What I did: I imported 1200 notes from Apple Notes
What happened: the Agenda App became very slow. It took a long time to start up. After that, menu’s appeared only after 5 seconds or so when I tried to select them (this was better after using the app for a while). I collapsed all notes, uncollapsing a note takes several seconds.
Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc): I have an older (2012) iMac but I was expecting the app would function normally. The Apple Notes app doesn’t have a problem with 1200 notes.
Are all these 1200 notes in a single project? I could definitely see it becomes slow if they were. Also, right after import the app is doing a lot of things in the background, including building a search index, have you tried letting it chunk along for a bit and does that improve performance after a while?
Yes, I imported the notes yesterday so the app had some time to process and settle down. I have one project with 1000 notes and the other 200 are divided to three other projects.
So if I understand correctly, a project shouldn’t have too many notes? I don’t use real projects, I have all my work notes (1000) in a single project and I use the search function for maximal flexibility. I could divide the notes into my real projects but that would change my workflow. I have to think about that.
If everything settled down after a while, I think it is fine to have many notes in a project. I personally prefer not to have more than 30-40, because then the menus become difficult to navigate, but there should be no reason you couldn’t do it.
As @mekentosj said, when you first add notes, they need to be synced to the cloud, and also indexed for searching. This can require some intense work, and could slow things a bit, but should be temporary. After the initial processing of the notes, it should be fast again.
I’m testing Agenda as my central hub for both daily/weekly planning and longer-form writing.
I’ve noticed that when I work in a note with 1,000+ words (no heavy images, mostly text), things start to feel noticeably laggy when scrolling or editing.
Is this expected behaviour?
Should I be thinking about splitting these into smaller linked notes, or even using a different tool entirely for long-form editing?
The appeal of Agenda for me is having everything in one place, but the lag on longer documents makes me wonder if it’s not the best fit for this part of my workflow.
Yes, in general, you probably want to keep notes to less than a few screens high. The issue is that Agenda presents full notes in a timeline, rather than just parts of notes, like most editors. This does have a cost.
My advice would be to break the notes into smaller pieces, eg, sections of chapters, rather than full chapters.
also having some notes that are quite long (and thus having some performance sluggishness) i want to try to breaka note into sections, how do I do that ?
Easiest is to split the note into multiple notes. On macOS, there are commands that can help. For example, put the cursor where you want to split a note, and choose Note > Split at Insertion Point.
There are a bunch of other options, including just good old Copy and Paste to a new note.
Ah, thanks, i misunderstood the previus post, i thought there was a way to use “sections” in notes that would help performance. Splitting notes I am using already!