After a few weeks of daily use, certain habits separate the people who love Textpad from the people who merely use it. Here are ten of them.
Keep a new-pad URL in your bookmark bar. The fastest note is the one that starts before you remember you wanted to take it.
Hash for headings, dash for lists, backticks for code. They are faster than the toolbar and they keep your hands on the keyboard.
Type / and pick the block. Slash menus are how Notion taught a generation to write — Textpad uses the same affordance without the rest of the Notion overhead.
Textpad unfurls links into rich previews. Pasting a URL is a real note, not a lazy shortcut.
Date-based pads are a graveyard. Topic-based pads accumulate context that compounds over time.
If a note has no reason to be private, leave it public. Future-you searching Google for your own past thinking will thank you.
When you rewrite, do it in place. Revision history keeps the old version. Duplicating pads fragments your archive.
Screenshots, diagrams, photos — Cmd-V works for all of them. The asset is uploaded, hashed, and embedded; you keep writing.
Before starting a new pad, search your archive. You probably wrote down half of it already and just forgot.
A URL stays current. A screenshot is dead the moment you take it. Always prefer the link.
Each of these tips is small. Used together over a year, they turn Textpad from a notepad into a personal knowledge base that pays back every minute you put in.