Some context: I started using Anytype as my main PKM about 9 months ago. I came from Notion and Standard Notes. I haven’t been able to import all my notes from these two tools yet (waiting for bulk object edits), but I almost never log onto Notion or Standard Notes anymore.
I f@##$&* love Anytype. I think its an incredible tool, developed by an incredible team, with the right values and vision.
After several months of using Anytype to draft my blogposts and op-eds, I shifted gears and started writing a full fledged book. For this project, I use Anytype to store and organize references (PDFs, videos, audio recordings, articles), take notes, and draft the actual book.
Here are my thoughts after a few months working on this project.
What’s working great
Offline-first: I write from home, on the train, on the bus, in the car (stopped at a traffic light), on the plane, at the gym.
Sets and collections: taken together, these allow for great management and organizing of objects
Flexible editor: toggled, embedded images, PDFs, links, etc make easy and efficient to save all sorts of relevant information
The small, frustrating things
Anytype is still in beta, so it’s totally fine and expected to have small things that don’t work quite well yet, or features that are missing. Unfortunately, these things add up, and together, make the experience writing on Anytype quite difficult.
No word count or character count
Sticky table of content (seems to be coming soon), which is crucial for long objects
Some of the writing features aren’t convenient on mobile: indenting is clunky, changing styles isn’t easy to access, undo-redo is hard to access
Proper display of in line sets and collections on mobile. Inline sets are a critical part of organizing sources and references
The deal-breaker
In the end, after three months writing this book on Anytype, I am saddened to say I have to move this particular project to a different platform. I didn’t expect it when I started writing this book, but in the end it is the lack of support for footnotes that is forcing me to move. Everything else I could use workarounds or be patients, but the lack of footnotes is making the whole writing experience incredibly difficult.
Anytype will remain my main tool for the rest of my work and personal life note-taking and organizing, but for this book project there is just no way for me to continue effectively without footnotes.
Your case is a little bit let’s say not-so-typical, but I totally agree with you.
I also tried to use Anytype as a writing tool and started a novel, but I moved the project last week.
To be honest, Anytype is not a writing tool. The fact that Obsidian, for example, expanded the notetaking tools with his plugins is a different topic. Personally, I’m a huge fan of personalization and plugins, but I realized that not all the notetaking services/apps should embrace the idea of personalization and extensibility.
The Anytype postpone the plugin project. Plugiins are the ideal tool for turning Anytype into writing software.
As I understand, the company is in the stage of building some stable business model so that it can continue to develop the product. The plugins are their last concern …
Actually, I disagree with that. It may not be designed specifically with extremely long texts in mind, but neither is Google Docs. And yet things like a sticky table of content or support for footnotes are available in Google Docs. And other than footnotes, most of the issues I mentioned (except for maybe word count) are relevant to the general experience on Anytype, not just to writing long text.
But I definitely recognize that the priority should be to make the overall app more stable and robust for mainstream use cases. I just hope that in the not-so-distant future we have the tools to use Anytype for long-form writing too.
@LavaC
I agree - tried to move the text to word processor software and it was somehow cut/broken. I must edit all the paragraphs.
@raph
Google Docs is online word processor. Where did you move your text? Did you have broken paragraphs?
I agree that Anytype could be ideal for collecting info and writing the text. I miss the canvas view so much!
@sturdily
Obsidian don’t break the paragraphs, but pure markdown is not my type of writing/formatting text. And the spell checker of Obsidian is not good enough.
There is not the perfect app (IMO) but thigs change fast.
I’m moving to Google Docs. I’m not happy about it, but I don’t want to adopt a whole new tool for this (I already use Google Docs for work) and Google Docs fulfills my needs:
I keep all my references and notes in Anytype, organized via sets and collections
I draft the actual book in a single Google Doc with table of content and footnotes (actually, I have one doc for each version of the draft). I have the doc available offline via the mobile apps and Google Chrome ( I know)
The experience juggling between the two isn’t great, but I’m used to it: I use Anytype for all my personal stuff, but Slite, Google Docs and Asana for work, so I’m used to going back and forth between a bunch of platforms.
@kayovas yes, the paragraphs were broken when I moved the draft to Google Docs. Thankfully my draft was still short. Is this an Anytype bug? Or a lack of compatibility?
As @LavaC said block based /outline editor are not good for long contents. I’m not aware of the technical details, but the result is obvious. So, IMO Obsidian is the tool if you want to use all-in-one software for writing.
The smallest unit under the chapter in the normal editor is a word, while in the outline editor, there is an additional intermediate unit block, the relevance of the text between different blocks is therefore reduced.
And up to this day, it’s always been difficult to achieve cross-block selection and editing effects in outline or block editors, and paragraphs in different blocks and different lines in the same block can also cause some ambiguity.
Very interesting hearing about Anytype from this perspective. Footnotes would be very useful. Totally agree that inline sets/collections on mobile is a sore spot. It’s one of two main reasons I’ve moved most of my grad work off of Anytype. The other major reason is battery life on mobile being exceptionally suboptimal. But, like you, I absolutely love Anytype. It has legitimately changed the way I think. In the mean time, I’ve utilized Obsidian’s new Bases featureset to recreate some of the core functionality of Anytype. But as soon as I viably can, I’ll be back with Anytype. Hoping these things get hammered out soon.
Edit: didn’t realize this thread was two years old. I stand by my response all the same,
I know)