I often find myself spending a disproportionate amount of time on workarounds for fairly basic things like formatting, resizing images, or structuring notes while editing. I fully understand the team’s perspective that DEVONthink is not primarily a note-taking app, but rather a system that offers note-editing capabilities as part of a broader knowledge-management philosophy.
That said, in practice DEVONthink has increasingly become the place where I don’t just store information, but actively create it. Whether I’m reading a PDF and extracting passages, adding my own reflections, or generating new material via Chat, a lot of valuable content is now born directlyinside DT. It’s genuinely an amazing environment for this kind of deep work.
Precisely because of that, it can feel a bit friction-heavy when basic editing tasks—like resizing an image or applying clear heading styles—require extra steps or workarounds. This isn’t meant as criticism of the team, who have built and maintained an exceptional app over many years. Rather, it’s an observation that as DEVONthink evolves into not just an archive but also a content-generation space, the note-editing experience may deserve a fresh look as well.
I have a key command in Keyboard Maestro to create a dashed bullet list. I use them so often that this actually saves me time compared to creating one in DTP using the menu or buttons. I did try to find a workaround for lists in a Formatted Note, but nothing really worked as cleanly as I’d like.
That said, in practice DEVONthink has increasingly become the place where I don’t just store information, but actively create it.
This is where I’m at, too. Though not primarily a note-taking app, I create many notes in DTP. It’s just easier to create them where I’m going to store them, which is also why I end up using the RTF format. It is the easiest format to use that does what I need.
Some time ago, I posted a script that does this for quicklook images: Links to a PDF, Pages or other document in an MD document are replaced by their quicklook preview as a data URI.
As you can see in the screenshot, the resulting MD is super-ugly and probably a pita to edit. Especially with large images. But well…
DEVONthink has always been my primary note creation tool.
95% of my documents are RTF files that I create in DT, tracking every aspect of my business. The other 5% are web clippings I convert to RTFs, so I can easily mark them up and take notes.
This is why I use RTF instead of a format like MD – I am actively thinking and planning as I write, and need to do that in WYSIWYG. This is a new topic, so bold, this is an outline so bulleted, this is important so highlight. The visual cues are as important to the content as the text. So I need to see them without bouncing back and forth between modes. I need to be able to read and edit documents for its content, without having to process formatting markup as well.
For this, RTF does the job. I wish it was more powerful (ugh, those styles are primitive), and even easier to script (e.g. find all my highlights). But for now it’s not bad.
I’ve been using this shortcut for so long, I’ve forgotten where it resides. I assumed it was Keyboard Maestro macro, because I have so many of them. However, when I look for it there, I don’t see it. Hmm, when I look for it in DTP, I don’t find it there either.
Thinking about it, I seem to recall one of the developers mentioning it here on the forum, but it was so long ago that I don’t remember specifically. Claude doesn’t find it in the documentation, either.
Oh, so we’re referring to the same thing? Keyboard Maestro is not involved – it’s a part of the rich text engine/framework in macOS that powers both TextEdit and DT’s RTF editor. I assume it’s documented somewhere, but I have no idea where.
Thanks for sharing. Sure, having large images within the document is not that pretty. My use case are short technical IT notes with configuration snippets and screenshots. For those I like to have a container for the text and the assets - images etc.
For other use cases - I moved my blog to DT sometime ago, I used dedicated groups for HTML + assets. For this I would “never” use single all containing Markdown / HTML files.
