I’m looking at cross-platform PKM apps, and Supernotes is one of the absolute best. Two excellent app review websites are www.NoteApps.info and www.ToolFinder.co.
Sometimes we need to copy a longer block of text, for example from a Wikipedia page. Supernotes accepts the copy & paste well, including images, but often maxes out on the character count. How are others handling situations like this? Do you copy the content in segments and insert card links to the previous and next segment card? (eg, note 3 of 5).
If I’m missing something, apologies as I’m new here. A suggestion for a new feature might be something like a clipboard-style note only for temporarily storing copied content. From there it could be further processed, edited, or split up into note cards. But the ‘clipboard’ note itself would lack most note card functions. It could have a button for clearing its contents. Thank you.
Hi there, and welcome! Actually, I never encountered the hard character limit, which as founder @tobias noted here is set at 24000 characters. This is not to be confused with the soft limit of 1200 characters, which isn’t enforced, but more of a suggestion.
Supernotes is designed to promote taking atomic notes, a short form of notes that carry one and only one central idea. It is, in my experience, a powerful way of building a pkms that enforces that only the essence of what matters to you is encoded, while information is easy to grasp on retrieval.
Going back to your example of extracting knowledgefrom Wikipedia, personally, I would apply the atomic notes schema in that I would isolate assertions from definitions, and represent each one of those in a dedicated note. Together, these notes could be grouped within a shared parent for instance.
That being said, this is, of course, just my personal approach, and I have to admit that I did struggle at first with atomic note-taking. But it’s definitely worth toying around with the idea.
PS. When I was on my hunt for the perfect tool for pkm, in the late 2010’s, there were very few sophisticated solutions apart from the big fishs like evernote or notion. It’s amazing to see what a plethora of tools you can find today on noteapps.info. Thanks for sharing!
You can certainly have a card with long form text. Then, to really benefit from Supernotes’ card format, break it up into multiple cards with the new move functionality. That would be the best workflow to easily break a long document into sections (i.e. cards) with useful headings.
You can then organize the cards by creation date ascending. They should show up in the correct order with the parent card as a title. There would then be no need to number the cards.
I didn’t know about the move function – accessed from the (+) button. Now I’m learning that you can select multiple sections within a note via the Ctrl-key (on Win). And then either ‘move’ them together into another note, or copy & paste them. Pretty cool.
The idea of SN’s note length limits (soft and hard) also helps to conserve app resources by encouraging smaller notes. My suggestion of a larger ‘clipboard’ note (holding tank or scratchpad) is so a wiki-page, for example, could be copied into that note space, and then further processed into note cards. The clipboard space would then be cleared for reuse.
Update: in my example of copying & pasting a block of text from a webpage like Wikipedia into a note card, Supernotes handles the formatting well, including links, embedded images and so on. This is an important feature for some users (like me, for one). It’s occurred to me that running SN in a browser (Chrome on Win 11), instead of the desktop app, has an additional Paste as plain text function from the right-click menu. This strips out html/markdown formatting from copied content and significantly reduces the character count in the resulting note card, in situations where pure text is more important than images and styling.
I’m a few days into Supernotes and appreciating the thoughtfulness and attention to detail in the software design – both visually and in the mechanics of note-taking. It excels at the intangibles and aspects that are hard to describe. I like the subtle shadowed container feel of the Zinc night theme (not flat) especially with the colored note cards. An important and very fuzzy consideration in migrating to any app is, can I love it? Supernotes rates way up there in this regard. On the bottom end, for me, is MS-OneNote.
I forgot to mention that in seamless mode, a long document as refined into child cards with titles as subheadings, looks like a nicely formatted document. And using the keyboard to move among and edit the cards is pretty fast.
JohnCP: Thanks again for helping out this newbie. I just looked at Seamless Mode, which ‘flattens’ a group of note cards so that they read more like a single, continuous document. This is another good feature for writers to know about.
I took another look at at Seamless Mode which could be very helpful to long-form writers working on articles or essays. It might not be immediately obvious, but Seamless Mode is a combination of two separate functions. First, it hides or flattens out the edges of note cards so that a group of cards reads more like paragraphs in a single, continuous document – as one would expect. But it also expands all the cards so that all the content in the group is opened up on the same screen (no ‘see more’ expander buttons). This feels very close to what I had originally been asking about. Another subtlety is that card background colors are removed, further melding the various cards into a unified page.