Obsidian has been my go-to productivity app for a long time. I basically manage my entire life inside of it, whether I’m drafting a story or managing personal finances. When I first started using Obsidian, my vault was snappy, and I could open it up and jot down a quick note without an issue. Now, though, with thousands of notes and images stored inside it, opening my vault takes several minutes, and even switching to it isn’t as fast as opening the native Notes app on my laptop.
But my native Notes app doesn’t record things in markdown, and it’s fairly bloated in its own right. I turned to HelixNotes instead, a small, lightweight app that looks a lot like Evernote or Apple Notes, but operates in markdown and makes it easy for me to transfer notes from it into my vault for long-term storage and use.
My vault was too slow for quick note-taking
I probably have too many notes, plus more plugins than I need
I’ve lost count of how many notes are inside my vault. I have written dozens, if not hundreds, of articles and stored them in the vault, and I have multiple collections of notes on books, movies, anime, and more. There’s also a litany of entries on topics I’ve studied or found interesting. Obsidian turned me into a data hoarder, and that’s not a bad thing — but the major slowdown in my vault isn’t ideal. If Obsidian is completely closed, it will take anywhere from two to three minutes to open.
HelixNotes opens in seconds. It’s lightweight and responsive, even when I have numerous other apps open on my laptop. It also uses minimal resources and runs in the background, so I have no qualms about leaving it open throughout the workday. I’ve started jotting down all kinds of notes in HelixNotes, and I’ve found it to be similar enough to Obsidian that I can use virtually the same inputs.
I don’t have to give up markdown capabilities
Or the built-in Obsidian formatting
As I said before, I still use Obsidian daily. HelixNotes is just for quickly jotting things down during the day as they come to me, to be revisited and either stored or discarded later. Because HelixNotes stores all of its files as plain.md, I don’t have to worry about compatibility issues with Obsidian. I can essentially copy and paste anything in HelixNotes into Obsidian and preserve all of the formatting I used. HelixNotes also uses the same internal linking format as Obsidian, so I can use double brackets like [[ ]] to create internal, Wiki-style links.
And since HelixNotes is open-source, there’s no external database to worry about. Everything is stored on my machine. There’s no risk of vendor lock-in, either; my files are all there and easily accessible, and I can use Obsidian’s Importer plugin if I have a large number of files to transfer.
In Obsidian, my quick, disposable notes were being buried under a growing knowledge base
My grocery list doesn’t need to live alongside political treatises
Obsidian is, by and large, a tool for building a second brain — a personal knowledge management system. It works just fine for quick notes, but when I’m jotting down ideas for the grocery store, I’m probably going to toss that note later. It doesn’t need to live on, stored as a data point in an ever-growing vault… except that’s exactly what a lot of my notes were doing. I had so many that it became tough to go through and review them unless they were connected to something else, and a note that just reads “bread, eggs, milk, drinks, snacks” is about as orphaned a note as you can get.
HelixNotes makes it easy to jot down random ideas and just toss them out later when I’m done. It also means my vault isn’t getting flooded with small, unnecessary notes that have no long-term value.
Not all vaults are as bloated as mine
My experience isn’t universal
Installing a second app just for quick notes might seem like more work than it’s worth, and in some ways, that’s true. HelixNotes isn’t fully notarized on the Apple App Store, so you have to install it from the web, and then — if you run into the same issue I did — you’ll need to grant it permissions through Terminal before it will even launch. It was a pain. But thankfully, that’s a rare issue (I might have to re-issue permissions whenever it updates), and the end result is well worth it.
Then again, if your Obsidian vault isn’t overflowing with experimental plugins and isn’t being pushed to its limits, it might open just fine. Let’s be honest: Obsidian does have a quick notes feature. My problem didn’t lie with Obsidian’s capabilities, but the limitations of my own PC.
HelixNotes is the note-taking app I wish I’d found ages ago
But all of my struggles with Obsidian aside, HelixNotes works great for taking notes. There’s a tagging system to make it easier to sort through them, an import system for bringing things from Obsidian into HelixNotes, and a slew of other features. It’s a refreshing little app, and one I’ve enjoyed learning over the past couple of weeks.
