Is it generally considered a bad idea to leverage drafts for permanent notes and notebooks? Anyone doing (or tried to do) this with any experience and/or workflows to share?
TIA!
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Personally, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Since the release of Drafts 5, Drafts has offered everything I need from a home for my note-taking and writing. And I think it’s a testament to Drafts’ versatility that it can serve both ways of working— as a temporary or long-term note store.
Posts:
- Is Drafts a Rest Stop or Luxury Hotel?
- Drafts Used for a Zettelkasten
- Drafts as a Notes Database
- Drafts as a bare bones knowledge management system
(I’ve probably missed a few— others can flag specific notes that might fit with the above list, or I’ll add anything else I can remember/find later.)
For actions, take a look at the recently released support for back-links/cross-links. Beyond that, specific recommendations for actions would really depend on what you want from your notes, and how you might hope to interact with them.
Also: welcome!
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Sweet. Thanks for all the info.
I certainly do this, I switched to it as soon as the double bracket Draft links became a thing.
The only thing to realise is that note organisation will be tags and links, nothing else. At this stage, tags can’t even be nested, so if you’re the kind of person who’s very invested in note hierarchies, it might not work for you. I’m finding tags a lot better for my needs than my previous folder system, but your milage may vary, 
8+ years of reliable storage, I def use Drafts as a permanent repository.
I mainly access old drafts via tags, and custom actions that pull up a Random draft (https://actions.getdrafts.com/a/1GC).
Am using the new draft linking quite a lot, too.
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I recently went all-in on Drafts as my primary/sole notes repository after using it as intended—“where text starts”—for the better part of a year. I’d been shuttling most of my notes off to Ulysses once they were “complete”, but got absolutely fed up with looking for information in two places (not to mention Ulysses is meant more for writing than general note-taking, Drafts has way better search, and Ulysses’ sync is… how to put this… awful).
I have 2,336 notes.
What I ended up doing was setting up a dozen or so tags that start with “@” (@bread, @foraging, @work, etc.) that I’m calling areas/contexts. They start with “@” so they float to the top of the tags list, and because everything gets one of those tags (I set up a workspace that only shows notes without one of them so I can check). Then I have maybe another dozen or so tags that start with “_” (_article, _call, _magazine, etc.) that I’m calling utility tags. They don’t really fall under a single @ tag, and the underscore floats them up to the top, just under the @ tags. Finally, I’m using regular tags for everything else (baldcyprus, benefits, mugwort, etc.).
So far, I have no regrets. It was nice to be able to embed PDF and image files in Ulysses sheets, but the Keep It app does a way better job of organizing, OCRing, etc. all manner of files, and has x-callback-url support so you can link those files to Drafts notes. I also snagged a copy of Marked 2 so I can utilize the streaming preview when I’m working with tables and whatnot.
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