[ebhn]

I think that for me with things like notes/writing, privacy is #1 by a lot. Preserving the textEdit workflow is nice, but I (and I imagine other users) could definitely be convinced to modify it given the right tooling and confidence in it. I know my workflow is not a productivity global maximum (and probably not even a local maximum), but everything I've seen so far does not justify itself as moving me far enough up on the productivity scale to offset the discomfort of changing habits.

Fwiw I really like the way you summarized the "constraint". Maybe I'm out of the loop on what's out there, but I don't think I've come across too many tools like that aside from lower level things like git.