Apple Notes is my go-to note-taking app across Apple devices. I love Notes on my iPhone, but on the Mac, it could use some more features, like a way to use Markdown or search my notes from desktop. Enter ProNotes, a Mac app that serves as an extension for Apple Notes. You can think of ProNotes as an app that doesn't do anything independently, but one that adds power-user features to Notes. The improvements here are so good that it basically turns Notes into a full-on word processor.
Just as you have Spotlight search (or better alternatives) to search for things on your Mac, you can use ProNotes to set up a keyboard shortcut to search through your notes without even opening the app.
ProNotes shows you all your results in a floating window, where you can either copy the note or a link to the note straight from the desktop. This is a game-changing addition that makes it so much easier to look for specific notes. To configure the keyboard shortcut, open ProNotes' settings and go to the Global Shortcut option.
Markdown is a markup language that makes it easy to add formatting to plain text. It allows you to do things like add HTML headers easily, eg: # for h1, ## for h2, and so on. The Markdown Guide has a great primer on how to use this markup language, and I recommend checking it out to learn more.
My favorite writing app for Mac, Ulysses, already lets me use Markdown. Thanks to ProNotes, I can do the same thing in Apple Notes as well. Once ProNotes is installed, Markdown support is enabled automatically. You can start using Markdown to add headers, checklists, block quotes, and bulleted or numbered lists immediately. The entire list of supported Markdown syntax is available on the ProNotes website.
Apple Notes allows you to add links from one note to another, which is called deeplinking. ProNotes allows you to quickly check all the places where a particular note has been deeplinked. The next time you want to check all notes that mention your best coffee recipe, you can click the Backlinks button. You can see this button by opening any note in the app and clicking the small arrow icon in the bottom-right corner. This will display a popover and show you every other note where you've linked to the selected note.
In case you're a fan of using the keyboard for everything, you might prefer using slash commands to access common formatting options. With ProNotes installed, typing / in Apple Notes on Mac will show a list of lots of formatting options including adding links, alignment, and creating a table. You can use any of these to speed up your workflow. Just tap the forward slash key and use the arrow keys to select the feature you need.
When you select any text in Apple Notes, ProNotes adds a popover menu that puts useful tools such as formatting and linking options at your fingertips. This is easier to access as opposed to using the toolbar at the top of the window.
ProNotes has some AI features that use ChatGPT to let you generate text, summarize articles, and some other stuff. I couldn't care less about this, and it feels like the only misstep in an otherwise great extension. The last thing I want is for AI to generate potentially unusable text in my Notes app. Fortunately, that's the only part of the ProNotes app that requires payment. If you want to use AI, you can pay $8/month, but otherwise ProNotes is totally free. ProNotes appears to be using its own ChatGPT API key to process all AI-related requests.
With AI features, you always have privacy concerns as well. Ideally, I wouldn't want anything in Apple Notes to be uploaded to third-party servers. Having said that, ProNotes has a clear-cut privacy policy that details when the app will connect to servers and exactly what data is exchanged. There's nothing alarming here, but honestly, the app wouldn't lose much without AI.
