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.

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

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.

No offense, but I can't believe you are charging money for a note taking application which doesn't have a built-in spell checker, and then go as far as suggesting users use a 3rd party spell checker.