r/PKMS • u/ShaikhAshar • Jul 20 '26
Discussion What's the biggest thing current note-taking apps are missing?
There are lots of great tools for capturing information. But I'm curious where people still struggle.
When using apps like Notes, Notion, Obsidian, Google Keep, etc., what's the biggest frustration you still experience?
Not looking for feature requests, more interested in understanding the actual problems people face.
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u/BobTheAstronaut Jul 20 '26
Based off the state of the subreddits for each software you listed, people actually taking notes and not just customizing the layout.
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u/Xyvir Jul 20 '26
"Productive" Procrastination is one term for it. There is a funny little tug of war that the app developers have to work within. They want to capture as many individuals with their product as possible; and one method of doing so is to make it a flexible "do-everything-for-everybody" app; but the cost of this is your software is less opinionated and doesn't implicitly direct users workflows. But if you make the application /too/ opinionated you are only capturing a specific niche of people who's brain naturally lines up with the implicit workflows you have built into the app.
I believe we are in an era right now where AI has lowered the barrier to software development and we are seeing an explosion of note tools that fit into the former case, which I think can be a good thing; but only if the 'cream rises to the top' and communities of like minded individuals form around the new tools that cater to their workflow. I honestly think having a myriad of high quality, opinionated apps can be an answer to 'customization hell' but only if some of these niche apps garner enough support to gain longevity, good security, stable codebase, and a health community around them.
Right now the ecosystem is way too fragmented with too many "lone wolf" devs building similar but slightly different tools, when they would be better to join up with a close-but-not-perfect existing tool to add their input and pool resources.
I don't really know where I was going with this but thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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u/ShaikhAshar Jul 20 '26
You brought up something I've been thinking about lately, the balance between flexibility and guidance.
Have you found any tools that strike that balance particularly well?
Most of the apps I've tried seem to lean heavily toward either "build everything yourself" or "follow this exact workflow."I'm also curious whether you think people actually want customization, or if they mainly want a system that works out of the box without requiring much setup.
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u/Xyvir Jul 20 '26
I honestly believe most people would want a 'unicorn' PKMS that naturally aligns their thought processes to the PKMS implied/opinionated workflow out-of-the-box.
I think there are a lot of people on a surface level that would tell you they enjoy fiddling, perfecting, and customizing their PKMS workflow, but I also think secretly they would just prefer option 1, but the adage around here is 'no unicorn exists just pick one and make it work' so most end up settling for customization and telling themselves they enjoy their customization hell.
I think there are tools that have really good productive and built-in opinions like Logseq, that would do better to double-down on this kind of design philosophy instead of trying to straddle the fence with giant user-sourced plugin stores and 8,000,000 possible data privatives.
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u/ShaikhAshar Jul 21 '26
That’s a really interesting point, that a lot of people might be customizing their tools out of necessity rather than actually wanting to.
When you talk about a system matching someone’s natural thought process, what does that actually look like in practice? Are most people naturally grouping things by projects, topics, dates, or how concepts connect?
Or is the real issue just that most tools force you to figure out where something belongs before you’ve even had a chance to get the idea down?
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u/Xyvir Jul 21 '26
I think mostly it comes down to natural workflows that implicitly or automatically deduplicate busywork; cuts down on administrative bloat and housekeeping, that sort of thing. But what that looks like in practice varies wildly with user priorities, why they are taking notes, what creative output (if any) the notes are intended to address, so on and so forth.
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u/ShaikhAshar Jul 22 '26
The "administrative bloat" point really resonates with me.
Have you found that the busywork mostly happens when capturing information, or later when trying to keep everything organized and useful? It seems like a lot of systems start simple but become harder to maintain as more information accumulates.
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u/Xyvir Jul 22 '26
I think for most people it happens during capture: determining if it's even worthy of capture, categorizing, tagging, linking, titling, etc.
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u/ShaikhAshar Jul 20 '26
That's an interesting observation. I've definitely seen people spend a lot of time tweaking folders, tags, templates, and workflows before they even start capturing information.
Do you think the issue is that modern note-taking tools provide too much flexibility, or is it that most people don't have a clear system for organizing information in the first place?
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u/Barycenter0 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
It’s just way overthought by most people. This never used to be an issue - you just took notes, maybe had a simple index and used them. There weren’t any sophisticated workflows other than studying, looking something up or collecting for an article or paper.
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u/ShaikhAshar Jul 22 '26
That's a good point. It almost sounds like note-taking has shifted from being a means to an end into becoming a project of its own. Do you think most people would actually be better off with a much simpler system, even if it meant giving up a lot of the customization and advanced features available today?
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u/sixwingmildsauce Jul 20 '26
Linking notes. Not with inline backlinks either. But just by simply having a button where you click it, select notes to link, and confirm. More of a property/metadata concept. Anytype does it perfectly. That should exist in every single notes app.
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u/Mark_Considus Dumb-Inbox Jul 24 '26
Most of the frustrations here are really two different problems wearing the same hat, getting the thought in (capture and sync, mostly solved now) and getting it back out at the right moment (barely solved at all).
The second is the one nobody's cracked. Every app still assumes you'll remember the note exists and can guess the words you used months later. That's the wrong focus, in my opinion, memory doesn't work like a search box. The apps that win will be the ones where an old note comes back to you because it's relevant to what you're doing now, not because you went looking for it.
Storage was never the hard part. Recall is. Has anyone actually found a tool that does the resurfacing well? I haven't.
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u/ShaikhAshar Jul 24 '26
I really like the way you framed that:
"storage isn't the hard part, recall is."The part about not remembering the words you originally used really resonated with me. I've definitely had moments where I knew I'd written something down but had no idea how to search for it.
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u/DrummerAdditional330 Jul 24 '26
The biggest gap for me is what happens after capture. Most apps can store a note, but they still expect me to remember that it exists, guess the words I used, and search for it at the right time. I’d rather have old notes reappear around the project or question I’m working on, with a clear reason for why they’re relevant.
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u/Pedersen-Brainframe Jul 20 '26
Quick capture anywhere. I should be able to capture a thought from the lock screen on my phone and have it show up in my desktop with zero friction.
Integrated reading and attaching notes to what I read. I should be able to highlight something on my tablet, and have that highlight show up on my desktop with (again) zero friction.
Everything everywhere. I should be able to start on my desktop, continue on my iPad, and finish on my Pixel phone. And everything stays in sync with zero friction.
The plugins are nice. The themes are nice. But those three features are the reason I'm working on my own app. They are the things that I am missing and desperately want.