iA Blog

I just had this light bulb moment about separating the writing and editing processes a few weeks ago. I am grad student and writing is an essential part of my job. I am not as good as I would like to be, but writing first and editing later removed a lot of mental load for me. I experimented with a couple of systems in the past, but always got paralyzed by my inner critic commenting on every sentence. It was exhausting to even produce "one page worth" of writing a day. I thought that as I was editing while writing, it would be of great quality, but it was usually of pretty bad quality. Last week I just connected a bluetooth keyboard to my phone, opened up my favorite writing app[1], and started typing while staring out of a window. I was dishing out page after page of moderate quality writing. I would then wait a day or two and edit it. It was far easier to convert the moderate quality stuff by removing the fluff than to try producing great quality writing directly as I did before.

Appendix: Previous systems

1) Try writing perfect prose on the first try: This is paralyzing. I would just sit staring at my computer screen for hours, thinking of the perfect introduction and perfect sentences. I have since realized that this is bad for my mental health and productivity.

2) Write on paper: I then tried writing on paper. Got more done than just staring at the screen. It is difficult for me to write for extended periods of time like this. My hands start aching, and my handwriting…

Changing jobs in 2005 caused me to switch from taking notes on paper to doing it electronically.

My new employer provided a tablet PC with a stylus running Windows and [OneNote](https://products.office.com/en-US/onenote). Taking notes on that system with excellent handwriting recognition was a revelation. The tablet was pretty clunky by today's standards, but it worked well. It was particularly useful for generating meeting notes in real time and projecting them during meetings.

After moving to another employer, I no longer had access to such a tablet but used [TiddlyWiki](https://tiddlywiki.com) to keep my notes. It was great until the number of notes became large (in the thousands).

After that, I became an early adopter of [Evernote](https://evernote.com). It was an adequate note-taking app, but the killer feature for me was searching for text in images. At that time, we put meeting notes up on a whiteboard. After the meeting, I could take a picture of the whiteboard, insert it in Evernote, and search it any time after that. I maintained a subscription to Evernote until the end of 2016 until they got squirrely about their subscriptions and some privacy issues.

After several years absence, I went back to TiddlyWiki. It was very much improved. But after importing thousands of notes, it became too slow at editing. The search was on for another system.

I looked at several open-source tools under active development:

* [TreeSheets](http://strlen.com/treesheets/) has been…

"Unfortunately Mistral-OCR has still the usual VLM curse: with challenging manuscripts, it hallucinates completely."

My personal experience relates to the statement from the article, "According to several studies, approximately 80–90 percent of the world's organizational data is stored as unstructured data in documents, much of it locked away in formats that resist easy extraction."

In my experience, this means Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents authored by people who put more focus on the appearance than the structure of the content. Take one of these documents and generate PDF from it and any hint of structure that existed is gone.

There was an article on HN not too long ago discussing this history of Word documents and the lack of structure, but I can't find the link. ETA: https://ia.net/topics/markdown-and-the-slow-fade-of-the-formatting-fetish

Depending upon your motivation for monospace, the iA Writer site offers my current favourite: IA Writer Duospace.

If you want monospace for the crisp, clear, draft-style, clutter-free look when writing code (or similar) then it's excellent. If you absolutely must have every character being exactly the same width then less so as the main difference is that it is monospace for everything except 'm', 'M', 'w', and 'W' which are each 1.5 wide (so it takes two to bring things back in alignment). In practice that is often less of an issue than it seems, and the benefit in readability/clarity/looks (literal mono for those characters makes them compressed) makes it worth giving it a try, even if you only end up using it for Markdown files etc.

They have a web page explaining it (alongside a download):
https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font

Due to the bugs in Apple Notes on macOS 10.15 and iOS 13, I just spent some time evaluating as many note taking apps for Mac as possible. I ended up picking https://ia.net/writer

Typora was interesting but it was very buggy, and doesn't handle tags which are important for notes.

My main criteria were an open file format, ideally editing plain text files on disk using Markdown as the formatting. This ruled out apps like OneNote, InkDrop, Standard Notes and others.

If you don't mind about having a proprietary database so long as the data can be exported to Markdown, https://bear.app is my favourite so long as you're on an Apple device.

I will also be interested in https://nvultra.com/ once it comes out of private beta.

I published my full writeup today at https://davidmytton.blog/the-best-note-taking-apps-for-mac-markdown-open-format-cross-platform/

Ah, I hate that you were downvoted for that. For those who haven't used it, yes, iA Writer tries to steer you away from adverbs: https://ia.net/writer/support/basics/writing-tips/parts-of-speech

You can turn that off. I did at first; all the colors in the English prose I was writing distracted me. I came to appreciate that, though. I realized that I used adverbs and adjectives much more than I intended to, and now they stand out.

Along those lines, I've already realized that I overuse "great", "love", "hope", "literally", and "but". I added those to iA Writer's custom patterns, and now it pesters me when I use those words. Sometimes I mean to, but I literally love to put them in every sentence and hope it turns out great. iA Writer says, hey, you might want to reconsider your word choices.