I care a lot about note-taking apps. My favorite, for many years now, has been Quiver, from a small, independent software development company called Happen Apps, a one-person shop run by developer Yaogang Lian. And I’m always telling people how great it is, because I don’t want it to ever go away.
Quiver is great because it lets you easily mix Markdown, code snippets, text, and several other formats in a single note. The interface allows you collect notes into notebooks, tag them, link between them, and easily search across them all. I use it as a personal knowledge base for pretty much everything.
Today, I decided to set up Quiver on a new laptop. But, of course, I wanted to be able to access my 1,000+ notes on both my old laptop and my new one. I use Dropbox as a home for my notes. So the procedure is a fairly simple one. But, as with many things, having it documented is helpful. And it gives me yet another excuse to sing the praises of Quiver.
Step 1: Download and install Dropbox and, in Preferences –> Sync –> Selective Sync, click the Choose Folders button and be sure to sync your Quiver Data folder. I call mine quiverData, and I’ll use that for this tutorial.
Step 2: Download and install Quiver. Quiver will fire up its default library, which contains a nice tutorial notebook, as you can see in the featured image for this post. You’ll be tempted to muck around in the Quiver Preferences, especially the Sync or Backup sections, to open your existing (Dropbox-synced) library. Don’t. Instead, from within Quiver, choose File –> Open –> Library. Then navigate to your quiverData folder and choose the Quiver library within it, which will be named Quiver.qvlibrary.
Then, if you have many notes, get a cup of coffee, because Quiver will need to go through them and index them locally. You’ll see a screen similar to this one:
And that, thankfully, is it. Once Quiver finishes syncing, you’re good to go. Notes edited on any of your Macs via Quiver will be kept in sync and securely backed up thanks to Dropbox.