gravity Product: Gravity Price: $9.99 The Problem We are all familiar with the act of note-taking. A thought occurs to you, you switch to your note-taking application and face a slew of decisions: What are we going to call this note? What are we going to tag this note? Or which folder does this note belong to? How does this fit into my existing tag-system? What was the tag I used a few months ago on a similar note? It belongs to this folder, but also belongs to this other folder, do I alias this note to the other folder? Which note is this new note related to? Do I need to link them? What about back links? And on and on and on. Our note-taking systems have evolved into a quagmire. We are now in the business of managing our systems. Instead of taking notes, we work incessantly on our note-taking system. Soon we avoid taking notes, it is too much bother. Look at the discussions on the Zettelkasten Forum: Definitions in Literature Note vs. Zettel Note — Zettelkasten Forum Zettelkasten - Term and Definition — Zettelkasten Forum Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method - Page 2 — Zettelkasten Forum What’s the point of literature notes? — Zettelkasten Forum Or go to Obsidian Forum. You will see the same discourse. People obsessing over the system. A Perspective I had heard of Andrej Karpathy. Couldn’t tell you in what context, but the name was familiar to me. He wrote the following: The append-and-review note – karpathy. Go read it, it is a small read. I will wait. His system is two steps: Append and Review. Append to a single file. No tags, no metadata of any kind. This is the line which stood out to me: “When I note something down, I feel that I can immediately move on, wipe my working memory, and focus fully on something else at that time. I have confidence that I’ll be able to revisit that idea later during review and process it when I have more time.” He periodically reviews his notes moving things which are important at the moment to the top. The rest of the information continues to sink to the bottom, like gravity. The main advantage of this system? No friction. No decisions at the moment of entering a note/thought. Nothing lost. Nothing falls through the cracks. Enter Gravity Gravity is an attempt to provide an environment for this system to work. It can be a menu-bar only application. You press a keyboard command wherever you are. Up pops an editor window. You type or paste in what your thought was. Hit ⌘↵ or three ↵’s. The note is saved. You are back to the program you were in initially. Periodically you can review your notes. The ones which are more relevant you can nudge up the chain. Everything else keeps getting demoted and drops down the list, like gravity. Gravity is powered by a SQL database as its back end. You can export your whole repository of notes to a Markdown file, a text file, or a JSON file. So even though it is a database, there is no lock in to the product. I was intrigued by the following line from the developer, Tristan Manchester: Gravity has one job: minimize the time between “I have a thought” and “the thought is captured and I can move on.” That appealed to me and I got curious. Gravity The Program gravity - window A keyboard command, you can customize, from anywhere and this is the Gravity window. All of your thoughts and their content in a window. gravity - capture This is the capture window. A keyboard command, customisable, and this window pops up. You enter your thoughts, hit the return key twice, or ⌘+↵ and the content is saved to Gravity. You hit ⇧+↵ key to add a new line. (I notice that a simple ↵ does add a new line too). In the Gravity window, you have the choice of promoting any entries you need to the top of the list. If you have a long list, this makes items which are relevant to you be readily accessible and it is the premise behind the program. Items which are not relevant for the time being keep sinking to the bottom. You have the option of archiving or deleting thoughts you want to keep or want to discard. It is all done in Gravity. Gravity Preferences They are well thought out and well designed. pref - general You will want Gravity to launch at login. You want it to be always available. I don’t much care for the program to show up in the Dock. You can choose to have the two ↵’s to save the capture or rely on the usual ⌘+↵ command. I like having both. pref - keyboard 1 pref - keyboard 1 pref - keyboard 1 The program is fully keyboard driven. I love this aspect of the program and they are all customisable. You set your own or stick to the ones shipping with the program. Regular readers know how much I like this feature. pref - syncing You can choose to sync to iCloud. That allows the same document in multiple machines. I love it. pref - search You can choose to have the archives included in the search. If you have a long list of entries in the current focus and want to move some over to the archive, you can still include them in the search and nothing is left out of your searches. pref - advanced This is where you can export your whole collection of notes to a Markdown file, a plain text file or a JSON file. pref - more advanced You can monitor some stats about your usage of the program. Optimize your SQL database. There is also a command line tool (I haven’t explored this much. Although I have installed it). How Well Does Gravity Work? This is from the developer of Gravity: I get the same feature request about once a week. “Love Gravity, but could you add folders?” “Would be perfect if I could tag notes.” “Any plans for linking between notes?” “An API would be amazing.” The answer to all of these is no. Not “not yet”. Just no. This probably sounds like bad product thinking. Aren’t you supposed to listen to users? Give them what they ask for? Iterate toward their needs? Usually, yes. But there’s a specific reason Gravity works the way it works, and adding these features would break it. The limitations aren’t gaps. They’re the design. Someone recently asked me why Gravity doesn’t have folders. My first instinct was to say “we’ll add that eventually.” Then I caught myself. We’re not adding folders. We’re not adding tags either, or bidirectional links, or a plugin system, or templates, or a knowledge graph. These aren’t items on a roadmap we haven’t gotten to yet. They’re deliberate omissions. The missing features are the product. I found this interesting. Mind bending, but interesting. Then I remembered: Gravity has one job: minimize the time between “I have a thought” and “the thought is captured and I can move on.” If you are looking for a capture application which is designed to do just that, have a thought, capture a thought, move on with life, then Gravity is the ideal tool for that need. It is well-designed software which does that and does that well. Is That All I Need From a Capture Application? I am old. I forget things. There are too many times during the day when I have a thought and it floats away a few minutes later. For instance, read the Org manual and read the section on narrow and widen. A few minutes later, I have no recall of what I was thinking about. My solution? Capture the thought. Do I want to capture the thought in a stream of thoughts? Or do I want to categorize the thought into a file? The program I use for this is Capture for Mac. I have a text file which has markdown headings like: Ephimeral Emacs Watch Later Read Later Programs Installed And so on. The Capture window in Capture gives me the option of inserting the content under a specific heading. It adds a time stamp and some context if I have highlighted something. That is what I use for capture at this point. You can follow a similar arrangement in Gravity. Prepend some text to the capture. For instance, things about Emacs, can have Emacs: to start with, or Read: for things to read later or Watch: to watch later, and so on. And the system works because the Search function in Gravity is excellent. I understand that the goals of the two programs are different. They are not solving the same problem. If your need is to record thoughts and move on with your life, Gravity as a system is perfect for that. I love working in it. I admire what it is trying to do and feel it is perfectly designed for that. Of Course, Emacs ("o" "OBTF" entry (file+headline "~/Dropbox/org/obtf.org" "OBTF") "Created: [%(format-time-string \"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M\")]\n %?" :prepend t :empty-lines-before 1 :empty-lines-after 1) You know I have to do everything in Emacs. I added this Org-capture template which lets me perform a similar function in Emacs. I can capture content to a file called OBTF.org. I can then refile content to the top or the bottom of the file through danielsz/Palimpsest. I can have an Archive heading and move sections to it through org-refile. All of this is more effort than Gravity, but it has the added advantage of being in Emacs. Some More Reading Blog — Thinking About Capture — Gravity No, We’re Not Adding Folders — Gravity Conclusion Gravity is a fantastic application to capture your thoughts. It is a product with a defined philosophy and it sticks to its vision. I recommend Gravity heartily for your capture needs. macosxguru at the gmail thingie. Note: Thanks to Tristan Manchester, the developer of Gravity, for providing me with a promo code when I asked for one.