What is the practical limit to the length of a note?

[RobLewis 26]

I have a note that consists entirely of styled text, currently a little over 10,000 words. 

 

Editing this note has become a real chore, as, for example when I double-click on a word to select it, it takes several seconds for the word to be highlighted. If I then hit Cmd-I to italicize the word, I'm looking at another several seconds for the text to change style. 

 

Is there any chance that editing of longer notes may be speeded up in a future release? Other popular text editors don't seem to have this problem. 

 

Using Yosemite on an older MacBook Pro (2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, SSD). Not the fastest Mac around, but not a complete slug either. 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

For EN limits, see EN Account Limits

 

However, from a practical POV, you might be better served with much smaller Notes.

EN does not provide any navigation within a Note (internal links/bookmarks not supported), so finding the section you might want to read later could be a challenge.

 

Also, one of our distinguished members, GrumpyMonkey, has encountered some serious issues with large Notes of mostly text.

 

You might find it works better to create a number of smaller Notes, and then connect them in a master Note that has an outline/TOC, with Note Links to each Note that contains a section/chapter.

[RobLewis 26]

Yes, well, breaking it up into smaller notes is a possible solution. It's just more work. 

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Distinguished

There used to be an unpublicized 5 MB limit on the amount of text that could be in a note. That is about 5 million characters, so we are talking about a size roughly equivalent to a very large book. You are unlikely to hit this limit (if it still exists) with a grocery list. But, if you go paperless and "textify" your PDFs (see my website for more) then it can be a frustrating limit. In general, for ease of navigation, especially on mobile, I recommend smaller notes.