Open note in external editor. Save changes back to note.

While I use the default editor for quick little notes (which is already painful enough without a spell checker), I do the bulk of my serious writing in Focus Writer. Which means I am constantly saving to a .txt file during a writing session, then copying and pasting into Cinta when I am done for the day. This is quite inconvenient and means I am using CN as little more than a way to archive and organize my work, rather than as a fully integrated notebook that I can do all my work in. There are a lot of people out there who already have a preferred word processor/text editor, and no matter how well you design the editor within Cinta, those people are not going to change their working habits by switching to a completely new working environment.

Thanks for your elaboration. This could be an interesting approach. However I don't know what to do with text formatting in this scenario?

For me personally, plain text is all I need. I can't really comment on other people's preferences.

Ok then I guess that if note contains rich formatting, a warning should be displayed that after editing in external editor all formatting will be lost.

That does sound like a reasonable compromise for having the ability to work in an external editor. And Dave Feree's suggestion regarding file handling seems like a pretty solid approach.

Thinking about it actually makes me excited. The idea that there might be a writing environment that I can stick with from now until the end of days almost seems too good to be true. The perfect simplicity of CintaNotes combined with the perfect simplicity of Focus Writer, with seamless integration between the two, is just too good to be true.

Great, then we are settled on the implementation! Thanks for your help. Now all we need is more votes :)

I want to add one thought: "Maybe we could get an option to export to plain-text OR rich text format."

I don't want to make things unnecessary complicate and I would be fine with getting only plain text in a first step. But in the long run we should also provide a solution with formatting. Formatting is part of CintaNotes and having several sub-features that don't support formatting gives a feeling of patchwork.

This feature would be of no use for me if I loose formatting but I would vote for this feature if we could retain formatting.

I think that such setting should be possible. It's equally easy to export as TXT or RTF.