The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps
Maggie is a designer, illustrator, and anthropologist. This is her digital garden for growing visual explanations about design, culture, and programming
Every major note-taking app on the market works one way: linearly, in text. Notion https://www.notion.so/ , Roam https://roamresearch.com/ , Evernote https://evernote.com/ , OneNote https://www.onenote.com/ , Bear https://bear.app/ , Obsidian https://obsidian.md/ . They are all centred around writing text documents that flow from left-to-right, then top-to-bottom; the way all text works in English. Even if they support other languages, you’d still write Arabic or Hebrew or Urdu linearly, just right-to-left. You might say this is what defines a note ; it is a chunk of written text, presented as
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