One of the things that I learned early in my career was to take notes. There was nothing more frustrating to me that to come across a problem that I knew I had solved in the past, but couldn’t remember what it was I did to solve it. Other times, it involved setting up or configuring something that you only did maybe once a job (like setting up a Jumpstart or Kickstart server), and it just wasn’t worth remembering.

Over the years, I’ve used various tools to store that information. Early on it was just a bunch of notes files that eventually made it to a version control system. This was good for storing knowledge, but it wasn’t very good at finding what I needed. I’d usually have to go through a bunch of things before I found the exact file I was looking for. From there I moved on to a local MediaWiki deployment running on my laptop. This gave me some better tools for finding things, but obviously running a web server and database server on you local machine could be a pain at times.

Eventually, I moved to Evernote. It was a pretty good tool for keeping notes, but it really wasn’t the greatest for storing any type of code or code snippets. You could do code blocks, but copy and paste wasn’t easy in code blocks in my computer or on my iPad. When I moved over to Mac, I started using Bear.

Bear allowed me to write my notes in markdown, had excellent support for code blocks (including the ability to easily copy them), and a robust tagging system that allowed me to sort my notes easily. What I didn’t like was that there was no real way to show the rendered document, but rather it always showed with the markdown syntax. It also did not have the same code block copy capabilities in the iOS version.

Bear served my well for a long time, but I eventually moved to Notion because I liked the ability to use markdown syntax without it displaying the markdown syntax. I also like the copy button that they have in their code blocks, which made copying code even easier than in Bear (where you had to right click and then click on “copy code block”). There were a few other things I liked about Notion, such as their templating capabilities, there are a number of things that really drive me nuts. I have never been a fan of the atomic blocks type editing and layout. Another big drawback was the syncing functionality with iPad, since it would only sync a page if you had already opened the page on the iPad, and then only for that initial sync.

So what would my perfect solution be? It would need to support markdown and have separate editing and display modes. It needs to let me easily copy code blocks and have syntax highlighting. It needs to sync with my iPad and have the same functionality that it has on my Mac. It would support Tags and folders. It would have good search capabilities, and I would be able to do everything in 1 app.

After years of searching, I think I may have found what I was looking for. Two weeks ago I moved from Notion and SnippetsLab to Drafts and DEVONThink. While it’s not specifically one app, it really could have been if I didn’t like the extra functionality that Drafts brings to my text writing. Now, everything I do starts in Drafts and then gets sent to DEVONThink for organization and storage. Over the next few weeks, I’ll get more detailed into my setup, but suffice to say I think I have found the answer that I have been looking for.