Hejour
A calm, day-based notes app for your Mac, iOS
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I removed the sidebar from my notes app and never missed it

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Every notes app I tried had the same shape: a list on the left, a note on the right. And every one of them slowly became a filing job — folders to maintain, notes to name, a structure to keep tidy before I could write anything.Hejour has no sidebar and no note list. There's one page per day. Today is always the page you land on. If something belongs to Thursday, you type @ and write a section for Thursday — it shows up on both days.The thing I didn't expect: without a list, there's nothing to organise, so there's nothing to fall behind on. Two weeks of not writing leaves no mess.What's the one feature you'd remove from the notes app you use now? I'm genuinely collecting answers.

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None, for me - I like the folder tree. I keep investment ideas in one folder, projects in another with subfolders for each project, then parenting, cooking, travel, and I go to the folder when I want to see what is in there. If everything sits on the day it was written, how do you get back to all of one topic? Search only helps me when I already remember the words I used.

That’s a fair point, and you named the exact weakness of search: it only works when you already remember the wording. The reason hejour starts from the day is that deciding where something goes is the moment most people stop writing. Capture first, organize later. But you’re right that “later” has to actually exist — chronology alone isn’t a retrieval system. The direction I’m thinking about is topic views that sit on top of the timeline: an entry stays on its day, but also shows up under “investments” or “cooking” when you want the whole thread at once. Closer to a saved view than a folder, so one entry can live in more than one place. Would that cover your use case, or is the nesting itself important to you (projects → each project)? That distinction genuinely changes what I build.

 

I am the organised sort, so take this with that in mind.

Topic views would help, but one level is not where I would stop. Almost everything I keep has a second one. Cooking splits into mains, desserts, etc. Travel I group by country. Projects get a folder each, with that project's notes under it.
I do like that one entry can show up in more than one place, a folder cannot do that.

Can you put a view inside another view?

Being the organised sort is exactly the input I need — you're the person this has to work for. Short answer: yes, but not as a tree. Here's the tension. The reason an entry can appear in two places is that views are conditions, not containers. Nothing lives "inside" anything. Once you nest containers, you're back to one home per entry and you lose the property you just said you liked. So nesting has to mean narrowing, not containing: a view can be refined by a second condition, and that refinement is itself a saved view you can pin. Your examples are actually two different needs, which is useful: Cooking → mains, desserts is a sub-topic. That's narrowing — cooking, then desserts. Works cleanly. Travel grouped by country isn't a sub-topic, it's a grouping axis. You don't want a saved view per country, you want the travel view to break itself apart by country automatically, so a new country appears without you setting anything up. Projects sit somewhere in between — a project is closer to a real thing than a filter, so it may deserve its own treatment rather than being a nested tag. So: two levels, yes. Arbitrary depth, probably not — in my experience depth past two is where people stop maintaining the system. Does your structure ever actually go to three, or does it stop at two?

 Honestly it goes past two for me. Travel is country, then within a country hotels, restaurants, things to do, then notes on each individual hotel or excursion. That is three or four deep. Projects are the same: the project, then its parts, then the detailed bits under each part.

The way you describe views actually sounds like views in a database to me, a saved query rather than a place. If that is the model, then my "three levels deep" is really just a view filtered by a view filtered by a view. Which is fine, as long as I can pin the narrow one and land straight in it, instead of rebuilding the conditions each time.