SMF·SUPERNOTES
Can a prompt replace Supernotes?
Notes & knowledge management — notes, wikis and personal knowledge bases
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Supernotes takes a position most note apps avoid: a note is a card, cards are small, and a thought that outgrows a card should have become two cards. Enforcing that with an actual length limit — rather than suggesting it — plus bidirectional links and a review that resurfaces old cards, is one sitting of work and produces a genuinely different tool. There is no service behind it that a personal build is missing; the gap is the mobile app and the sync.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a card-based note tool where the length limit is enforced rather than suggested.
Cards: a card has a title, Markdown content, tags, and links to other cards. Content is capped at a configurable character limit, defaulting to 1,000. The editor shows the remaining budget and stops accepting input at the limit — not a warning, a limit. When the user hits it, offer to split: create a second card, move the selected text into it, and leave a link behind. That split action is what makes the constraint productive rather than annoying, so make it one keystroke.
Why the limit matters, and why it must be enforced: an atomic-notes system where notes can grow without bound becomes a document system with extra steps, and the links stop meaning anything because everything is in one place already. The constraint is the feature.
Linking: wiki-style links between cards, with autocomplete over titles. Backlinks listed on every card. Creating a link to a card that does not exist creates it as an empty stub, which is how a collection actually grows.
Browsing: a card grid rather than a document list, showing title and the first lines. Filter by tag, by link count, by orphan status (no links in or out), and by age. The orphan view is the maintenance queue for a linked collection.
Daily review, which keeps the collection alive: each day surface a small number of cards — a mix of the least recently seen, the least linked, and a few at random — for the user to read, edit, link or archive. A collection nobody revisits is a graveyard, and this is the mechanism that prevents that. Record when each card was last reviewed.
Search: full-text over titles, content and tags, with results as cards.
Collections: a named ordered set of cards, for assembling a sequence out of atomic pieces — an outline, a reading list, an argument. A card can belong to several collections. Export a collection as a single Markdown document with the cards in order.
Storage: one Markdown file per card, with YAML front matter for title, tags, created and reviewed dates, in a folder the user chooses. A rebuildable SQLite index beside it for search and links. External edits detected and re-indexed. Plain files are the source of truth.
Out of scope: sync, mobile apps, sharing or collaboration, publishing, and any AI feature.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the mobile apps, where most quick capture happens
- B.2 sync between devices
- B.3 sharing a card or a collection with someone else
- B.4 real-time collaboration on the same card
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: sync, collaboration, and capture polish
Because a card system is fed by small moments — a thought on a walk, a line from a book — and if capture needs a laptop, the collection stops growing within a fortnight.
Questions
Can I import my Supernotes cards?
Supernotes exports cards as Markdown with their metadata, and links between cards come across if the export preserves them — check, because the link syntax may need rewriting. Cards over the length limit import intact and are flagged for splitting rather than truncated.
Is a hard limit not just annoying?
For the first week, yes. After that it changes what you write: a thought that needs 3,000 characters becomes four linked cards, each of which can be found and reused independently. Without enforcement, the limit is a suggestion everyone ignores by the third note.
What does it cost to run?
Nothing. Markdown files and a local index, no server, no keys. The files remain readable in any editor, which is the right property for something meant to last years.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Capture on a phone. Cards are short precisely because they are written in small moments, and those moments are almost never at a desk. A laptop-only card system collects the thoughts you had while already working, which are the least interesting ones.
Related tools
Receipt