While you are doing other things, an idea pops into your head. How do you put it down and get back to work?
You can open a document and save your thoughts there, or quickly open your note-taking app of choice, but both of these things take you away from what you're doing right now. Apple has solved this problem to some extent with the Quick Notes feature in macOS, which allows you to quickly take notes by moving your mouse to the lower right corner. Problem: This depends on Apple Notes, which you may not use. Another problem: you have to move the mouse, which can take you away from whatever you're doing.
Type is better for taking notes quickly than Quick Notes. This $4 Mac app combines the speed of Spotlight or one of its replacement launchers with note-taking capabilities. Basically: you use a keyboard shortcut to open an app, which pops up like an app launcher over the content you're working on. Type your thoughts and press Enter, and the application will close, allowing you to return to the task at hand.
You can view all your notes using the app if you want, but the really nice part is that everything is date stamped and stored in a text document on your computer. This means you can view and manage your notes using the text editor of your choice.
This is especially useful if you're a big Obsidian user like me. Simply store your type annotations as Markdown files in the Obsidian library, and you can quickly add random links to files that can be referenced later in Obsidian. You can do the same thing with any note-taking application that uses text files.
Type has the option to store your notes in multiple files, and you can store them wherever you like. When you enter a new note, just use the up and down arrow keys to make sure your note goes to the right place.
There isn't much in the way of setup. You can configure keyboard shortcuts; you can choose which application to open note files in - the default is TextEdit. You can also change the format of the timestamp added to each comment, or remove the timestamp entirely, and decide whether new comments should be added to the top or end of the file. It's not a complex app, but it does a job well. I think I'll use it every day.
