Capacities - Quick Look at the Next Generation PKM Tool
Capacities - Quick Look at the Next Generation PKM Tool
In this article we are going to take a quick look at an underrated next generation PKM tool that is on track to becoming one of the best ones in the market.
Thoughts on PKM Tools
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools have become by far the most hyped productivity tools of the last year and for a good reason. Now, more than ever, people want to find better ways of organizing their knowledge in a scalable and extensible way. Unfortunately, many users struggle with using these tools to their full potential because of the sheer amount of freedom they offer. Having a lot of freedom is nice but it can easily overwhelm the vast majority of inexperienced users.
After having tried countless PKM apps and having mastered their fundamentals, I have come to the realization that my favorite PKM apps are the ones that offer the possibility to type knowledge. You might be wondering, what does it mean to type knowledge? The idea of typing is nothing new and comes from programming languages' type systems. In the context of PKM tools, typing refers to the ability of the tool to let the user define types with properties. While I won't go into the specifics of typed PKM tools in this article, I do plan to write more about them in the future.
Introducing Capacities
In this article, I want to introduce you to a powerful and underrated PKM tool called Capacities. Developed by a talented team of two individuals, Steffen and Michael, Capacities bills itself as a “studio for your mind” and it is available as a web or desktop app for both Windows and Mac.
Even though there are many other apps that compete with Capacities, such as Tana, Reflect, Roam, Obsidian, and AnyType, I find that this tool stands out for its affordability (it offers both a free and pro version), speed, modern design, and an abundance of helpful features that allow you to easily manage and scale your knowledge base. Here are some of my favorite features of Capacities.
Speed is Key
It might sound silly but I consider speed as a feature. From several studies, it has been shown that a response time of < 100ms is perceived as instantaneous.
Capacities is fast to load, as it does not load the entire knowledge base into memory like Roam or Tana. You might think that because of this loading mechanism the content is slow to load while opening individual pages but this is far from the truth. Nearly all pages load instantly and only when you have a lot of matches, either in search or in a database/collection, it might take a few seconds at most.
The synchronization system’s speed is also good, even though it has a long way to go before becoming what I would consider transparent and reliable. I am still concerned that sometimes I might lose my notes or that sync conflicts result in wrong states.
Search that SEARCHES
We are able to search for information super fast in our brain and even when we have a rough idea of what we are looking for, we are likely to find something related to that. This is what searching should be like in a PKM tool and Capacities does this very well.
Capacities has two types of global search:
Full-text search: this search works online and performs fuzzy matching of text and properties of your notes. With full-text search you have the ability to look for anything within your notes super quickly and express your search queries more naturally.
Basic search: this search works offline and matches only the titles of your notes. With this search you are a bit limited but at least you can use it whenever you don’t have access to the internet.
Typed Knowledge
Capacities has first-class support for typed knowledge. Everything you create in Capacities is an object. An object can have an icon, a name and a set of properties of different types. It is important to understand that an object is not a page but the blueprint of an entity within Capacities.
By default, Capacities comes with several object types including Page, Tweet, PDF, Image, File, Weblink, and Tag. All of these built-in content types are immutable (their properties can’t be changed) and work seamlessly when you embed a link, upload a file, a tweet or an image.
This granular representation of content is genius because for example when you upload an image within an object (e.g. a Page), you are not tying it to the object but Capacities creates a new Image object and links it within your other object. This has a whole lot of advantages, that I will show in the upcoming articles.
Image object and its relationships.Organize your Knowledge with Backlinks, Databases, Collections, and Tags
There are many ways to organize knowledge with existing tools, but they're often limited to folder-based methods or tagging (if you're lucky). However, Capacities offers multiple ways to structure your knowledge and make the most of your content:
Backlinks: links allow you to connect notes together and backlinks show you all the places in which a specific note has been linked.
Databases: databases are a high-level way of grouping together objects of the same type. Each database offers several views, filtering, and sorting options. They also have a dashboard view that shows newly added objects, untagged objects, and collections.
Collections: collections exist within databases and are, as the name suggests, collections of objects of the same type that are grouped by a relationship (e.g. books to read, favorite restaurants).
Tags: tags are a way to further categorize knowledge in case the previous structures are not enough for you. They are a great way to group together objects by topics and they can be added to blocks 🤯 because Capacities is a block-based editor.
Other Things I Love
There are other things I love about Capacities:
The editor is very good, it features a lot of formatting options and has the best code blocks I have ever tried (the software engineer inside me is super happy).
Split screen is supported and works great for working on multiple notes at the same time. It allows you to also pin notes.
Tags and objects can be pinned in the left side bar in order to have fast access to important information.
You can use tabs to manage multiple work streams in parallel (e.g. personal, work).
You can save tweets automatically within Capacities and they are going to be both parsed and indexed, without any integration.
Things I Would Like to See
Of course, Capacities is not a perfect tool. During my first weeks using it, I have been able to collect some things that I would like to see improved/added:
Mobile app for iPad and iPhone that focuses on speed of information capturing (e.g., share sheet integration, quick capture).
Offline-first support with reliable data structures and syncing protocols (I am looking at you, CRDTs).
More keyboard shortcuts, ability to open the same note side by side, keyboard navigation...
I am confident that the team will go above and beyond to deliver on the above requests, as they have consistently demonstrated their commitment and excellence in past releases.
Wrapping Up
Capacities is a promising tool that I am sure will become successful as soon as people realize that a PKM tool should be, as the founders say:
"No plugins, no coding, no techy syntax. Just one simple, beautiful and powerful tool."
Short rant: I am honestly tired of seeing complicated, ugly, and plugin-based tools that try to solve every problem with a plugin instead of building from first principles a well-integrated and -designed solution.
I plan to write a full series on exploring Capacities from the simplest features to the advanced features to designing a scalable knowledge base inside of it. Stay tuned for more content!
Have a great day and do yourself a favor, try out Capacities!