I apologize if this has been mooted before; I’ve done some searches and haven’t found anything.
Shovebox is another junk drawer application, that provides slightly novel approaches to the same basic questions that all the other members of this class do, that we’ve all seen. But one thing that it does which is very nice is it provides a global hotkey for instant capture; basically a global hotkey to create a new note in as few clicks as possible. Another application that has a similar function is Notational Velocity. Both of the above are inferior to Eaglefiler, of course, but have you considered adding a global hotkey to create a new note?
I was thinking something like this: when in any application, a hotkey would bring up a window—without actually giving focus to EF. So first we don’t have to suffer a shit in attention. The input focus defaults to the body of the note, so we can start typing immediately. If we’re satisfied and not too fiddly, we can press return. EF creates a new rich text note from that text, and takes the text for the title as well. Maybe the whole thing, maybe the first 200 characters, the first 6 words, et cetera.
After we type the note, if we DO want to set our own title, we can tab down (or up) to the title field. Again, pressing enter at any time saves the new note.
The only field that such a panel would require, which shovebox doesn’t, is a ‘which library?’ dropdown. It could follow the same basic pattern as the capture-with-options window, and default to the currently open library if there’s only one, let you choose if there’s more than one, and show you the recently opened ones if there’s none.
Classification after entry could go one of two ways. You could have another dropdown next to the which-library dropdown, which defaults to Records; or you could have all instant-capture notes automatically get filed to a quick capture folder. Or, have all instant-capture notes automatically get filed in Records, but automatically tagged with some unique tag, so they can be organized later.
I imagine you’ve considered some of this before; but maybe it’s feasible?
