Cosmos Feedback

# Cosmos Notes Initial Feedback — Dec 23, 2021



What I like



There’s a lot of ideas below, so I wanted to start out with what I think Cosmos gets right.



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General file structure



This is Cosmos biggest asset as a writing tool. Something I hate about Notion is their use of emoji’s everywhere within file titles. The card system makes a lot more sense and is much more visually clear.

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Clusters and their privacy settings



Having public and private clusters are great, I can have a note both in a private and public cluster without making a duplicate, having privacy settings at the cluster level makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of using clusters as a mini blog that people can just check in to, it encourages me to write more publicly, even if that's just sharing ideas I want to build to hold myself accountable



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Typography



I really like the font that I write notes in



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Tags



Tags are great, they're very important to any organized file system of any kind.

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Desktop & Mobile



Having these from day one is a huge plus



# Suggested improvements



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Less Friction



The faster I can write down a note the better, it should be as easy and grabbing a pen and a piece of paper. With a digital product there's two angles to consider, desktop and mobile.



**Desktop**

Within cosmos, make it effortless for me to write a new note, for the power users (me) something like a ⌘ + K menu would go a long way. It would allow for faster actions.



Outside of cosmos is equally as important if I don't have cosmos open, what's the fastest way I can get here and write a note, having to go to cosmos, and then create a new note takes too long, there's too much friction. The solution? Something along the lines of note.cosmos.so, let me bookmark a link where I can immediately be brought into a focused writing view and start typing away. This one would be huge.



**Mobile**

Widgets is the answer, I have a hidden widget or two on my Home Screen, having a cosmos widget that immediately brings me into a new note, keyboard open and all would be the fastest way possible to write a note on my phone period. This would also be huge in my opinion.



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Less Friction II



Everything I said above was about getting to Cosmos, what about actually using it? A few ideas comes to mind:



Auto paste hyper links — This one is hugefor me personally, I think this should be OS level but the ability to write out what I want link text to say (e.g. follow me on Twitter) and then highlight "Twitter" and paste a link would be amazing for writing detailed notes with references.



Let me know my note saved — better autosave feedback would give me more confidence in Cosmos as a writing tool Limit the size of the preview card — This note has a very long preview card, it’s 557px! I think limiting the card size and only emphasizing what is a title (either the first line of text or a heading) would make more sense.



Cluster & Note descriptions — It would be great to be able to give each note a little description that’s apart of the preview card and the side card of the note (not the actual note it’s self). Same goes for clusters, especially if public it would be nice to tell people what to expect. I also think the titles within preview cards are a bit too big.



Keyboard shortcuts — Let me focus the search bar by just typing “/” (when not in a note), give me a button and keyboard shortcut to save and close a note.



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The "/" menu from NotionThe "/" menu from Notion



This one kind of falls under less friction, but it’s so important to me that I think it deserves it’s own section. There’s not a whole lot to say her other than the “/” menu is my favourite feature in Notion, but there’s one way they completely break it for me. They don’t have “/” menu on mobile. Yes you have to “123” next to the space bar on mobile but that’s fine, instead they show this persistent banner menu that gets in the way. Having “/” on desktop and mobile would be a huge feature for me personally.



Also, make it easy to discover by starting out each note with some placeholder text like “press “/” to see text options” or something along those lines. I think the highlight menu to edit text elements is still important.



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A more focused writing experience



I don’t really know what this means yet, putting it down to help inspire you, just something with all these features that’s more focused, maybe that means hiding the stuff on the right side, maybe that means making the note card a modal with a background blur behind it, I don’t know.



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Simple blocks

My personal ideal note taking product isn't as complex as Notion or as simple as Apple notes, it's somewhere in between. Some more block types I'd like to see are:



-   Todo list
-   Nested lists — let me indent and make a sub list of a list

-   Quote blocks — So I can emphises things

-   Call out blocks

-   Dividers — So I can separate things

-   Images/embeddable cont