Apple Notes recently got a power user feature I’ve long wanted

Apple Notes gained a variety of great features in iOS 18 last fall, like collapsible sections, color highlighting, audio recording with transcripts, and more. But I recently discovered one more change that answers one of my long-time feature requests, and could satisfy a lot of power users.

Switching between notes now has a shortcut in iOS 18

Currently, I have over 2,500 notes saved inside Apple Notes. I’m a heavy user of the app and have been for years.

But one pain point I’ve long had is switching between notes.

Most of the time, manually navigating between different notes isn’t a huge deal. But there have been many times when I’m bouncing between two or three in quick succession, and the Notes app feels sluggish.

Because I have so many notes, my Notes app includes a deep folder structure that can make switching between notes especially slow. When two notes live in entirely different folders and sub-folders, it can take several swipes and taps to jump back and forth.

Fortunately, I recently discovered that iOS 18 introduced a solution for Notes ‘power users’ like myself.

Inside the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the app, there’s now a Recent Notes sub-menu.

Opening this menu shows the last 10 notes you viewed on your device, and you can tap each note to quickly switch to it.

Thanks to this new Recent Notes menu, I now have a simple, reliable way to speed up the process of switching back and forth between notes.

To be honest, I’d love for Apple to speed up the process even more by requiring just one fewer tap if possible. But iOS 18’s change is a great start.

Did you know about the Recent Notes feature in Apple Notes? Do you expect to use it yourself? Let us know in the comments.

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