Issues and Annoyances with the MacOS Notes App
I am a fan of ubiquitous capture. I rely on Notes heavily, and I keep a lot of information in Notes. Bet's face it, Notes on MacOS is just not a very good editor. It has some wonderfully powerful cloud features like sync to all my Apple devices, offline viewing and editing, sharing, and shared editing. History is also tracked for shared notes. And I was incredibly happy to see that Markdown export was recently added. But when it comes to basic editing tasks, Notes has a pretty basic feature set and is unfortunately pretty buggy. For whatever reason, Apple put all their effort in Notes into the cloud functionality and neglected most of the other stuff.
I have been keeping a list of issues I have personally encountered in Tahoe. The vast majority of these issues continue from Sequoia.
See my post Export Notes as Markdown in MacOS Tahoe for specific issues around exporting notes to Markdown.
My number one complaint continues to be version control. If I have a note that isn't shared, the history doesn't get tracked. I was completely shocked the first time I realized I can't look through notes history in Time Machine (yes, iCloud notes do get backed up to time machine via ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes, but the process to view or restore them is ridiculous). This is problematic because of the undo situation. When switching between notes, the undo history gets thrown away. So, for example, if you change something in a note (accidentally or on purpose), then click to another note, the undo history from the first note is lost. If you go back to the first note and hit undo, then you just get the error sound. There are various scenarios where this makes it far too easy to lose content, which is what led me to start checking my notes files into git in the first place.
Occasionally when I cut something from one note and paste it into another note, notes crashes during the paste. Fortunately, when I restart Notes, my text always appears to have been pasted properly.
Selecting text is buggy. Selecting with the mouse by double clicking or by single clicking and dragging often doesn't work as it should. Triple-clicking a line sometimes gets the newline and sometimes not. It's sometimes hard to select a portion of a line in a checkbox item with the mouse. When holding shift and pressing the arrow keys to select text, the selection often gets stuck, and I have to resort to using the mouse. There is just so much inconsistent behavior on so many different little selection operations like this, which is really disappointing. :( Meanwhile, this all seems to work properly and consistently in just about every other MacOS app I use.
If I double-click on a note and open it in a second window, then far too many things are buggy in that second window. For just one example, if I copy something to the clipboard in the secondary window, it doesn't actually get copied to the clipboard. If I just have a secondary window open, sometimes the clipboard stops working properly in the main window. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I've just learned to never open a second window in Notes.
When using a dark background, and when custom colors are applied to some text (using the color picker, ⇧⌘C, which can only be done on MacOS), then sometimes the brightness of the color is reversed. For example, if I choose a lighter grey in the color picker, then the text will show up with a darker grey in the note, or if I choose a darker blue in the color picker, then the text will be a lighter blue in the note. I've found that if I turn off Math Results (Format => Math Results => Off), and then reload the note (or sometimes I have to restart notes), then the problem goes away. This was a constant problem in Sequoia, but it has only happened to me a few times in Tahoe.
When collapsing headers, the spacing is often wrong, e.g. there will be a big blank space after the collapsed heading. If you try to delete the blank space, it just expands the bullet again.
When I make lists of checkboxes, I often have some blank checkbox lines in-between tasks. I like keeping the checkbox lines that don't have any text because it helps break up items in the list, and when I mark an item in the list done, it automatically move it to the end of the list and out of the way of my active tasks. But Notes doesn't handle these lines well. If I collapse a heading that has blank checkbox lines under it, they don't collapse properly. Also notes has a habit of putting a space at the end of a line, leading to a line with a checkbox followed by a single space. If I highlight a line with text and then move that line around in the list, the highlights can end up getting applied to the checkbox lines next to it that have a blank space. I'm frequently clearing unintentionally highlighted lines.
I notice that if the first image in the note has a transparent background, and I am using a dark theme, the thumbnail of the picture that shows up in the notes column has a white background.
When scrolling through a pretty long note, Notes sometimes scrolls to a place far away in the document, even though I've only scrolled a very small amount. It takes a little while to find my way back to where I was just working.
When I'm at the bottom of the note, and I hit the enter key, and it goes beyond the end of the note, sometimes the note doesn't scroll, and my cursor and anything I'm typing is off the screen.
OK, this is not really a bug, but why are there only 5 highlight colors? I realize it's challenging to come up with colors that look good on both light and dark backgrounds, but seriously, why isn't green one of the colors? Green is the ideal color to indicate that something is done or in an OK state.