A notes app for writers who collect fragments

Writers collect raw material all day: a line that arrives in the shower, a phrase overheard on the bus, a detail about a character, half an argument for an essay. Gravity is a notes app for catching those fragments fast and finding the good ones again later, when you're at the desk and need them.

I'm Tristan, and I make Gravity on my own. It isn't a drafting app. It's the place the material goes before it's ready for a draft.

How it works

Gravity keeps every note in one stream, newest at the top. There are no folders or notebooks, so there's no decision to make when a line arrives. You open the app, the cursor is already in the box at the top, you type the fragment, and you press Return twice.

As you add more, older fragments sink. When you scroll back and one still feels alive, you swipe it right and it goes back to the top, where you'll see it again. Fragments you don't rescue keep sinking. They're still there if you search for them, and they stop crowding the ones you're using.

The method comes from Andrej Karpathy's append-and-review note, and it suits writing well. You rarely know which fragment matters until you're working on the piece it belongs to.

A week of fragments

Monday, on the way to work, you hear someone say "she keeps her grief in the glovebox". You write it down word for word. Later you add char: Dan hums when he lies for the novel, and essay: the case against productivity advice is itself productivity advice.

Wednesday evening you sit down to work on the essay. You open Gravity, search essay: on your phone, and there are four fragments from the past month. One of them gives you your opening. You swipe left, tap Copy, and paste it into your draft.

On Saturday you scroll back through the week. The glovebox line still gives you a small jolt, so you rescue it. Two ideas that seemed brilliant at midnight now feel thin, so you leave them to sink. That took three minutes, and you didn't file anything.

Features that matter for writing

• Markdown works, with headings, emphasis, lists, links and quotes styled as you type. Notes are saved as plain Markdown text, so nothing is lost when you paste them elsewhere.
• Long notes open on a full page. Tap Edit and the same page becomes the editor, with the cursor where you were reading.
• Prefixes like line:, char: or essay: get their own colour in the stream, and on your phone searching for one shows only those notes. I've written about how I use prefixes.
• Each note shows when you wrote it, so you can see which ideas have been nagging at you for months.
• On the Mac, Option-Space opens a capture panel over whatever you're writing in. Option-Shift-Space adds to your last note, which is useful when you're collecting quotes from something you're reading.
• The share sheet sends a line or a link from another app straight into the stream.
• Export gives you your notes as a Markdown file on iPhone, iPad and Android, or as JSON on any platform.

How it compares

Scrivener, Ulysses and iA Writer are for drafting and structuring long work. Gravity doesn't try to replace them. Many writers will use Gravity to collect and one of those to write.

Drafts is the closest alternative for capture. It opens to a blank page and has actions for sending text on to other apps, which is great if you process every note as it comes in. Gravity is for keeping fragments around and coming back to them.

Bear is a lovely Markdown app for Apple devices, better for writing longer notes with nested tags. Apple Notes is free and does everything, which also means folders, attachments and sharing you may not need. Obsidian is excellent for research and linked notes, if you want to build a system around your material. Notion is better for planning a project than for catching a line on the bus.

Who it's for

Gravity suits writers who collect in scraps: novelists, poets, essayists, copywriters, songwriters, anyone who knows the good line usually comes at the wrong time. It suits people who've tried keeping an ideas folder and never opened it again.

Questions

Can I write full drafts in Gravity?

Yes, for short pieces. For a long draft, collect the fragments in Gravity and write in your drafting app.

How do I get fragments into Scrivener or Ulysses?

Swipe a note left and tap Copy or Share, or export everything as Markdown and open the file in your writing app.

Won't I lose ideas that sink?

No. Sinking only moves them down the stream. Search still finds them, and you can scroll back as far as you like. For why letting them sink helps, read record every thought.

Can I keep separate streams for different projects?

Use prefixes like novel: or essay: in the one stream. Search pulls each project up, and the rest of the time you see everything together, which is where the unexpected connections come from.

Gravity is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and on Google Play for Android.