The Stack
Help & Tips
The Stack is a simple application for capturing quick ideas and "notes to self".
Usage
The main view is a list of your notes, most recent on top.
Each note in the list consists of a single editable piece of text.
Tapping on a note in the list allows you to edit it.
Tapping on the large plus button at the bottom-right makes a new note (⌘N).
A long-press (iOS), or right-click (macOS) on a note in the list brings up a menu with various actions that you can perform on the note.
If you include #hashtags in the text, they will show up in the index as tags.
Tapping on a tag in the index takes you to a view of that tag. You can edit the tag name here, and also see all the other notes it is attached to. If you tap the plus button on this view, the new note will automatically start with the relevant hashtag included.
Ordering Notes
Notes are generally ordered in a simple manner, as a stack, with the most recent note going onto the top (hence the name).
This design is deliberately simple, and intended to encourage you not to worry too much about the order.
The logic behind this decision is that if there are just a few notes, you can easily see them all, and if there are a lot of notes, you can use #tags and/or a text search to filter them down into manageable groups.
If you still have a lot of notes even after filtering, then our assertion is that the exact order starts to become fairly meaningless. You probably just want to know "what shall I tackle next?"
We think that the best strategy in this case is to review the whole list, identify the most important one or two notes, pull them to the top, and tackle them. Once you've done that, you can repeat the process. Even for a fairly long list of notes, scanning the list becomes quite a quick process, and the more you do it, the more aware you are of the context of the list, so the faster it is to do again.
To support this idea, the one re-ordering mechanism in The Stack is that you can pull a note to the top of the list, using the "Pull To Top" button.
Completing Notes
When you're editing a note, the button at the top-right allows you to change its state. A new note starts in the "To Do" state. You can set notes to "Completed" to mark them as done, but there are some other statuses too: "Abandoned", "Paused", and so on.
You can quickly mark notes as done in the index by swiping them from left-to-right. You can delete them instead by swiping the other way.
Viewing Completed And Deleted Notes
Completed and deleted notes stay in The Stack forever, so you can always go back to them if you need to.
However, by default, the note list only shows notes that are marked as "To Do" or "In Progress".
You can change the filter on the list of notes to also include completed notes, deleted notes, and notes that you've assigned to other categories such as "abandoned" or "on hold".
Doing this allows you to tap on a completed or deleted note. You can then edit it if you want to, or change it back into a non-deleted or non-completed note.
Shortcuts (macOS/iPadOS)
In addition to the standard system shortcuts, The Stack supports the following:
- ⌘N - Create a new note.
- ⌘1/⌘2/⌘3 - Change notes filter to view completed and/or deleted notes.
- ⌘⏎ (command-return) - Navigate back to the previous view.
- ⌘I - View the note list.
- ⌘T - View a list of all tags.
- ⌘' - Send feedback.
- ⌘, - View the settings.
Support & Feedback
You can send us feedback from within the app, by choosing the "Send Feedback" option from the main menu. This takes you to a screen where you can enter a message for us, and optionally add your name/email address.
Sending feedback anonymously is absolutely fine, but please note that we can only respond if we have an email address to reply to!
Alternatively, see the feedback page for alternative ways to contact us.