App review: Tot

Yesterday, I wrote about Iconfactory’s newest app, Tapestry. Today, I want to do a little review of another great app of theirs, Tot.

“Your tiny text companion”

Tot is a scratchpad app, for fleeting notes. It was inspired by Tyke, which explains the need for this well:

I made Tyke because when I’m working I often need a little bit of scratch paper to jot something down.

Sometimes it’s because I need to paste it someplace or other times it’s because I just want to clear the formatting and edit it.

I used to use a new text editor window for that job. Now I don’t have to.

I use Tot for things like writing down everyone’s take-away orders. I also use it when I need to keep some text in a small Mac window that stays on top, or small pieces of info I might want to look up from time-to-time.¹

The business model is also both clever and fair: It’s totally free on Mac, and then you pay once for iOS (€20) and Apple Watch (€2).

My favourite part of it, is that it allows you to store 7 notes. It’s more than 1, but still limited. You swipe between them, and they are beautifully colour coded.² This makes it so you don’t fall into the trap of wanting to name your notes, or keep them forever. You’re supposed to move on.

These 7 notes are synced between Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, with great apps for each.

Purposeful limitations

It supports a limited amount of rich text features: Bold, italics, links, and lists. The latter can either be regular unordered ones, or “smart bullets”, which can be toggled like a task list.

The screen to select list item symbol, on iPhone. Lots of options. Explained more below.

You get a little toolbar above the keyboard on iOS, and you can pick 3 shortcuts to list types.

Plain-text

You can also switch it into plain-text mode. (And this setting is remembered for each note.) The app knows about Markdown, so the formatting will be transformed into this in the plain-text mode – and hotkeys, like Cmd+B, works.

Additionally, Tot handles imported text intelligently by doing Markdown conversion:

In plain text mode, any rich text will be converted to its equivalent in Markdown. If you copy “something bold” on a web page, it will end up as “something **bold**” in the plain text.

With rich text mode, the opposite happens. Any pasted text with Markdown formatting will be styled using your selected font.

The same conversions happen during drag and drop. — From the app’s documentation

The same note in rich and plain-tex mode.

It also has thoughtful details,

like counters, sharing options, Shortcuts support, colour-blind mode, and more.

Not perfect

I’ve seen Tot being mentioned as “finished software” – but I don’t agree with that.

Alternatives:

I don't think it should become more powerful – because I like the limitations! But if you want something similar, but that's a bit more powerful, I recommend checking out Antinote. The beta is free until March 2025, so jump in now!

And if you're a Raycast 🖇️ user, the new version of notes built in there is great as well.

If you want something that's simpler (and cheaper) than Tot, check out Scratchpad.

When I jump between Tot and my favourite text editors, Paper and Bike, there are a couple of things I miss.

Tot doesn’t really support lists…

Hitting tab will only indent a list item if you have the caret before the list symbol.

When doing text selection, it also doesn’t distinguish between the list content and symbol, like Paper does. And it doesn’t wrap properly.

Formatting issues

Hitting Cmd+B doesn’t just format the text you have selected – it puts you into some sort of Bold Mode. This makes any text you type bold, until you turn it off. The inverse is true as well.

Bike handles rich text ambiguity better than any app I’ve seen:

Bike uses the caret, with a B above the caret, or lines under it, to make you know what you'll get when typing.

You're never unsure about what you'll get when you type.

In Paper, having the caret near a bold section (without having anything selected) and hitting Cmd+B, will turn off bold for the entire section. I love this, as you don’t have to precisely select the section first.

There are also some edge cases, like multi-line formatting, which Paper handles better:

Paper handles multi-line Markdown formatting better.

I also wish Tot would do some light formatting like this in plain-text mode. (It could still show every symbol, like now.)

I also miss having hotkeys to move paragraphs/list items up and down.

And wouldn’t mind folding. (Paper lacks this as well, though.)

It’s still a great app! I love the way it looks, and the limitations. It’s just not at the absolute top, when it comes to being a place to handle text.

I highly recommend trying it out on Mac, and maybe buy it for the other platforms if you use it a lot.

I don’t want my regular text editors to have that option enabled. ↩︎
I love how the icon changes with the colour of the active note. ↩︎