Show HN: ThinkType – Write and Search Notes at the Same Time
thinktype.app
thinktype.app
It doesn't replace all these apps by combining all their features, it uses a different approach: When you open the app your cursor is in a search field which you can also write and save longer notes from. Making the search so easily accessible lets you use text to organize your thoughts anyway you want. For example you can use it as a todo list by using the "TODO" and "DONE" keywords in notes. This lets you either search for all your todos, or all your notes and todos related to a project - the latter is something you couldn't do if your todos were in another app.
I submitted this yesterday with the title "write your thoughts down immidiately", but it didn't get any attention. I hope this title is better and it's OK to submit it again.[1]
If there was some agreed-upon standard for “hierarchy of information” in the world (e.g. a piece of information is marked as ‘Topic’ vs ‘Detail’ and categorized, akin to biological taxonomy), everything I know could be organized.
One would have this program accompanying them everywhere, communicating with standardized protocols with other tools our species uses, and configurable for what types of information the user wants to ingest/process or not, etc.
Then, when writing anything new, one could have this program at their side, with a display constantly updating with relevant things they’ve heard before about the thing they’re currently typing. Maybe add some bells and whistles for greasing “brainstorming” and automating suggested topic connections.
It’s along the spirit of the recent backlinking/passive info processing trend... and reflecting on how enabling the standardized protocols of the Internet have been. Anyways...
Did want to leave some useful feedback. I think it’d be clearer if a quick summary sentence of ThinkType’s functionality came in a block before the inspiration-monologue part. Reading that while searching for the gist of ThinkType sapped at my curiosity a bit.
At the moment I use https://github.com/foambubble/foam with VSCode and have repurposed the backlinking functionality as my tag system (I make a blank file with its name as the tag). This helps assuage my concern that I might miss something when searching for it later, eg if I don’t choose the correct term to search for, or had a typo in the original note. I also like that, when looking at a tag, I can see what docs I’ve mentioned that tag in. (“What notes have I written that have the [[SCI-FI-THOUGHTS]] tag?”)
It also helps that CMD+P enables fuzzy search for an existing note file by its name, and ctrl-click on a [[backlinked]] phrase takes me to that page.
If there was a separate desktop app where all this functionality was first class, I would use it, because then I could use CMD+Tab to switch to that app, while keeping my VSCode windows for my coding.
I also tried Obsidian but it was too clunky. Haven’t tried Roam.
Anyways, nice work so far!
You could build a limited version of this with a browser extension, but the greatest problem with it would be that note taking also helps prioritize, and for everything you've ever read to show up in ThinkType would distract from your own notes. You would have to have priorities, with automatically added notes having a lower priority then manually added notes.
But for now I'm going to focus on making it easier to save notes, maybe build a browser extension that makes it really easy to select text and save it as a note.
> I think it’d be clearer if a quick summary sentence of ThinkType’s functionality came in a block before the inspiration-monologue part. Reading that while searching for the gist of ThinkType sapped at my curiosity a bit.
I'll try think of something, but I find it hard to explain.
> This helps assuage my concern that I might miss something when searching for it later, eg if I don’t choose the correct term to search for, or had a typo in the original note.
I thought about this problem, but I worry that having two spell corrections, one from the browser and one from ThinkType would be irritating.
> If there was a separate desktop app where all this functionality was first class, I would use it, because then I could use CMD+Tab to switch to that app, while keeping my VSCode windows for my coding.
This reminds me a bit of emacs vs vim: With emacs (and roam and notion etc.) the idea is to have one instance of the program always open. But ThinkType loads so fast then you can use it like vim: Open it in a new tab whenever you want to write something down. And that has the advantage that it's easy to work on several notes at the same time.
Potentially operate one or two paragraphs at a time, presenting all related information, and allow people to "pin" search terms.
This would make writing much nicer by collating the information as you need it.
EDIT: Do you mean having two search fields at the same time? I always just open two windows when I need that, but it would probably make sense for thinktype to support it "natively".
I think this is a really nice tool for information synthesis. Instead of manually finding info to think about, it appears naturally, and improves the quality of your writing and thought.
However, for this to work, it needs to find information relevant not just to the last sentence, but your entire of thought. This is better-represented by prior paragraphs than the current sentence.
Further, you probably already know what you’re going to write about, so you could “pre-seed” the results with special words. And if you’re looking for something that’s not appearing, you’d need to search for it.
Just very random product thoughts. Cool prototype!
But regardless, I still haven't found the winner that takes them all.
EDIT:
When you're logged in and open the developer tools, you should see in the console a string like this:
https://db.thinktype.app/userdb-616d6164657573706167656c40676d61696c2e636f6d
{"db_name":"userdb-616d6164657573706167656c40676d61696c2e636f6d","purge_seq":"0-g1AAAABXeJzLYWBgYMpgTmEQTM4vTc5ISXIwNDLXMwBCwxyQVB4LkGRoAFL_gSArkQGP2kSGpHqIoiwAtOgYRA","update_seq":"10256-g1AAAABdeJzLYWBgYMpgTmEQTM4vTc5ISXIwNDLXMwBCwxyQVB4LkGRoAFL_gSAriYFBqBaP8kSGpHqoOtHJWQA7xRl9","sizes":{"file":5775808,"external":173992,"active":3839921},"props":{},"doc_del_count":190,"doc_count":637,"disk_format_version":8,"compact_running":false,"cluster":{"q":2,"n":1,"w":1,"r":1},"instance_start_time":"0"}
curl https://db.thinktype.app/userdb-616d6164657573706167656c40676d61696c2e636f6d --cookie jwt=$JWT -k