Tools for thought have to become like prosthetics, an extension of your body. For this it has to have really low friction.
Here we have two problems:
1. the ideal power user UX has some learning curve for newcomers which hinders adaption a lot;
2. I prefer typing, but it's hard to beat a piece of paper in ease of input and flexibility of arrangement, type of input (graphics, text, plots, mindmaps, tables all there without any toolbar to click).
The 2nd point makes me think that a general interface is just really hard and specific ones can be done really well already.
Examples of tools for thinking I like:
- org mode: suffers a lot from (1.) and is not that generalized (more is possible, but little effortlessly).
- Deepl Desktop App: real AI collaboration for translation. The UI could be more streamlined, but is fine for now: hit ctrl+c+c, check if the translation is ok, click "insert" and your sentence is translated within your document. It translates 90% as good as I do, I catch the other 10%.
- Soulver/Opalcalc/NaSC: a bit like excel but all calculations always visible (trade offs: not working for tabular data, not as flexible as programing)
- wikis: amazing for long term and collaborative storage, problems with scaling, relevance, discovery and organization
- paper: great input flexibility, hard to refactor, no computer assist (calculations, data etc)
- jupyter notebooks: finally mixing documentation and programming, sadly problems with structure and state
- grafical programming languages (touch designer, pure data, bitwig grid etc.): predominant in the art-world, I think because you can tweak values and connections best.