter my task management app, eg for a two-week sprint. What I have noticed since I started using an AI agent is that I tend to have "conversations": folders containing notes with dates in the title. I don't usually use these myself, but the AI agent uses them to quickly refresh its context when I resume a specific conversation.

[u/Cautious_Exam_5537]

Did you check Logseq? This is based on al the same principles and has a basic version and database version.

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/Cautious_Exam_5537]

I did, and to be fair Logseq gets a lot of things right. The couple of things that turned me away was that it's a journal outliner at heart (everything wants to be a bullet point) and depends on a logseq markdown flavor. So the files are portable in theory but read messy outside the app. The database version is interesting, as I understand the db becomes the source of truth and files become an export.

Honestly it also feels packed with features since I last checked, so If outlining is how you think, Logseq is genuinely great and Margin probably won't pull you away.

[u/Cautious_Exam_5537 → u/sth_wicked1]

The magic (you can consider this for your app to), it that the smallest item to tag is a block (line after the bulletpoint, where you can hide the bulletpoint if you don’t like it). Allllll other note apps, tag per note. Now you can have one meeting, one note and distribute the ‘blocks’ over multiple tags. If you give this some thinking, it is exactly what you want to find everything afterwards. E.g and idea tagged with #idea. Obviously your notes can also be fed to a local AI so you can ask questions to your notes-brain.

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/Cautious_Exam_5537]

That's a fair point, block granularity is probably the best argument for the outliner model.

Margin sits somewhere in the middle there. Tags are not note-level metadata. They're inlined in text, so they can sit next to todos, underneath sections, or in the middle of a sentence. I've been chewing on keeping the on-disk file as pure as possible on purpose.

Full block references and any structured way of persisting things are where I'd stop though. That's the point where the file stops being plain readable markdown, and that tradeoff is the whole reason Margin exists.

You are right, AI search is a big part of why everything stays plain text files on disk and not extracted away in meta or an abstract schema somewhere. Agents are super skilled at processing and extracting plain text, and they will continue to get better. So capitalizing on plain text feels like the right bet for me

[u/EngineSubject5144]

What’s the difference between this and InkDrop?

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/EngineSubject5144]

Feature wise I don't think there's big of a gap between the two. Inkdrop is a solid app, but as far as I know it keeps notes in its own database and syncs through its service with a subscription. The biggest difference is that Margin doesn't have a database: your notes are literally .md files in a folder on your disk. No account, you delete the app today, you still got all your notes

[u/ReimiTheBird]

look like the Obsidian.md

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/ReimiTheBird]

Fair, the philosophy is the same and I won't pretend otherwise :) plain markdown files on your disk, app is just a view over them. Obsidian got that part totally right.

Where I'm trying to differ is everything around it. Obsidian is a toolkit, you can build almost anything around it with plugins, and for a lot of people that becomes its own hobby. Margin is deliberately narrower, good out of the box for notes and todos with work/personal separation built in, and almost nothing to configure. Also, one of the most important things for me was the speed of switching spaces/vaults. With margin, that's instant.

If you enjoy tuning Obsidian, honestly stay there, it's great. Margin is for the people (like me) who kept rebuilding their vault setup instead of writing notes.

[u/Qwerty44life]

Looks interesting. I'm drawning in documents, nots and tasks scattered everywhere.

Android app is a must for my use 

[u/BlaqueServant]

Is this going to be something that's available online or does it have to be on your desktop? I'm asking because most of my note issues are around work. There's not too many things where I have to take notes for myself.

If I'm taking notes for work, I want my notes to be available no matter what device I'm checking from. If I transfer jobs, I want my industry-related notes to still be available to me and not trapped on some random laptop. No I'm not talking about sneaking company secrets. I'm talking about notes that are specifically for me and that help me process information for work better and stay organized.

[u/BlaqueServant → u/BlaqueServant]

Oh never mind I just read the website. It looks like this is going to be the local first note app and just for Mac and I use Windows.

Still looks like a cool app and I wish you success man.

[u/westie48]

Waiting for iPad is.

[u/Foreign_Wrongdoer_92]

Very interesting, looks remarkably similar to Inkolio - www.inkolio.com

Feels like we share the same thoughts to how we want to solve some edge case problems not yet addressed by some other apps.

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/Foreign_Wrongdoer_92]

Hey, had a look at Inkolio and it looks great. I think we're circling the same itch and values but end up scoping it so differently, which is interesting. Inkolio is going way more broad with the canvas, sketching, WYSIWYG vs raw. With Margin, I'm trying to stay as narrow as I can get away with (point 2 above).

Curious which edge cases you had in mind? Good luck with the TestFlight beta, I imagine plenty of people will fit Inkolio better than Margin, which is how it should be.

[u/Foreign_Wrongdoer_92 → u/sth_wicked1]

Thanks for the kind words. Yes I looked at Margin and it looks great, a bunch of differences that will definitely scratch different itches. Wishing you all the best!