MeisterNote: Not for Workings
MeisterNote: Not for Workings
Although it might be a good collaborative documentation platform.
I had missed the beta release of MeisterNote until recently. It's oriented toward collaborative documentation, like a company knowledge base.
The integration with other Meister products — MeisterTask and Meister Mind Map — is a plus. The interface of MeisterTask into MeisterNotes is very well done.
However, the bottom line is simple. I would not recommend MeisterNote as a tool for workings since it lacks some critical features, such as tables, tags, backlinks (two-directional pointers across linked notes), and plain-vanilla links to notes.
MeisterNote is based around workspaces and notes, and each note is a series of blocks.
In the screenshot below, the left margin shows my Personal notes, and the central panel is the editor interface for 2021-07-14 journal. This follows an industry standard for editing systems.
On the far right is a toolbar that accesses information connected to the note, about which more later.
MeisterNote support checklists (to-do lists), which are very lightweight. All you can do is toggle them from open to closed.
I tried obvious workings -sort-of-things, going from the top of the note, as shown above:
No support for markdown.
I could create blockquotes, but they are ugly.
Heavyweight tasks are provided by integration with MeisterTask. Here I have opened the MeisterTask panel in the sidebar, displaying MeisterTasks defined in the note. I won’t go into a deep examination of MeisterTask, but seems very cool.
I like the comments model. Supports Google Docs 'resolve' style semantics, but not suggested edits.
Every note is a series of blocks. These are created by a slash command (‘/’) that brings up a selection of block types:
Every block has a link, so you can create pointers across a note and across notes. Strangely, notes don’t have links (although you can always point to the first block in a note).
There is none of the backlinking semantics that has been popularized by Obsidian and Roam Research.
Conclusions
As I said at the outset, I don’t think MeisterNote is a good solution for workings. It could, however, be productively used in collaborative documentation, although in that case, I would want tables and a range of import and export options, at the very least.