Sayed
Mochi, as a note-taking tool, is severely underrated. It's been 2 months since I started heavily using it daily. The first month I used it purely as a flashcards app with spaced repetition, which was an incredibly successful use case. One specific "Oh my God, that's awesome" moment was when I reviewed a card, feeling it was somehow related to another card. Luckily, I had already linked it to a related one. I simply clicked, and saw on the pop-up dialogue the related question, which itself had a link to another related card! Suddenly, I began to form the bigger picture by simply reviewing my due cards. I could see similar cards with such convenience, and eliminate any confusion on the spot.
In the second month, I started exploring it as a note-taking tool. I come from 2 years of using Obsidian. It served me well, particularly for academic long-form writing, but it somehow always felt clunky. One area Mochi shines over Obsidian and all other similar apps is the way Mochi displays related notes. Instead of opening a linked note in the same window or in a new tab, it simply opens a pop-up dialogue. For some reason, this design hit home with me. I could go infinitely deep and still maintain the trail by simply clicking outside the pop-up. So sweet! It also helps me focus on the current card, instead of drowning me in endless tabs; that's one less thing to worry about in Mochi, since the pop-ups are inherently self-organizing by design! Once done, you HAVE to click outside to clear them. If you need a particular card for later reference, simply pin it.
The other interesting, and beautifully executed concept is the Deck > Sub Deck > Cards design. It helps with creating Atomic Notes and yet keeps related notes under one roof. This is huge. In practically every other app, you would have to create a folder and store your atomic notes in separate files inside that folder. When you click the folder, you need to click the notes individually to view them. In Mochi, clicking on a Deck or Sub Deck opens a view where all the nested notes are displayed one after another, with the possibility to choose from a couple of views (list, column, grid, etc). Long notes are also truncated with a Show more button, so you can better browse the collection at a glance. I dabbled with the concept of not worrying about organizing and relying on tags, but I found it inefficient for focused studies, where you really need to have organized notes. Mochi gives you the freedom to organize by tags, but still maintains the concept of folders with a better design.
If you're still reading, you may be a productivity nerd! So here's a typical workflow of mine.
For context, I'm under training for a promotion to airline captain. I have 10+ big ol' manuals to reference at any one time during my studies. I created a note called SOPs - The Sequence where I list each step of flying an aircraft, from pre-flight to landing, from a bird's eye perspective.
Of course, each step requires vast knowledge from any number of the aforementioned manuals. I simply enter Edit mode (shortcut E), highlight each step, and click New card from the pop-up menu. A new card is automatically added and linked in the same deck. Now I start writing the details of that particular step, save, and come back to where I was by simply closing the details card. When I want to review my notes, I go to the master note, review each step, and go deeper on each one only as needed; otherwise, I skip to the next task. And again, the pop-up design helps me not lose my train of thought, and I open the details of each step and come back.
This workflow reminds me of the incremental reading concept coined by SuperMemo. In a nutshell, you have a big reference note, and you keep extracting key concepts into linked notes until the whole note becomes just a reference. Now you can repeat the same thing with those smaller notes until you end up with atomic notes with one single concept, ready to be used for spaced repetition and active recall. Later, when you review a card, you have access to the whole context, aka where this card was created from and why. I liked the concept, but SuperMemo is the clunkiest piece of software ever that only works on Windows! Mochi is the closest cross-platform app I've seen to replicate this functionality, but with elegance.
Of course, I cannot overemphasize the importance of being able to customize the theme! It makes using Mochi 10 times more enjoyable, which made me want to study more just to enjoy it even more! I've put my theme on GitHub, if you're interested.
In a previous post, I had listed some feature requests related to the flashcards side of the app. As a note-taking tool, I've been missing one little feature: the ability to search inside a single note. The universal search tool (shortcut CMD+K) is already superior to other apps, but once inside the note, there is no way to quickly find the exact piece of information, especially on longer notes. One related feature would be to highlight matches when searching cards inside a deck (shortcut /). Currently, it lists all cards that match the query, but does not highlight the match inside the card.
Mochi has been around for 7 years. I wonder why it hasn't become as popular as Obsidian or Logseq, with obsessed YouTubers that cover every little obscure feature of those apps. I hope the developer's business model is strong enough to keep the app alive. I would suggest either adopting Obsidian's model with its plugin ecosystem, which would help build a larger community around the app, or Logseq's open-source model. Extra services like live publishing of decks could also bring in some more revenue.
Adrian