I’ve been using Agenda for about a month now and it’s become my go-to for note-taking. That being said, the inconsistency (bugs?) of text entry and keyboard shortcuts are slowly killing my enthusiasm. I really appreciated the fixes to undo, but it was worrisome that shipped. Text entry is always very slow for me (on latest MacBook Pro 15"). Moving the cursor around with the arrow keys sometimes jumps out of the note I was in altogether and then I can get back into that note with the keyboard at all, but have to point-and-click. Many times the collapse shortcut doesn’t work, but uncollapse will actually do the collapse, and then those shortcuts both start working again as expected.
I apologize for the complaining, but the number one item on my wish list for Agenda right now is to fix and/or dramatically improve the foundational text entry, shortcuts, keyboard navigation features. Every time I use it, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to type (not that I was ever very good), but I do much (much!) better in Sublime, nvAlt, Things, and even Visual Studio running in a Parallels VM.
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Thanks for the feedback!
We have full keyboard navigation coming to macOS in the very next version. It’s already done.
We are about to start on a performance round that should improve text entry and scrolling a lot.
It’s important to recognize that Agenda is not like any of the other apps you mention. All of those apps have a single text editor on the screen at a time, perhaps two for Visual Studio. Agenda has to contend with many. A whole time line, with as many as 10 text editors at a time.
So it’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges. It’s not to say Agenda shouldn’t get better, and it is all the time (eg undo), but it does take a bit of time. You will have to take my word for it when I say making a standard text editor with a single view for entry is about 10x easier. I’ve done both.
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Hey Drew- Thanks for the reply and the insight, much appreciated! At this point, despite my complaints, I can’t quite imagine being without Agenda - hopefully that’s taking as the praise it’s intended to be 
. As a product dev person, I respect that what Agenda is doing is hard. As a user (an entitled user? 
) , though, I expect it to just work regardless of how hard it is to make it so 
. I’m particularly struggling not so much with speed of text entry, but with the cursor jumping out of the active note and the collapse/uncollapse state machine getting mixed up about current state.
Not that you need to explain to me :-), but I don’t get why there are as many as 10 text editors on the screen at once since I can only use one of them at any given time. Is that so the view remains unchanged between active and inactive?
Lastly, for what it’s worth, I’m still very much an advocate and have even gotten a couple of my developers to give Agenda a try.
Thanks for your understanding.
The 10 text editors aspect is really a very important part of our vision. The whole timeline view of a project. I guess you could replace inactive text editors with a JPEG or something. Maybe things like that will be investigated in future.
Either way, it is still 10x more difficult than putting up a standard single pane text editor, which Apple actually make extremely easy (the source code for Text Edit is about 400 lines if I recall — the whole app!) Not trying to make excuses, just trying to explain why it is not very similar to an app like Bear. It’s actually more like a fully editable version of Slack or Facebook.
Anyway, we are determined to make it fast and work elegantly. The performance round is coming up this week, so you should see fruits of that in a few weeks time, I would think.
I came here to mention exactly this. Just today I’m using Agenda to type up some long-form notes and frankly it’s a bit painful. The delays are not massive, what feels like ½ a second or so, but that’s enough to give one a general feeling of sluggishness with typing and text entry. Little delays like this make it all feel much less responsive and more… cumbersome, like typing into molasses. I’m on a big a pretty fast iMac 5K which ought to be more than powerful enough to type fluidly.
I’ll put it this way: I just switched over to doing my typing in Sublime Text pasted it into Agenda for inclusion in my projects there. Even pasting the 60 words I just typed into Agenda showed a little hiccup delay.
We hear you, we have high hopes we can improve the performance, it’s what we’re focusing on as we speak.
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