My Tools: Tot

Pocket notebooks are awesome. But sometimes, normally when running, I don’t have a pocket notebook with me. For such moments of Ultimate Horror and Unspeakable disorganisation, I have Tot.

What is Tot?

Tot is an ultra-simple, ultra-lightweight text capture app that lives on all my devices.

Why I Like Tot

Tot is simple. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a traditional word processing app that sometimes get in the way of quickly jotting down a note. What it does do, though, it does with speed and elegance.

Simply put, Tot is the place a lot of my text starts. I use Tot to compose long text messages and emails (so I don’t accidentally hit send before I am done), jot down notes that strike me on the move and more.

Tot’s sync via iCloud is lightning fast, and it has full Markdown support. (Did I mention, I love text files?)

One of the things I love about Tot is that it only lets you have seven notes. This feature might look like an annoying limitation, but it isn’t. It forces you to deal with the text you’ve written. I have many note taking apps strewn with notes I have forgotten about—which makes the note itself pointless. You can’t forget about your notes in Tot—you have to deal with them!

Why I Like Tot More: An Update

Tot has (June 2022) released widget support for iPhone and iPad. Now you can get direct lightning-fast access to any given Tot page from your home page or your Today view. This is awesome. It means I can transform one of my tots into a daily note which I can access extremely quickly.

Get Tot!

Tot is free on the Mac App Store, but is a pay-once app for iOS (which includes both iPhone and iPad versions of the app). (I received nothing for this post, and there are no affiliate links herein; I use Tot on a daily basi,s and I think you might find it jolly useful.)

Updated Post

I updated this post in August 2022 to include details of Tot’s new widget support.