Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Capacities: Getting Started

Explore the wonders of Capacities and how this object-based note-taking application is one of the most popular tools for note-taking right now and why Capacities is building a different approach to notes.

Capacities is an incredibly exciting block-based networked note-taking app that has a beautiful UI and an incredible team behind it who consistently listens to their community. We're excited to dive into Capacities in this beginner's guide. Before we begin, important to note the newly launched Capacities Made Simple course to help you navigate Capacities.

Capacities: Important Features

1. Networked note-taking

Whilst your content lives in objects (databases) they are not stuck there. You can link content together through the object properties such as the book -> people relation in the example above, or you can link in the body of the content to create backlinks.You can do so through the @ or [[]] function, and you search in-line for this if needed.

Use the @ or [[]] to search for your content in line and watch the links fill out your graph

2. Choose how to view your linked content

There are several views in Capacities: inline, link block, small card, wide card, and embed. This means you can craft your pages to look exactly how you want them too whilst still prioritising the networked note taking approach.Germany is a page in the “country” content type. I have embedding the places that are related to it from the “places” content type via the small card embed option.

3. Incredible search

It’s not just the inline search that’s great. The search and command bar allows you to quickly and easily search across your space, to switch between spaces and to create new content. It’s super fast too.You can even search the properties via the command bar!

4. Contextualised Links

Using properties in your objects also allows you to create contextualised links in your graph. There’s no need to open up each piece of linked content in order to manually work out the connection between two entities. Let the properties tell you.

5. Different views and page layouts

As you can see from the screenshots so far, the UI is beautiful. Two areas Capacities excels in are its different object views and its page layouts.The object views let you see the content within your object in different ways. The options are table, list, wall, gallery. My personal favourite is the wall view, but there are great uses for all.

If you are a Believer, you also get access to different page layouts.

Capacities recognises that we take notes on lots of different content and gives us the object (AKA content type) structure to manage this. But they also understand that different types of information might want to be displayed differently. For example, the small, and simple index card layout is perfect for Zettels or recipe cards, but the profile layout is perfect for your notes about the people you interact with.

6. Tags

Capacities tags are not like in Logseq or Obsidian.

They are not another way of referring to an existing page, they are a separately created piece of content intended to unite content from across your objects under one heading. Tags here are like more powerful folders because you can view and filter the content in dynamic and useful ways. Here, entries from the “place” object are united under the “travel” heading alongside images and weblinks.

7. Integrations

Make adding content to Capacities easy with email, Telegram, Whatsapp and Twitter integrations, and enjoy the latest integration of Hookmark to increase interoperability between other apps in your system.

8. Great community

The team value the community’s voice so much, and constantly ship updates that prove this. Be part of this community on discord and see for yourself!