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Comment by minouye | Hacker News Reader

I've played with Craft a bit and it's been a joy to use so far.

Conceptually it sits between Apple Notes and Notion. You get native apps that work offline, support fast capture, and are satisfying to use. You also get the wiki-style support and block-level editing of Notion, along with lots of other nice Notion visual flourishes (page-level icons, cover images, etc.)

One area Craft really shines, is the way that it supports interactive, sharable documents. If I have text, images, files, and want to combine them all into a single page/starting point, Craft makes this super simple.

Here are some examples (which you could design on your own):

https://www.craft.do/s/VIAC9BTTJWdCxp

https://www.craft.do/s/09fqwC5rGqErmB/b/F19F87F2-0F04-49F9-9...

https://www.craft.do/s/09fqwC5rGqErmB/b/9041969E-127C-4439-A...

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Evernote also does similar stuff, right? What is new? Sorry I haven't tried Craft myself yet.

Evernote has a flat list of notes, usually ordered by time. I find related notes by searching. Craft lets me build a tree of nested documents. I imagine that the tree structure would encourage more thought upfront in placing new content into relevant context. It looks like Craft is probably less buggy than the latest Evernote apps.

A tree... like a Directory tree?

I use a git repo, markdown documents, and one daemon on each device, to sync and share notes across all my devices.

I have yet to find something that beats this in portability, flexibility, note quality (from markdown to interactive jupyter notebooks), file support (all files), math support (latex formulas for markdown), graph support (mermaid), presentation support (reveal.js),...

Maybe Craft is a little different than a directory tree, since the directories are external to documents, where Craft documents nest internally.

I agree that markdown in a git repo has quite a bit of flexibility. We use git+markdown for my software team's documentation. I prefer Evernote for my personal notes because of less friction when pasting in embedded images and because of better support for editing and offline access from mobile devices (also because of inertia).

I haven’t used Evernote in years, and granted I was pretty fed up with it when I left. Maybe Evernote has changed since then?

But, compared to the Evernote I remember...

- Block level editing

- Backlinks

- Publish to web

- Better support for embedding different types of content

Notion/Craft are really in a whole different league compared to Evernote.

I've been trying to switch to Notion from Evernote, and I'm having a hard time. I really liked that Evernote could be a shoebox where I put all my random PDFs, receipts, user manuals, etc, alongside a smaller number of evergreen notes.

I haven't found that same shoebox aspect to Notion, which I think is by design, because people believe it to be an antipattern. But every time I want to save something, it needs to be need in some kind of database or as a subdocument to another document, and that's just not how I think of those things.

Agreed. That’s something I struggle with with Notion as well. I use Bear for that currently (Apple-only though).

Edit: although I guess one solution would be to create a “Shoebox” page in Notion of the “List” type.

I actually came across Craft in the Evernote subreddit. Compared to the latest Evernote client (v10), speed of the clients would be biggest difference. Both support note taking and sharing, but the polish of Craft is definitely noticeable.

The interface reminds me of Andy Matuschak's notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

Thanks, its strange that they didn't include this demo on their website.

Wow this shit is fast, even on mobile web!

Wait wait wait notion but fast? OK I’m signing up

LOL I pay for a Notion personal plan and that was my exact thought.

Speed matters!

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