You will find lots of help with Drafts Actions in the Drafts discourse.
That said - I have used this Action for years and it has been rock solid
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I am using Drafts as a note taking tool and I am using my own (simple) actions. On the Mac I sent everything to the Global Inbox where a Smart Rule sorts the notes by tag. On mobile devices I use the x-callback-url command. That allows me to send notes to specific groups if I want to. Only batch apply is really annoying because with x-callback, as the name suggests, for every note DTTG is moved to the front, then Drafts again, then DTTG, etc. It’s a flickering frenzy.
Drafts is a fantastic app to take notes really fast, and I especially love the Apple Watch version.
But what it is not—and it has been mentioned above—is an external editor. One way, Drafts to DEVONthink, works great, but you can’t edit notes existing in other apps in place.
Which is what this thread is about. I’d like to throw in MultiMarkdown Composer for that purpose (Mac only). It’s not a beauty, but if you use a lot of MultiMarkdown features it is an interesting option, as its creator, Fletcher Penney, is the creator of MMD too.
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What problem are you having? I use Drafts daily and have never had a problem sending files to DT (I mostly do this on Mac, although I do sporadically do it on iPad and haven’t noticed an issue there either).
Why I prefer Drafts for initial notes (including Zoom meetings!):
- Set theme exactly how I like
- Keeps all my early notes (I.e. not “finished”) in one place so I know what’s pending, without cluttering up other apps
- Can completely customise the menu so that it’s only things I need (on iOS this is amazing, because the custom menus sit above the keyboard so you can just click things as you type. If you have a MacBook Pro with a touch bar it does the same thing)
- Quick to add a note from any device
- Actions mean you can automatically send a draft wherever you need it to go in one step
@chrillek you’re right about Drafts using its own file system, but it shouldn’t really be an issue for most users because it’s not intended to be a long-term storage solution. It’s for writing drafts and then sending them off to their final destination. You don’t end up with duplicates (in theory) because you’d probably be deleting the draft once a copy has been sent to the right place (and many actions (automations in Drafts) will do this step for you). People can and do use Drafts to store notes more permanently, but that isn’t what OP is asking for and isn’t really relevant here.
I have also been using Tot for a few weeks now, but to me Tot and Drafts are doing different jobs. Drafts is the notebook on my desk where I start writing something out, or sometimes even just think about something. Tot is my pad of post-it’s where I scribble things I need to action promptly. Sometimes I end up writing quite a bit (the dreaded “chained post-it” scenario 
) but often it’s just a few sentences I don’t want to forget before I have time to action it properly.
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Bonus pro-Drafts argument for @chrillek: Drafts actions are JavaScript (and their documentation is close to the DEVONtechnologies gold standard)!
So in terms of text manipulation, you can use the core parts of the scripts that you have written for DEVONthink in Drafts or vice versa. The parts that access the UI are different, of course. But hey—JS(X) on mobile devices!
As for duplicates: The last step of my Drafts actions that send notes to DEVONthink or DEVONthink To Go includes moving them into the Archive section of Drafts and tagging them “devonthink”.
I don’t use them for actual archiving, as @MsLogica rightly pointed out, that’s not what Drafts is for. Some users do use Drafts that way, but they’re definitely not DEVONthink users.
The notes in the Drafts Archive are just short-term backups, a safety net for when something goes wrong in the sync process or if my computer crashes. And I delete them now and then.
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The original question was about an “external editor” (emphasis mine) for DT. That made me think of
- opening a DT record in said app
- modifying it in this app
- and having the changes saved back into the DT record (thus visible in DT) from that app on close or save
Drafts doesn’t fit this bill:
- It makes a copy of the record in its own database instead of simply opening it
- That duplicates the data
- On save in DT, nothing is saved back to DT
- instead, another step is required (an “action”)
I have nothing against Drafts as a product (how could I, since it can be customized and tweaked so thoroughly with JavaScript?). But it is not useful as an external editor for DT.
It might be a good app for initial note-taking. But I also stopped using it for that (and any writing at all) because the silo approach is cumbersome. There is absolutely no technical reason to do what they do. I want my files in the file system, where they belong. Silos are locking customers in an app. Even when there are “actions” or whatever to export files.
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I’m well aware of that 
And I wrote some of them myself when I was still using Drafts. But actions to export a file are only necessary if one locks the file in their own silo first.
Since I do rarely take any notes, I’m not the best person to judge the usability of apps for that purpose. My point against Drafts in this thread was that it’s not frictionless. You have to remember that you need to run an action. With other editors, you simply save the file, as you’d do anyway.
It might be nice for people who are able and willing to write their own actions or adapt existing ones. But for someone who just wants to open a record from DT, modify it, and have the modifications appear automagically in DT again? I don’t think so.
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I totally agree with you.
What sets us apart is that I am a heavy note taker, and Drafts has so many pros for me—for me, not for everyone!—that the locked in notes were the one big pill I decided to swallow. (The small ones are: no case-sensitive tags and the not yet perfect user interface. But that’s really all.) At the end of a busy day I see a note indicator on Drafts’ dock icon, open it and send the notes with a few clicks into DEVONthink. I’d love to see a DT Smart Rule pull the notes automatically, but well.
The developer disagrees—I know because I asked him about it.
Which reminds me of what I had used before I switched to Drafts for note taking: 1Writer. It offers only a sub-set of the features of Drafts but stores its notes in the file system. It was created for iOS and iPadOS but does run on Apple Silicon Macs too, which might it make interesting for the OP.
I don’t know if it is under active development, though. It’s creator seems to focus on their other app, the nice read later app GoodLinks.
Well… Draft’s has a scripting dictionary. Which means that you can automate it, also from other applications. So, you could write a script that’s executed in a smart rule and fetches the notes.
function performsmartrule(records) {
const draftsApp = Application('Drafts');
const DTApp = Application('DEVONthink 3');
const newNotes = draftsApp.notes().filter(note => /* Some condition matching new notes */)
newNotes.forEach(note => {
DTApp.createRecordWith({name: note.name(), type: "markdown", "plain text": note.text()});
})
}
That is, of course, only a coarse outline. And Draft’s scripting dictionary is surprisingly poor. They seem to be aware of that, but I guess AI support is more important
Aside: I find it a bit irritating that Draft’s scripting support from the outside is so limited, if on the other hand they do so much to make it scriptable from the inside. Talking about silos …
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They take their concept “Where text starts” quite literally. And that’s where they do excel, don’t get me wrong.
The problem is that Drafts originated on iOS and in a time before the Files app and the ‘edit in place’ feature. Wasn’t its developer the one who came up with the whole x-url stuff? That was the only workaround for sharing content between apps when a workaround was still needed, and Drafts was a silo amongst silos.
No, I’m not getting into a “Drafts is bad” corner They didn’t invent x-callback-urls, but they are certainly offering a lot of them. And I love(d) their JS support – reminded me of Emacs with its Lisp. A programmable editor is a very nice and flexible beast.
And now that you mentioned it: If they originated on iOS, they had to silo their files then. In the dark ages, there were no “files” on iOS. These times are over, though.
It’s a weird situation:
- On one hand, we have apps like DT with good scripting (read: Apple Events) support on macOS and no scripting support at all on i*OS
- On the other hand, we have apps like Drafts with good scripting support across the board, but nearly no Apple Events support on macOS – thus very limited interaction with other apps.
On a more constructive note: A mapping between DT UUIDs and Drafts UUIDs, paired with a smart rule in DT and/or action(s) in Drafts might make the two play together nicer.
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Wow! 70 “Replies” so far. Could it be that people have a personal connection to their editor? Or what? I share not that priority.
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Did you never hear of the vi/Emacs wars? Nearly as brutal as the argument on “indenting with tabs vs. spaces”.
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Tabs of course
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Of course I saw that! I even have both of these (un-used) on all my computers.
But just observing what might be not that important for DEVONthink world given it allows people to do whatever they want without having to be validated by others. Just me.
Another (darker) speculative explanation is that Drafts, a for-profit business program, generates revenue through subscription. To keep you subscribed, Drafts would like to prevent you from transitioning with ease to free or one-time-payment alternatives, of which there are plenty. AppleScript support, for one, is a free alternative to Drafts’ paid JS scripting capability.
One of the apparent ways to lock you in is to silo in everything – documents, automation methods, etc.
Free users used to be able to use all Shortcuts actions provided by Drafts. Actions like Markdown to HTML now require a subscription. I know this because the change had forced me to change my web clipping workflow on iOS last year.
Not all subscriptions are the same. For Google Drive or ChatGPT, the user pays to access remote resources, which always have a cost. Therefore they treat integration as an competitive edge, not a weakness, and offer functional APIs. For Drafts, however, it’s the same kind of subscription as Mercedes-Benz’s $60/month-for-more-horsepower offer. You are paying for unlocking what’s already on your device.
I’m not going to make an ethical judgement on DRM here. The point is that Drafts is on a different business model than that of e.g. DevonThink. Business concerns inevitably overcome technical considerations.
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Too dark for me.
Drafts has a single developer. That means that major changes to the core of the program would take some time without generating visible changes for probably the majority of users. Which is not us here in the DEVONthink forums who work with tons of data of some kind and who do care about automation, etc.
And a single developer follows their vision for their program, good or bad.
And yes, he has to make a living too. I didn’t know he changed the subscription. I found the former “Subscribe as long as you want and keep what you got until you unsubscribed”—including custom actions—policy really fair. (I’m not a friend of subscriptions in general, I must add.)
For me the subscription price is acceptable. The developer is constantly working on the app, there is a steady flow of (feature) updates. Just not in regards to opening the file system.
But nonetheless, the content is not locked in in the means of: You can’t get it out without subscription.
I doubt making Drafts accessible through Apple Script would endanger its business model. Simply because Drafts’ Mac version in my opinion is basically just the syncing counterpart to the mobile versions. I probably wouldn’t use it if it was Mac only.
Drafts originates from and excels on mobile devices. And there is no Apple Script.
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Drafts’ “lock” is a partial one in that the documents can be exported but the automation cannot. It matters when you just want to choose an editor, not a whole solution package.
You’re perhaps right that AppleScript alone would not change much. However, having a fully functional API that do not require subscription would clearly do. That they have restricted access to Shortcuts is evidence of the tension around automation.
If you’re having a good time with Drafts, and is content to pay a moderate subscription for the experience, that’s great. Please be aware, though, that justification for one’s own actions is not equivalent to justification for the system – a discrepancy we’re already witnessing in the great debate about the power and ethics of AIGC.
For you does the file arrive in DT as a MD file or as a Plain Text file?
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I thought “I found […] the policy really fair” and “For me the subscription price is acceptable” had been proper indicators of my awareness. But that opinion could not be generalized either, of course.