Aesthetics are subjective, so what may look terrible to you may look good to others. Similarly, not everyone likes the appearance of Bear, Typora, Taio, <insert a Markdown editor here> or it’s rendered Markdown output.
As @chrillek noted, you can use other peoples’ CSS or you could learn to roll your own. And there is a ton of writing that doesn’t require “pretty”.
As astutely noted above, DEVONthink is not a “note taking app”. It is a document and information management application that has the ability to create documents in several native file formats. It is not a competitor with Typora, Bear, etc.
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I would change this to
DEVONthink is not designed as a note taking app but a lot of people use it like that anyway.
Whatever friction might arise from the design and aesthetic “limitations” of the interface are, for me, greatly outweighed by having everything from notes (meetings, phone calls, story ideas, daily journals, jokes, endless miscellany), PDFs, spreadsheets, receipts, emails and a million other things all in one place, under one tagging/grouping paradigm. It’s taken practice but I’ve become better skiled at knowing the limitations of tagging and grouping, classifying etc. Zettlekasten/PARA have showed me some other ways of doing it but they’re not for me as rigid models to follow, just places to take ideas from.
To sum up, for me it is definitely, 100%, a note taking app.
Quick anecdote:
Last year, started a new project, lots of problem solving. Tons of back and forth in Email, Slack, Signal, What’s App, SMS, etc.
For issues that I could see getting out of hand I scripted (with help from this forum) a To Do list creator that made an item in Reminders. linking to a main markdown doc in a folder beside Email, Docs, and Messages folders. I could import any emails related to issues, and screen grab anything from the message apps into that folder. The main markdown doc was a place to jot notes about what might have happened in meatspace and a short history of the issue. On an iPhone or Mac, I could call up the issue in Reminders, click the link to the doc, type new notes or review them or emails right before a phone call or meeting.
A lifesaver many times over. Mostly powered by a strong base of note-taking and being able to connect those notes to all the other things, either by proximity (folder nearby) or actual linking to docs stored elsewhere/on the web.
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