[HN Gopher] Tired of note-taking apps
___________________________________________________________________
Tired of note-taking apps
Author : akkshu92
Score : 334 points
Date : 2020-07-19 12:12 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (akkshaya.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (akkshaya.blog)
| [deleted]
| melling wrote:
| I like using Notability with the Apple Pencil on the iPad. Hoping
| the text recognition in iOS 14 works with it.
|
| GoodNotes is also nice. These pdf's were created with it.
|
| https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/tree/master/s...
|
| I also use Bear for my Markdown notes. Having everything on my
| iPhone and easily searchable is important for fast retrieval.
|
| Apple Notes doesn't let you limit search to a folder/tag.
| kontxt wrote:
| Check out https://Kontxt.io. It's like Pocket, Genius, and Reddit
| combined. There's personal features for note taking,
| organization, and permission based sharing, and social features
| to discover the best parts of the web.
| djhworld wrote:
| I gave up with the commercial and open source offerings and
| instead just wrote my own solution.
|
| All notes are markdown, stored in a SQLite DB with full text
| search. It has a simple frontend and you can drag/drop images
| onto the editor and it will upload them.
|
| To facilitate quick note taking I wrote a FUSE driver for it and
| have bound CMD+N to open a command line scratchpad window (I use
| i3wm) where I can write and edit notes using conventional *nix
| tooling.
|
| It's not perfect, nor slick, but it works for me.
| stepstop wrote:
| > To facilitate quick note taking I wrote a FUSE driver for it
|
| I didn't understand this part. Why can't you just write the
| file and then either manually/automatically trigger an import
| of the text into the SQLiteDB?
| jasonjayr wrote:
| The fuse FS (which, fuse not at all difficult to use, there
| are many implementations of SQLite-backed fs) implements the
| trigger that automatically imports it.
| djhworld wrote:
| The note taking service is on one of my raspberry pi's and
| exposes a HTTP API which the fuse driver interacts with.
|
| Could have used NFS or something to achieve what you've
| suggested, but this is the path I went down and seems to work
| ok for my needs.
| Aperocky wrote:
| The best note taking app is vim.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _the global note-taking management software market is estimated
| to reach $1.35 billion by 2026_
|
| That's an interesting indicator. Would anyone happen to know what
| report the author is sourcing or have a link? I'm curious to read
| more of these numbers in full.
| kostarelo wrote:
| I would like more info on that too.
| akkshu92 wrote:
| https://www.verifiedmarketresearch.com/product/note-
| making-m....
|
| Not sure if it's a trusted source. Let me link it to the
| article though.
| elongatedMusku wrote:
| Well, if you are human, use a piece of paper. If you are an Emacs
| user, there is Org mode.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Against my better judgement, I switched from apple notes to
| notion for half of my note taking. I'm using Notion to document
| the things I am learning, but not for anything personal. As most
| of my learning includes a lot of URLs, the workflow I setup in
| Notion is easy and speedy.
|
| Overall though, I hate the idea of putting my thoughts on the
| cloud (someone else's computer) and worry about the future when
| tool "B" comes along and I want to move my data. I see a lot of
| cut n paste in my future :(
| pjot wrote:
| Nothing has been as frictionless as nvALT[1].
|
| Plain text, full text search, and point it at
| iCloud/Dropbox/Drive and now you have your notes fully synced.
|
| I've spent far more time than I care to admit trying out new note
| applications...
|
| [1]: https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
| rmkrmk wrote:
| I hope they'll release nvUltra soon: https://nvultra.com
|
| I use this as well, have all my stuff in a git repo and sync it
| to my iOS device so I can edit it with apps like iA Writer or
| 1Writer easily.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Agree.
|
| Hotkey popup, it's free, you own your data, and just enough of
| a feature set to be useful without a learning curve.
| lukasb wrote:
| Yeah. It solves the "I forgot I already have a note on this"
| problem too, by making search and creation the same UI.
| J_tt wrote:
| For windows I like resophnotes, the autosave is amazing and
| outputting plain text means I can share with my co-workers
| easily
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think the note taking market is due for a takeover by one of
| the epaper writers, like the remarkable, the Sony epaper or the
| onyx boox. I feel very similar to the author, at the same time
| I've been using my Sony epaper for reading papers and taking
| meeting notes which is much more convenient than using a
| computer. If one of these companies would come up with a good
| note taking app, preferably with some way of making easy cross-
| reference and maybe ocr for search I'd move all my notes over to
| handwriting again.
| j0hnml wrote:
| The biggest issue I have with note taking is not the medium or
| app, it's the fact that I would often write something and never
| look at the note again. This essentially made the act of note
| writing, at least for me, futile since I rarely remember my notes
| as I'm writing them.
|
| The best solution for this, I've found, is to still take notes on
| the bigger picture but then to add the smaller details,
| definitions, concepts to Anki [1], which literally forces me to
| review those smaller details again and again until they "stick".
| Doing so then makes me want to revisit the notes to get the full
| picture. As a result, my memorization of all kinds of things has
| greatly improved, which makes future research and documentation
| all the more better. It's a very good positive reinforcing
| learning method and I recommend it to anyone who may have similar
| issues.
|
| [1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/
| barrenko wrote:
| For me the biggest point of writing is to remember and then
| safely forget about stuff.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Me too!!!
|
| I find since I moved from Tomboy to OneNote that my memory is
| significantly worse.
|
| Tomboy didn't support pics so I was more tuned in to meetings
| as I was actively processing info in order to note it down in
| my own words.
|
| Now in Outlook I often tune out when I feel something is less
| relevant, and I lazily take screenshots "in case I need to
| look at it later". Then, when something comes up that is more
| relevant to me I'm tuned out and need to catch up. I also
| remember information much less long because it never really
| entered my brain at all.
|
| So yeah it definitely helps for that purpose, at least for
| me.
| kaliszad wrote:
| For me, if I have some more long-running projects or ideas I
| might return to and e.g. give a presentation about them at some
| point, I find using https://orgpad.com an alternative. It tries
| to be a general tool that helps you connect the dots in a graph
| and that helps structuring information more like your brain
| does instead of forcing the linear approach of lists or longer
| texts. It doesn't force a scheme or anything like that on you
| and it can quite easily be turned into presentations e.g. like
| this conference talk on Graph isomorphism:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu8P7UwHhAA Btw. Orgpad is also
| a project, that is completely written in Clojure/
| ClojureScript. (Full disclosure I have consulted and still
| consult the developers on orgpad.com infrastructure.)
|
| I the end, if you have the wrong tool or the wrong method for
| anything you are going to have a bad time even if the tool or
| method is useful in a different setting. An analogy: You can
| hardly unscrew something using a hammer unless you want to have
| more problems then before.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Orgpad looks really good.
|
| I always find this kind of mindmap stuff to go beyond my
| screen size too quickly though.. I'd love to have something
| like this in VR so I can walk around and write stuff
| everywhere, move things etc, just like I have my walls
| covered in stuff like those stalkers in horror movies :D
|
| VR would be great for this I think. I might even make an app
| like that.
| cdnuzzo wrote:
| my vote is for standardnotes.org
| jjice wrote:
| I searched far and wide for a good note taking app a few years
| ago, only to find that the best solution for me was right in
| front of me the entire time. git init fall2020
|
| Git lets me keep track of everything, and I have free hosting at
| multiple different websites, or my own server if I want to. It's
| simple and customizable, and depending on what type of notes, I
| have different scripts to automate new notes and searching.
|
| Next semester, I'm going to run the above command and then make a
| directory for each course I'm taking. In there, there will be a
| series of markdown documents numbered 'nn.md' with a header at
| the top of the file with the date and the subject. After that,
| it's just plain markdown. I alternate between VS Code and Vim,
| but both get the same job done. When I'm done, I just 'git add .
| && git commit' and move about my day.
|
| Since I currently use GitHub private repos for hosting, if I'm
| walking to class, I can view the rendered Markdown right on my
| phone. This is nice for getting a quick recap about what the last
| class covered.
|
| I also use a Git repo for my journal, but with different ways of
| formatting entries. The entire thing is very extensible, but not
| as friendly as some other note taking apps if you don't like
| plain Markdown. Writing a web interface for this setup wouldn't
| require much work, and it's something that's on my list of things
| to do.
| kevinslin wrote:
| I've found that its hard to beat plaintext markdown notes with
| git. been taking notes like this for the past ten years and now
| have 20k+ markdown notes. just launched a markdown note taking
| plugin built on top of vscode to help with this sort of
| workflow: https://dendron.so
| djhaskin987 wrote:
| Even though it's restrictive, I find most of my notes of a
| creative nature are all done and markdown and git. Another
| commenter was saying how their best work was on pencil and
| paper, and I agree, I'm very creative in that medium as well.
| The only thing that comes close on the computer is markdown.
|
| I do use OneNote at work, but it's a classic example of where
| the tool molds the use case. Typically I will use OneNote to
| track a problem, or gather notes and links from other sources.
| It's a great way to put together a dossier on a problem so to
| speak, but I don't really use my creative juices in OneNote.
| cdperera wrote:
| I augment this slightly by using Typora. It's nice for writing
| inline and fenced math blocks (with LaTeX), which is pretty
| invaluable for my maths subjects, I've found.
|
| It's nice since it renders the markdown while you write it,
| which I kinda need when writing LaTeX.
|
| It's an offline tool, but I'm pretty much always near my
| laptop, so that's not much of a big deal for me. Tbh, having it
| offline was kinda a bonus for me.
|
| No Vim support though, which is a bit frustrating.
| branweb wrote:
| I like this approach and used something similar for a while
| myself. For me the main drawback was syncing between devices. I
| had to remember to commit and push on one device and then pull
| on another. Maybe not a big deal for lecture notes, but a
| little fussy for just adding a book to a "to read" list.
|
| Also in time I found I never really used any version control
| features. Backing up to a remote was the only thing I needed.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| I use git as well to track my notes, I just haven't found a
| good editor yet which is equally as important. Sublime Text or
| any code editor works fine enough for Markdown, but I really
| miss the ability to have hyperlinks in my notes. Markdown links
| are just extremely ugly to look at and overly verbose.
| andrewkdinh wrote:
| Some good choices are Typora, Mark Text, and Zettlr. I'm
| actually in the process of creating my own, inspired of each
| of these.
| swayson wrote:
| https://github.com/foambubble/foam
|
| Roam-like note taking app using VS Code. Still early days but has
| momentum.
|
| Been using it for a week for some project docs, and so far I like
| it.
| oldsj wrote:
| Thanks for posting this! Been playing around with org-mode and
| org-roam but setup is definitely more challenging and it does
| feel like a bit of platform lock-in since the only useful org
| editor is emacs.
| oblib wrote:
| Haven't we all made a note app by now?
|
| I spent over a month at "TodoMVC.com" playing with frameworks.
| After all that I couldn't decide which one I should use and ended
| up deciding not to use any of them and then made my own.
|
| And I don't use it much either :D
|
| I do look at new ones still though. Some of them have so many
| features that just the notion of spending the time learning how
| to use them puts me off.
|
| As I write this I'm looking at 4-5 sheets of paper scattered on
| my desk with notes scribbled all over them.
| bhauer wrote:
| > _It's not because of limited choices. But it's the other way
| around. There are so many note-taking apps you could try but end
| up sticking to none. At least, that's my story. It's a perfect
| example of the paradox of choice._
|
| Either this is not a good example of the paradox of choice, or as
| I am more inclined to believe, the paradox of choice is mostly
| bunk.
|
| While I don't discount that some consumers may be frustrated at
| times by an abundance of choice and may naively think their life
| would be better with fewer choices, I don't think reality would
| bear that out. Maybe easier in the moment of the choice, but less
| satisfactory in the experience of the outcome of that choice. I
| know my life would be measurably less enjoyable with fewer
| choices in all walks of life: fewer food options, fewer cities
| and towns to live in, fewer computer manufacturers, and yes,
| fewer note-taking apps. Fewer apps would _not_ make the apps
| better. It would only remove some of the options that are
| satisfying niche needs for other people. It 's a bit elitist to
| say there should be fewer of any category, because it implies
| that the subtlety of preference felt by others is unimportant.
|
| Choice is the consumer side of the innovation process. If
| anything, the non-satisfaction with note-taking applications
| shows that more exploration, more innovation, and yes, more
| choices are in fact needed. Technology still has a ways to go
| before we have a robust approximation of the free-flowing paper
| and pencil note-taking, augmented seamlessly by the computer. We
| see where we're heading with things like OneNote, but we're still
| generations of innovation away.
| chishaku wrote:
| > Fewer apps would not make the apps better.
|
| I don't think the author is saying this.
|
| You can agree on the following simultaneously:
|
| * More competition and innovation in this space might lead to
| better tools and _possibly better_ individual outcomes.
|
| * More options might lead to more exploration, experimentation
| and high switching costs, paralysis by indecision,
| procrastination via tinkering, and _possibly worse_ individual
| outcomes.
|
| The truly major innovations are behind us: language, writing,
| writing instruments, paper, word processor.
|
| Of course, _other tools_ could accelerate your process but
| depending on what you 're working on, if you don't pick a
| system and stick with it for a while, you might experience
| worse outcomes.
|
| > the non-satisfaction with note-taking applications shows ...
| more choices are in fact needed.
|
| Satisfaction is as much a function of our perspective as it is
| of the tool.
|
| You can ask
|
| "What is the best tool?"
|
| or you can ask
|
| "What is good enough?"
| darrmit wrote:
| I've tried nearly every major app/service and always end up on
| Standard Notes. It strikes the perfect balance for me between
| privacy, ease of use, and functionality.
|
| Prior to settling on SN I was a big fan of Simplenote and nvALT,
| but the lack of even basic MFA for Simplenote drove me away.
|
| Evernote, OneNote, etc just seem to be way too much for what I
| need. And Apple Notes, while it has gotten a lot better, does not
| make it easy to get your data back out.
| yalogin wrote:
| The main feature for note taking should be it's simplicity. I am
| just writing down a list. All I need is a place to keep referring
| to and may be search them. The problem comes when they try to
| cram too much functionality in it. If I wanted more functionality
| there are other apps like pages and numbers already available. I
| would just start there. It's understandable though, Every company
| wants to hoard all the enterprise functionality
| mercacona wrote:
| The best note app I found is a journal app. I've been using Day
| One for more than a year now, and it's holding Evernote's promise
| of remembering everything.
|
| I do use Apple Notes too beside Day One for temp notes (email
| drafting, edit texts, links to check & trash, etc), but it's on
| my journals where my knowledge-notes reside.
|
| What people like from real notebooks is that you don't have to
| think about organization, you just start a note in the next blank
| page. With Day One that's what I got (even by email), and then,
| once I need to search for something in my personal log, I can
| organize stuff with tags or backlinking notes.
|
| The "On this day" function also helps, as you can prune old ideas
| or notes that were a dead-end.
|
| Personally, I'm sold.
| andi999 wrote:
| What i like about real notebooks is the 'flicking
| through'search function.
| abhiyerra wrote:
| I am also an avid DayOne user. It is great. My process is to
| have three journals in DayOne Todo, Done and Workouts. Every
| time I have an idea I write it down in the Todo journal. Once a
| week I do a GTD on that notebook. Any actionable tasks if it
| follows the two minute rule I do immediately or if it a longer
| task I move to the context specific locations in Notion,
| GitHub, Gmail Tasks, the CRM, org-mode, etc. so I can get them
| done when I am doing my context specific tasks (project
| management, coding, email, sales, knowledge base, etc.) then I
| then move the entry to the Done Journal.
|
| Yes, it is a lot of processing things twice but I think it has
| some benefits. Most things aren't actionable so it is just
| great for refreshing my memory. It forces me to write
| everything I think of down so I don't forget anything and
| DayOne is great for that. I have nearly 10,000 entries. I don't
| worry about note size. Some are "send contract to Ashley"
| others are longer thought out ideas. I've been using this
| system for the last few years and it has worked well.
|
| One size fits all note apps never worked for me and I figured
| the reason for that is that a lot of what we do are context
| specific. We want the notes / todos for a particular type of
| task to live where we do the task when we are doing the task.
| biddlesby wrote:
| Totally agree. Having to think about how I need to organise my
| thoughts as the same time as coming up with the thoughts
| themselves always seems like a burden!
| cborenstein wrote:
| Very much agree with this. The idea of separating the "dump"
| phase from the "organize" or "refine" phase has been an
| inspiration for what we're building at Bytebase:
| https://medium.com/@bytebase/an-iterative-approach-to-
| notes-....
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I use Microsoft Onenote. I use it because it is bundled with
| Office 365. It suits me encourage the use of 365 rather than
| another app, because my team then have less software to support.
| It is good enough, and that's enough for me to not be bothered
| with anything else.
| c-smile wrote:
| In fact original EverNote implementation (EverNote 2.0) used
| physical notebook metaphor.
|
| Notes appeared as an "endless tape":
|
| https://www.phonearena.com/news/Two-thirds-of-app-users-in-U...
|
| I think we (initial EverNote dev team [1]) were first who came up
| with reasonable virtual list implementation for notes.
|
| The metaphor of notes tape (a.k.a. "writing notes down") was
| quite natural for most of people, that's why EverNote got so many
| users initially. The key point was to add powerful search tools
| (including OCR and image recognition) and categorization (tags)
| on top of that tape.
|
| Just in case: Sciter's SDK contains sample implementation[2] of
| such virtual tape: https://quark.sciter.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/05/vtape.pn...
|
| [1] https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-
| of-...
|
| [2] https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-
| sdk/tree/master/samples/%2...
| da5is wrote:
| Are there any note apps still around that take an endless tape
| approach? It seems like everyone's gone away from it, but my
| mind still works best with endless tape + tags + search.
| kostarelo wrote:
| How was the market size calculated? Where was sourced from?
| fblp wrote:
| Quick rant triggered by this... We have our
|
| - Cloud document systems (Google docs, Dropbox paper, Notion)....
|
| - Project management systems (Trello, Asana, Monday)
|
| - Todo/task/notes management (Keep, Todoist, Evernote)
|
| - Customer Ticketing systems (Zendesk, helpscout, freshdesk)
|
| - Bug/issue tracking systems (Pivotal, Jira, Github)
|
| - Crms (Salesforce, Hubspot, Streak)
|
| - And then theres even specialized customer facing and internal
| facing KnowledgeBase products (getguru, readme.io..)
|
| Can you see the insanity? So many apps that are just different
| ways of abstracting and sorting knowledge, relationships, time
| and next steps.
|
| A lot of progress has been made in enabling developers to
| integrate customer (event) data accross apps over the past 5
| years (segment, mparticle with their data layers). But what about
| a standard data layer for the folder / project/tickets / tasks /
| notes hierarchies that exists in all these apps. So our
| information and knowledge isnt so siloed?
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| You can full-send into Notion (or any one of these systems) for
| a "jack of all trades, master of none." Obviously, not as good
| as a single-purpose system, but there really needs to be a
| space for unified data.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think that part of the reason there's so many options is
| because there's no best approach and managing information is
| hard.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Personally I find Apple Notes the most convenient for quick
| jotting down of ideas etc. It's not the most advanced in terms of
| features but it loads instantly, is quick to use and is available
| on all of my devices. Have tried numerous alternatives but
| they've never stuck e.g. they're slow to start up or are fussy to
| use or don't work well on one platform.
|
| For deeper sketching out of ideas, diagrams etc I really like
| Concepts on iPad with the Apple Pencil. It has an infinite canvas
| and is all vector based, which is great for never worrying about
| whether there's room to fit your idea on the page or whatever.
| Previously I used Notability and it was good and a bit more
| traditionally note based, but I miss the infinite canvas. The
| text recognition and handwriting features in Apple Notes on iOS
| 14 are pretty cool though, will be nice to see what third party
| apps do with them.
| justsomeuser wrote:
| I like Apple Notes and would use it if it did not have the
| following limitations:
|
| - You cannot link between notes like a wiki (like Evernotes
| evernote://$note-guid)
|
| - You cannot export all your notes in a standardised format.
|
| - You cannot store notebooks in specific offline only encrypted
| disk images for privacy.
|
| - Cannot change background (must use paper emulation)
| submeta wrote:
| > You cannot export all your notes in a standardised format.
|
| This!
|
| When I tried to export my notes I realized how hard to
| impossible it was to get them out. An absolute no-go for me.
| So I gave up on accumulating notes in this otherwise
| beautiful and practical app.
| Terretta wrote:
| Exporting your Apple Notes to Markdown-style at ease:
|
| https://medium.com/macoclock/exporting-your-apple-notes-
| to-m...
| Terretta wrote:
| Workarounds / alternatives for the limitations:
|
| 1. You _can_ link between Notes. On a note, click collaborate
| icon, click add people, in share options tap icon for Copy
| Link, and then dismiss the To: dialog with the "Copy Link"
| text top right. Paste that link in another note. Now they're
| cross-linked like a wiki. Instead of doing all this, create
| /use a shortcut.
|
| 2. Use Exporter:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12
|
| 3. Protect any given note with a key. The note data is
| encrypted, and stored encrypted anywhere it is stored.
|
| 4. Surely changing the background is an optional feature, not
| a limitation? There are a ton of features Notes doesn't have,
| but not having them may not be in the "limitation" category.
|
| // FWIW, I mostly use Ulysses.
| justsomeuser wrote:
| 1. You can link to a note but it just seems like a second
| class feature - you need to share the note with yourself.
| Id like the ability to have off line only notebooks with
| links.
|
| 2. Thanks.
|
| 3. Per note encryption is useful, but it would be nicer to
| have the entire notebook stored off line on an encrypted
| disk. E.g. If I share my computer with people its easy to
| see what sets of files/notes are "open" by looking at
| Finders mounted disks list. If the data does not get
| transferred over the network it adds another layer of
| security - I do not have to rely on Apples implementation.
|
| 4. It is a limitation to me as reading/writing is the
| primary feature and its a personal preference to have a
| solid background. Same category as font size adjustment.
| Minor inconvenience.
| alt219 wrote:
| Fantastic, thank you for #1. Earlier today I was bemoaning
| the lack of wiki-like linking in Notes. Glad to learn
| there's at least this workaround.
| codq wrote:
| Paper background is gone in iOS 14.
| austinl wrote:
| I have to agree with this. I was on Notion for a while, and
| I've tried every other app out there, but found I was wasting
| too much time thinking about the structure and features instead
| of the _content_.
|
| I've gone back back to Apple's Notes and other native apps
| (Mail, Calendar). Yes, these apps are not perfect. Undoubtedly
| there are things other apps do better. But they _fade into the
| background_ , they're simple and unassuming. They integrate
| into the OS well, are private, and will be around as long as
| Apple.
| tammer wrote:
| I would argue that in a number of ways Apple Notes is one of
| the most advanced in terms of features.
|
| Yes, it doesn't bombard you with its functionality and at first
| glance is a simple place to jot notes (perhaps its greatest
| strength). But dig into the feature list, and perhaps help me
| find a similar application that:
|
| 1) can combine tables, rich text formatting, and in-line
| sketches 2) can store any file type in-line 3) can encrypt
| protect notes 4) can bulk share Notes + live edit 5) has a
| built-in complex document scanner
|
| I know there are some alternatives that cover most of these but
| I think Apple Notes is king precisely because of these many
| layers of functionality.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Big minus: Only works on Apple platforms :(
|
| I use macOS and iOS all the time but I also use Windows,
| Android and Linux. So sadly most of Apple's services don't
| work for me. Even though I know they're really good. I really
| wish they'd expand their horizons a bit. Microsoft stuff
| works on pretty much everything so why not theirs?
|
| I had no idea it was that good though, because of the above
| reason I never really used it.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You could still access it from web. The interface isnt bad,
| but it's web, so no native UI.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| The web version has an incredibly obnoxious bug when it
| comes to using Enter.
|
| On Firefox on Ubuntu 18.04 hitting Enter once will not go
| to the next line. Hit Enter again and it will go down two
| lines.
|
| Works fine in Chromium but there's no reason I shouldn't
| be able to use Firefox, especially when Apple pretends to
| champion privacy...
| 1123581321 wrote:
| This drives me crazy too.
| als0 wrote:
| Sounds like it's a stone throw away from being packaged
| by someone as an Electron app :)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Totally agree.
|
| I get the markdown thing but it just seems to add a layer of
| complexity to a market crowded with productivity porn.
| amelius wrote:
| Does it integrate with Siri?
| clairity wrote:
| i liked apple notes on my ipad pro until i got bit badly by the
| upgrade to ios 13, where all the previous pencil drawings were
| flattened, and features like zoom and ruler (constant-interval
| across zoom levels) were removed.
|
| i used notes for personal design drawings/sketches, and it was
| great for that purpose until the upgrade.
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| Concepts is great! It's the best cross between note-taking and
| drafting, with all sorts of interesting rulers and sketching
| guides. You can even export as DXF to laser cut vector graphics
| straight from a sketch or drawing.
| sitkack wrote:
| How do you backup Apple Notes? The PDF export loses fidelity. I
| really like AN for the integrated camera, esp the document
| scanner. Is there another application that allows for writing
| as well as annotating media, video, photos and sound?
| agustif wrote:
| I remember I used some notes-cli tool to export notes from
| Notes.app into txt or markdown files
|
| Maybe it was this https://github.com/xwmx/notes-app-cli
| bnj wrote:
| I've been playing around with [0] recently, which has been
| a good way to learn about how apple notes are structured on
| the back end as well
|
| [0]: https://github.com/threeplanetssoftware/apple_cloud_no
| tes_pa...
| lbotos wrote:
| I loved apple notes, and have used it for years. I left (for
| joplin) because there was no easy way to do an export/backup
| without scripts or workarounds.
|
| I don't use the document scanner tho :(
| lalo2302 wrote:
| You can save your notes as emails when you connect your
| gmail account.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Not something I had thought about actually. I'd always
| assumed iCloud was "good enough" for my use, though some
| interesting points raised below which would definitely be
| important for more important notes. Most of mine are quite
| throwaway to be honest.
| dewey wrote:
| It's a sqlite database so you could pull it from there:
| https://www.swiftforensics.com/2018/02/reading-notes-
| databas...
|
| I haven't tried it with Notes but with Apple's Podcast app
| it's a nice sqlite DB you can query.
| aj7 wrote:
| It's on iCloud.
| sitkack wrote:
| Is iCloud a backup or a coordination mechanism? If someone
| steals an iDevice and starts nuking notes or deleting
| videos, are they not gone?
| kevindong wrote:
| It's a tradeoff of convenience vs. security. If someone
| steals my iPhone they would first have to get into it.
| Assuming they can do that, I'd have much bigger problems
| than my notes being tampered with.
|
| Additionally, iOS devices can be locked remotely.
| jurmous wrote:
| All deleted notes go to a "recently deleted" folder in
| which they will stay for 30 days. Although they could be
| permanently deleted from there and then it is really
| gone...
| jliu70 wrote:
| There's an app called "Exporter". http://falcon.star-
| lord.me/exporter/.
|
| I've used it and it works. Software developer also makes
| Another note taking app Falcon http://falcon.star-
| lord.me/#features
|
| NOTE: Exporter works well, but it does NOT decrypt locked
| notes, nor does it handle anything outside of text (e.g,
| tables or images).
| foobiekr wrote:
| I agree with this and notes is what I use - apple notes with
| cloud sync, especially on the phone. Every now and then, I move
| it all out of notes into standalone text files in a directory
| tree in Dropbox.
|
| Why?
|
| Because several times now I've lost notes due to Apple's cloud
| "sync." On a few occasions, the note turned up in the trash
| (with no action on my part) or simply disappeared.
|
| Putting aside the spontaneous deletes, one thing that seems to
| more frequently push things into the trash is editing the same
| note on more than once device - the handling of this on the
| icloud backend appears to be "hell, just delete it."
|
| edit: I should note that this spontaneous delete thing was more
| common a year ago, but then again, I've dramatically reduced
| the number of notes I maintain, now down to like 30 or so as
| opposed to the hundred+ I used to keep.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Yes, same here. I found out, that oftentimes I just need to
| vent something in a slightly structured way without any
| distraction. Apple Notes opens in an instant in an expected
| way, syncs and works across devices.
|
| It is not so much a great workflow I need, it is simply
| frictionless noting down immediately.
|
| After that I can go to further elaborate on the idea with a
| mightier tool. In my case it is GoodNotes.
|
| After lots of attempts and frustration (Which features should I
| use now to get this idea out?) I now use only Apple Notes and
| GoodNotes.
| balladeer wrote:
| Other than a combination of fiddling inside ~/Library and some
| more SQLite circus there's really no way to make Apple Notes
| notes portable (across platforms) and even such circuitous
| hacks might break in any update or upgrade. That's a big enough
| no for me.
|
| This is one of those instances when the _perceived_ Apple 's
| walled garden convenience just falls flat. I personally prefer
| FSNotes (it has a long way to go but it's FOSS) and Bear. I am
| moving from Simplenote.
| [deleted]
| reaperducer wrote:
| _there 's really no way to make Apple Notes notes portable
| (across platforms)_
|
| Apple Notes works fine on any platform that supports a modern
| web browser at icloud.com.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Escaping a walled garden into a subscription based text
| editor seems like a pot/kettle scenario.
| ksm1717 wrote:
| I think you mean a frying pan/fire scenario
| cborenstein wrote:
| I agree - choosing a tool that makes jotting stuff down most
| convenient is key.
|
| I believe that there hasn't been enough innovation in the jot-
| down phase of notes. Most people use Apple Notes, Google Keep,
| or raw text files. They're convenient for jot-down. But painful
| when it comes to organizing.
|
| Notes are easier to organize when they're modular. You can add
| modularity, without losing convenience or speed, by writing
| notes like you're messaging yourself.
|
| Fast jot-down + easy to organize in small steps = more likely
| to stick with it.
|
| (I'm one of the creators of the modular, messaging-like notes
| tool bytebase.io)
| divbzero wrote:
| > _loads instantly_
|
| This is a key feature for note-taking apps -- quick to load
| wherever you are -- and is one reason why I also gravitate
| toward Apple Notes for jotting down ideas. I can then
| reorganize into documents or spreadsheets as needed when I'm
| back at a desk.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| The best thing about Apple notes is that I can dictate while I
| am hiking. The problem is that it seems to require >2 bars of
| service, which is a rarity when I actually need it.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Apple dictation works offline - at least with the latest
| models. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208343
| schuke wrote:
| I've heard you can use local voice recognition by long-
| pressing the dictation button.
| yencabulator wrote:
| That's one of the most ridiculous hidden UX'es I've heard
| of in a long while. It always surprises me when people
| think of Apple as somehow "user-friendly".
| jeromegv wrote:
| Did you actually check? Just tried on my phone and it's
| not there. But if I turn on airplane mode is still works
| so May be there's no need for a setting at all.
| sneak wrote:
| Apple Notes are not end to end encrypted. Thanks to programs
| like PRISM, US military intelligence has realtime access to the
| plaintext contents of much of the information you store in
| iCloud (including notes and photos), without a court order.
|
| That, for me, makes it a nonstarter.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Fair enough, but this applies to essentially any service that
| you can access on the web (you can use Notes on iCloud.com)
| fargo wrote:
| Governing's harder
| criddell wrote:
| Are you saying that the connection to Apple servers that hold
| the backups are not encrypted? That can't be... I'm almost
| certain they use TLS.
| sneak wrote:
| No, I'm saying that the notes are not encrypted from
| endpoint to endpoint. They are encrypted with TLS keys
| known to Apple in transit, and they are encrypted with
| storage keys known to Apple at rest in your iCloud account.
|
| This means that Apple has the ability to decrypt them at
| all times without your knowledge or involvement, and can
| and does so via the PRISM program for US military
| intelligence to access the plaintext data, the same as they
| do for the CCP in iCloud users in China.
|
| End to end encryption is not the same thing as transit
| encryption.
|
| For the record: PRISM is not "sniffing" or any other type
| of bulk surveillance program that would be thwarted by TLS.
| It's an API/app-driven program, run by and within large
| tech companies, that permits the US military intelligence
| organizations to pull the decrypted contents of the account
| of anyone on the service, directly from the storage systems
| of those tech companies. The _majority_ of the data that
| the IC processes is the result of PRISM. I encourage you to
| read Bart Gellman 's book Dark Mirror for more information
| and specifics.
| criddell wrote:
| Okay, that makes more sense.
|
| When I'm backing up to an Apple server, I think of the
| two ends in the end-to-end encryption scheme as my
| computer and Apple's computer.
| sneak wrote:
| No, the ends are the device from which the backup is
| being taken, and the device to which the backup is
| restored: the start and the endpoints of the entire
| journey of the data.
|
| When done properly, the places the data sits/transits in-
| between have no ability to read or decrypt the
| information; it's indistinguishable from random data to
| those intermediate storage/relay services or nodes,
| because they never have access to the keys to decrypt it.
| Lammy wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-
| exclusiv...
| kawfey wrote:
| You must have some very interesting notes. I think for most
| of us, the US government wouldn't be particularly interested
| in our musings, but what do you suggest?
| Lammy wrote:
| It's amazing that people can witness POTUS 44-45 and still
| make "well _I_ have nothing to hide " arguments :/
| sneak wrote:
| Regardless of any political situation, it's a rather
| stark lack of imagination when one can not realize that
| there are people who are doing things entirely legal and
| reasonable that absolutely require _privacy from the
| state_ for their own safety and success, such as labor
| leaders, political organizers, civil rights leaders,
| reporters researching state corruption, war crimes, or
| human rights abuses by the state itself, et c.
| csydas wrote:
| Yes, but let's not conflate this specific use case with
| every day usage.
|
| I'm a gigantic privacy advocate and probably senselessly
| cautious about tons of technologies, but that's the
| result of a conscious choice. Set and forget encryption,
| or programs that advertise they can skip the first step,
| are dangerous in my opinion/experience. It can give the
| wrong impression about security and lead to dangerous
| decisions/actions or lack thereof.
|
| The concept behind thoughtless encryption is noble, but
| for all encryption models/schemes I know of, it has to be
| a concentrated and intentional decision else you end up
| with:
|
| - Lost data due to key mismanagement (not a bad thing,
| but extremely inconvenient)
|
| - Incomplete or ineffective encryption
|
| - Vehicles for intentional deception that allow bad
| actors to get you to share sensitive/personal data under
| the impression that it's protected
|
| and much much more.
|
| Steve Yegge said it best when he said that Security and
| Usability are constantly at odds, and from my
| perspective, this is a good thing to some degree. With so
| many FUD apps that promise security, for the time being
| is a very convenient litmus test for laypersons to know
| "how much should I trust this app?"
|
| I know that it's popular on HN to shit on Telegram, but
| in my current country of residence, Telegram is the most
| popular messenger program...for normal non-secretive
| messaging. It is extremely well known not to trust TG for
| secret conversations, illegal purchases or any other
| illegal activities, and so on. Not even on the basis of
| the security model of secret chats, but the
| discoverability of them. Basically the thought is "If you
| could find it without being a member of some ring of
| trust, so can the police". It's one reason why the
| conversations that frequently happen on HN about Telegram
| feel so misguided to me -- those who have conversations
| that may put themselves at risk __aren't using the app
| for such conversations__. They're not using any such
| apps, and either doing disposable communications (burner
| phones, pen and paper convos, etc), or they're arranging
| meetings in other ways.
|
| Encryption/security has been commoditized by app and
| platform creators and packaged into a marketing tool. I
| wouldn't trust Telegram or Signal any more than I'd trust
| WhatsApp, Messenger, Messages, or whatever Google's
| monthly name for their chat app is to have such
| conversations in most countries.
|
| To wrap it back to the GP's comment, I get the complaint
| about Apple Notes not being E2E encrypted -- but, if
| you've got sensitive data that needs to be recorded, why
| are you cloud-syncing it in the first place with a
| company that has frequently been investigated/prodded by
| the US Government, and even more frequently
| probed/violated by data exfiltration companies that work
| directly with the aforementioned government?
| stu2b50 wrote:
| They're not saying they have nothing to hide, they're
| saying they're not joting down quick notes of anything
| they have to hide.
| Lammy wrote:
| I would agree that self-censorship is one of the most
| insidious effects of surveillance if that's what you mean
| :)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I have to agree...
|
| I'm very conscious of this now when I'm talking on the
| phone. Not that I really have anything to hide, but I'm
| always wondering how something would be perceived by
| someone who is listening in.
|
| It's not a nice feeling at all. This is one of the
| reasons I hate mass-surveillance so much. Just that
| feeling that everything I do or say is on the record.
| lioeters wrote:
| Sadly, I find myself thinking similar paranoiac thoughts
| simply talking in person at home. We have a number of
| devices with microphones, and when friends visit, they
| bring their own devices with who knows what kind of
| untrustworthy apps (looking at you, Facebook!).
|
| Sure, we're normal citizens with "nothing to hide" - but
| I've become wary of any possible channel of data
| collection, regardless of whether the end consumers are
| private parties or state agencies.
|
| It's dystopian, that I'm having to consciously censor my
| speech in case anyone is listening. Same with HN - I
| doubt my comments are of any value to outsiders, but it's
| possible that someone will associate my real-life
| identity with this online account, and dig through (i.e.,
| put the data through some extractive process) to assign
| various values, for unknown consumers - probably
| advertisers, but maybe even some "good citizen index".
|
| Thankfully I live in the EU (oops, another data point
| leaked), where there's at least some level of privacy
| protected by law.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's amazing that people can witness POTUS 44-45 and
| still make "well I have nothing to hide" arguments :/_
|
| Unless you have a really short memory, I think you mean
| POTUS 39-45.
|
| And while by a lot of measures POTUS 45 has been a
| disaster, POTUS 44 did far more damage to privacy than 45
| has (yet).
| moneywoes wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this please?
| peruvian wrote:
| It's not that complex. Our personal privacies have
| deteriorated with either party in power for decades. Both
| Dems and GOP have voted to extend the Patriot Act and
| similar acts. Most of the NSA/PRISM drama happened under
| Obama (PRISM in 2007 with Bush, to be fair) and I'm not
| sure anything changed by 2016.
|
| So singling out Trump isn't really relevant or even
| useful.
| Lammy wrote:
| A Story In Two Headlines:
|
| "NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution"
| (2009) -- https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offe
| rs_billions_f...
|
| "Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?"
| (2011) -- https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-
| skype-2/
| Lammy wrote:
| I'm not talking about any specifics of either
| administration, only about having them back-to-back with
| polar-opposite reactions from most people. I hope that
| would make anyone on any side think twice before handing
| "their guy" some fun new weapon, but I probably hope for
| too much.
| balladeer wrote:
| I'm afraid this came across as an unfortunate and
| disingenuous response to someone's comment about privacy. A
| feeble variation of "I have nothing to hide" I'd say.
|
| For the last part: Standard Notes, Joplin, jrnl, FS Notes
| (possibly), nvAlt (not actively developed) etc.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| Nobody's particularly interested in you taking a shit or
| jerking off, either, but I'll bet you close the door when
| you do.
| perrohunter wrote:
| The important question here is: What do they know? Who
| decides what they do with that? Who decides who decides?
| sneak wrote:
| My notes do not have to be interesting for me to desire, or
| deserve, personal privacy.
| dutch3000 wrote:
| i like using siri to add to apple notes, while ideas come to me
| or something during walks etc. works well with airpods pro.
| arendtio wrote:
| Is there a way to use it on a different platform?
|
| I like to use Linux systems and even though Microsoft sells
| Windows, OneNote allows me to use it in a browser.
|
| Apple still seems to favor their walled garden so that you have
| to live with all their downsides in order to enjoy the good
| parts.
| cmroanirgo wrote:
| It's actually saving using imap. So you can configure it to
| use non iCloud and then use eg. 'imap notes' on Android.
|
| The rub is that non iCloud is text only, so you lose
| functionality.
| boskop wrote:
| Yes, you can use it on iCloud.com
| arendtio wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't know iCloud includes applications.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Personally I use Apple Notes or org mode. Whenever I see an
| alternative, I refuse because it's not like my notes will all
| magically migrate to Notion/Roam/whatever. No, I'll just append
| on a name to the list of notetaking apps I use. That's not worth
| it. Even for some fancy backlinking features that I'll definitely
| bikeshed to hell.
|
| What it'd take for me to move to a new note taking app (not that
| I'm holding my breath for a new one) is that it would have to be
| an information black hole. I wouldn't have to migrate notes
| because it would automatically suck up everything. Of course
| that's tricky and potentially privacy invading, so I'm not
| expecting a solution anytime soon.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| I've tried Evernote, Apple Notes, the Remarkable Tablet, vimwiki,
| and I keep going back to handwritten notes on paper.
|
| My current workflow for notes is: I take notes on the notes app
| on the iPhone or my Mac if I don't have my A4 Moleskin notebook
| handy. And then I transcribe the notes on the Moleskin whenever I
| can. Another recent addition I have to this workflow is a Brother
| VC-500W label printer. I use it to print QRcode stickers for URLs
| that I stick on my notebook.
| _eigenfoo wrote:
| Have you considered linking notes from one notebook to another?
| E.g. if you named each notebook and numbered pages, you could
| just point to "page X in notebook Y", and wouldn't need to
| transcribe. Would this be something helpful to you?
| grugagag wrote:
| Yes! The act of transcribing allows for reorganization and
| better recall. What i find amazing about plain paper/notebooks
| is that we remember visually where to find info. Manually
| searching by flipping through the pages also further helps
| cement the information. Search functionality is useful in some
| cases but for essential notes it is a bit overrated IMO
| pvorb wrote:
| I think some of the reasons why there are so many note taking
| apps are that it's easy to start with, everybody has a use case
| for it (easy dogfooding) and you don't need a business idea. If
| you need an idea for your startup, it's just too easy to either
| build a note taking app or a chat app.
| Slartie wrote:
| To do: add to-do-list apps to that list
| [deleted]
| joshstrange wrote:
| I was a long-time nvAlt (macOS + SimpleNotes on iOS) user and
| then used Drafts for the last 6 months which is a nice
| replacement (I use about 1% of the features). I'm trying to get
| into Notion for a few types of notes I take but it's too heavy
| for quick notes so I feel like I'll probably settle into using
| Drafts for quick notes/scratch-pad and then use Notion for
| structured notes/knowledge base type stuff.
| intended wrote:
| Same - shifted to one note and then that made me start writing
| notes on paper.
|
| Unless the writing experience on the tablet improves to match the
| real world, it's just not going to be good enough.
|
| Procreate on the iPad has some of the best redo/undo gestures and
| some excellent inking.
|
| If they used that engine to run a note program, and allow a way
| to sync across ecosystems - it would be the best written note
| taking app bar paper.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > Procreate on the iPad has some of the best redo/undo gestures
| and some excellent inking.
|
| Yes, same with Concepts (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/concepts
| /id560586497)--(initial... it feels a tad less user-friendly
| than procreate, but stores drawings as vectors and you can work
| with an infinite canvas. Check it out if you like Procreate:)
| It's great for im promptu diagrams and hand written notes.
|
| Now, the three finger swipe gesture on iOS (Notes, annotations)
| just pisses me off. It's slower, more error-prone and different
| than any other App. I wish Apple followed Procreate/Concept on
| that one.
| intended wrote:
| I have concepts ! It's pretty nice. But procreate has pretty
| much demolished every other app.
|
| I've been doodling on the iPad since the day they came out,
| and procreate simply nailed the gestures.
|
| Apple has a moat around them, so I don't see why they don't
| take the gestures either.
| htk wrote:
| It's fashionable to say that the best note taking system is
| pen&paper, but I think it ends up being a disservice to the idea
| of registering knowledge. I think written and digital have
| completely different pros and cons.
|
| I love to physically write things down on a moleskine, but I
| decided to not storage knowledge there, I just dump things from
| my short term memory to act upon them in the short term. I tried
| storing knowledge there but when I needed later I didn't have the
| notepad with me, or it was in an old one etc.
|
| Digital note taking has several disadvantages, but at least it's
| always with me.
|
| Like they say about cameras, the best one is the one that's with
| you.
|
| Having created several note taking apps (the latest being
| Mindown), I'm deeply interested in the note taking problem, but
| it seems to be impossible to create the ideal one. Sometimes we
| want "simple", other times we want advanced features. This is the
| first layer of challenge I see in the note taking world, but I
| can peel this onion in almost endless layers...
| mannschott wrote:
| I'm familiar with this conundrum. I've been taking notes,
| managing tasks and appointments on paper since 2015; before
| that I took most notes in Emacs org-mode and managed some tasks
| there, and some in OmniFocus.
|
| Lack of search is a definite disadvantage of handwritten notes.
| Here's what I've done to blunt that:
|
| (1) Every notebook begins with a few pages for a table of
| contents. (2) When a notebook is full, I scan it in as a PDF.
| (3) I type up the table of contents to make it searchable and
| add that to the PDF. (4) The PDFs are all available on my
| phone.
|
| I am generally able to find things this way, but it is not as
| convenient as i-searching around a giant buffer in Emacs or
| using something like deft.el. For the moment I am continuing in
| this fashion, but I do periodically consider switching back to
| using a computer for note taking. Perhaps some day I will.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| There are "smart notebooks" that make it relatively easy to
| send your handwritten notes to the cloud. The problem is
| that, at least when I checked a couple of years ago, they had
| no OCR, and only uploaded images to which you could attach a
| name, so they are not especially helpful when it comes to
| search.
|
| I hope in a few years, with good OCR, they will be a good
| solution for those of us stuck in this dilemma.
| flipjsio wrote:
| I save my notes as text files (markdown format). It is universal
| so its not dependent to any app. It is searchable and future-
| proof. I save them in Apple iCloud so it auto-syncs to my iPhone
| and use iA Writer app to read/write to it. I used to use GitHub
| and git app (Working Copy app) on my phone to sync between
| devices.
| kevinslin wrote:
| since you're using markdown, I would check out
| https://dendron.so (disclaimer, I'm the author). its an open
| source, markdown-based note taking app that works with markdown
| notes on your file system. also supports back-links,
| hierarchies, tagging, and more. its built as a plugin for
| vscode so you also have access to vim keybindings and anything
| else you might need with vscode extensions
| ntnsndr wrote:
| Same, except I use NextCloud to share across machines. And edit
| in Emacs. I still have trouble seeing what I am missing by
| using simple, universal files instead of some lock-in app. Any
| extra feature seems to come at the cost of losing the benefits
| of constraint.
| grtehy wrote:
| Just another opinion on the balanced note taking method:
|
| I think org-mode solves almost all _offline_ note-taking
| requirements
|
| * org-roam makes it super-easy to link notes
|
| * emacs as an editor is as usable as any other editor
|
| * Rich media is possible and easy to do in org-mode. Attach a
| snapshot, embed a video file
|
| * Code with documentation is a feature not available in most
| other note taking methods/apps. It's possible to run code
| snippets and add comments, documentation about them in the same
| space
|
| * Latex support is advanced. Inline equations work seamlessly
|
| * Search support is advanced
|
| Drawbacks:
|
| * One of the main drawbacks is that all your notes end up
| offline. This was a deal-breaker for me. ox-hugo helps in
| publishing your notes to a (private) static site where it can be
| searched, viewed but _not edited_ on the fly
|
| * Publishing through ox-hugo is separate from maintaining a
| backup/sync of your notes in /org/ format. You'll have to do this
| separately through Dropbox/GDrive/etc
|
| * A backup of your org notes is not usable until you set up your
| emacs environment and download all your notes
| habosa wrote:
| I'm a serious pen and paper person but the only note taking app
| I've stuck with is Google Keep.
|
| I think the constraints are a virtue. No hierarchy, no structure
| more complex than a list. It imitates my paper workflow which is
| a bunch of scattered post its and single sheets on my desk.
|
| I do like Notion for more academic or deep work but it's not
| something I'd fire up without a second thought.
| semibeard wrote:
| Samuel Suresh's YouTube video titled "How I Take Notes with My
| iPad Pro in Lectures" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0ql-
| yeY9u0) makes some pretty good points for taking handwritten
| notes on a device.
|
| Akkshaya Varkhedi says in the article a couple downsides to
| handwriting notes on paper are:
|
| 1. Can't add screenshots, images, links, etc. 2. can't easily
| search for content.
|
| Using something like Goodnotes addresses both of those items. You
| can take screenshots, add images, and links, and even use the
| devices camera to capture images (like the whiteboard/chalkboard
| during lecture). And (depending on how good your handwriting is),
| there is a search feature which searches the words you've written
| --and those words can be converted to type if you want to add
| them to a document without needing to re-type it.
|
| Buying a tablet and stylus (like iPad and the Apple Pencil) to
| solve the two points paper notes does not solve seems a bit
| overkill--but in todays world, if you're a student going into
| University and need to purchase a device, those tablets are
| looking mighty attractive versus a standard laptop.
| MH15 wrote:
| Ohio State University gives all incoming freshman an iPad and
| Apple Pencil [1]. I can say with confidence it works amazingly
| well for taking notes in a classroom setting and for doing
| homework. Copy-paste comes in handy for things like large math
| problems of course.
|
| However, I don't like using it for work/personal projects.
| Still trying to figure out why.
|
| [1] https://digitalflagship.osu.edu/students/technology
| dmje wrote:
| Funnily enough, I don't think there is a really good one. There's
| lots that almost do it but not quite. - Evernote: no note linking
| - Bear: lovely but no web or android version - OneNote: appalling
| in the way only MS can be - SimpleNotes: too simple - Zoho: too
| ...urgh - Keep: too Googley - Apple notes: too Appley - Standard
| Notes: too buggy
|
| I'm clearly a fussy sod. But really, just a nice, oss, local
| files, ability to encrypt, x-platform apps: surely not too much
| to ask....?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| This is why I've come full circle and just use a small notepad
| now. I still don't type writing by hand, though.
| kevinslin wrote:
| at the risk of doing some self promotion, I've had the same
| problem and ended up creating my own tool. https://dendron.so,
| is a new note taking tool (launched a week ago) that lets you
| take local-first markdown notes and supports links like roam.
| it's open source and built on top of vscode.
| dmje wrote:
| That looks pretty interesting - thanks, will give it a go!
| rhamzeh wrote:
| Have you tried [Joplin](https://joplinapp.org/)?
|
| It's FOSS, works on local files, has encryption and supports
| note linking.
|
| It also has apps for several platforms.
| johntash wrote:
| > works on local files
|
| This is only sort of true. You can import/export markdown(or
| text) files, but the source of truth is in a sqlite database.
| When you sync with webdav or another folder, that's also
| markdown - but it's not recommended to edit those files
| directly.
|
| Other than that, Joplin is great. It's my main note taking
| app outside of spacemacs/org-mode.
| dmje wrote:
| I have, and something about it didn't gel, but I'm gunna have
| to go install it again to remind myself - or maybe discover
| it's the holy grail :-)
| rajesh-s wrote:
| I see you didn't mention Markdown. My solution for the last
| couple of years to this problem is to have all my notes
| organized into folder and .md files. A couple of advantages: -
| I can move around different IDEs/apps since there are a lot of
| different solutions for every platform there. - Same goes for
| search and links between folders. Rely on git for version
| control of the files themselves. - It gives you the flexibility
| of using plugins to turn into PDF or host as a gitbook private
| site for example.
|
| Knowledge base organization gets discussed frequently on HN. I
| understand your frustration though, I've always longed to see a
| one fit for all platforms though. Onenote sure shows a lot of
| potential but is probably limited by the fact that MS wants to
| keep it as close to their office suite as possible.
| jorgekong wrote:
| Same, I've settled with a multi-OS IDE for taking notes. The
| main issue is trying to get shortcut keys for Markdown such
| as toggling a list. I haven't found a good extension either
| on JetBrains or VSCode ... maybe the only way is to
| personally write the extension haha
| nabilhat wrote:
| I have the same frustration. The real split seems to be on
| local files / encryption. I ran into a couple that had
| encryption stapled on as an afterthought and handle the
| encryption/decryption in storage, which misses the point. Some
| use keepass for secure notes, also a clunky hack. The closest I
| found was Tiddlywiki, which can encrypt local files (but only
| if it's a single html file). I don't like Tiddlywiki, but
| that's what I'm using.
| jasonv wrote:
| What I really don't understand about OneNote is the default to
| a white-board-like free form placement mode for text blocks. If
| you move it a little, accidentally, it's not aligned the same
| as the other notes.
|
| This _really_ put me off when I first started using it, and at
| a client site, it 's really the only option. Otherwise, the
| organization system is something I've come to like/live-with,
| but still -- why the boxes that can be moved around? Is there a
| "turn off free-form placement" mode that I haven't found?
| linuxdaemon wrote:
| That stupid placement thing is the "feature" I hate the most
| about onenote. Sometimes that is a benefit and the kind of
| note you'd want to make. But this seems like an easy fix of
| having two note types and being able to pick a global option
| of which way to default, and giving a drop-down option of
| what kind of note you wish to create if you wanted a one-off
| different than the default . Having it always be up to the
| user to place text frame objects is annoying when most of the
| time generic text notes is what you want.
|
| I personally don't care for the skeuomorphic organization of
| notebooks, tabs, and pages. But maybe that's just me :)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes and if you type one backspace too many it will delete the
| whole box and place it at an off-centre location when you
| click to make a new one.
|
| There's a workaround though: Click on the title and then
| press enter and it'll create one again in the right spot :)
|
| But yeah OneNote is bloated, slow, has the typical MS UI
| boneheadedness... But it's what I have to work with at work
| :'(
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| As much as I hate onenote, the ease of just hitting
| [super]+N to start a quick note is the lowest friction way
| to go from 'i need to write' to 'i am writing'. I've tried
| a few of the competitors but I guess I found my killer
| feature.
| McDev wrote:
| Would you mind elaborating on why Standard Notes is too buggy?
| Only thing that comes to mind is the use of React Native and
| Electron (suboptimal performance / UX) but I've never had any
| issues myself.
|
| I'd like to hear of alternatives that apply the same e2e
| encryption model.
| glenstein wrote:
| I also am on Standard Notes and haven't noticed it being
| buggy. But I'm presently a free user and never switch
| editors.
|
| It was after buggy experiences on Simplenote that I had to
| jump ship. I don't know if I just had too many notes, or
| what, but it became slow, updated in weird ways that lost
| things or copied the same line multiple times, jumped to the
| top when I tried to scroll down, etc. Just all manner of
| strange behaviors.
| dmje wrote:
| My main issue has been the editor(s). The model of having
| multiple choices of editor should be great but I've found it
| flaky when switching, particularly switching to mobile.
| Sometimes my whole note seems to disappear, but is ok if I
| flip back to simple editor, sometimes mobile shows html
| preview rather than plaintext.
| criddell wrote:
| > Evernote: no note linking
|
| What about this:
|
| https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313588-How-to...
| dmje wrote:
| Yeh, it does that, but when you're in context writing a note,
| you don't really want to jump out, trawl through all your
| other notes, find the link, go back to original note and
| apply... Really, you want a context menu, or the double
| square bracket notation to bring up a list, or similar. See.
| Said I was fussy :-)
| iamwpj wrote:
| I recommend not taking notes usually. Unless you're in a class or
| lecture, I'm not sure I see why you're taking notes. If you're
| learning a new technology you should be documenting that for use
| as you go. If you're writing code you should be adding notes to
| your code and readme. If you're troubleshooting, the details
| should be in the ticket. I'm not against note taking by any
| measure, but I don't see the function of it in a day to day
| workflow.
| marvinblum wrote:
| I take notes for others (collaboration and knowledge sharing)
| and to create a concept for problems I cannot keep in my head.
| Additionally I use a note book for quick notes, drawings and so
| on. Usually I will take pictures of parts that might be useful
| later and add them to my digital notes.
| dghughes wrote:
| I find Google Keep convenient it's simple and quick.
|
| Colour coding of notes, pinning notes, add a url to a note all
| basic stuff I find useful.
|
| The only missing feature is categories but I can do that
| manually. I add a header like "Tip" for notes I may need for
| work. Other categories I make up may be "Groceries " or what
| context the not related to.
|
| I prefer fast and simple over anything needlessly complex I mean
| it's quick notes not a thesis.
| timwis wrote:
| I've tried a lot of note taking apps over the last 8 years. Over
| the past few months I've become less fussed about the tools and
| more focused on the process: I now have a file for each week (I
| call it a journal or weekly notes), with a heading for each day
| of the week, and a sub-heading for each
| meeting/conversation/thing I'm thinking about. At the each week,
| as part of my weekly review (GTD), I review the weekly notes
| file. I scan my notes for each meeting/etc. and consider whether
| I need to do anything with them: I often have to create a task;
| sometimes I want to hang on to something so I move it into an
| evergreen note [1] on the topic (at the moment, I have one for
| work, and one for personal, but I expect I'll split these out as
| they accumulate). But for most things in my weekly notes, no
| action is necessary and I'll probably never look at them again
| (unless I need to refer back to something someone said later,
| which is easy to find if I wrote it).
|
| So far it's working pretty well for me. I think the key is the
| regular review/processing.
|
| I think I could implement this in just about any tool, so long as
| there's an easy way to quickly add an entry with a timestamp to
| the current weekly note file. I happen to use org-mode in emacs
| for this with org-journal (using doom emacs, only switched a
| couple months ago) but other tools would work just as well I bet.
|
| [1]:
| https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4SDCZQeRo4xFEQ8H4qrSqd68ucp...
| amirkdv wrote:
| > I've become less fussed about the tools and more focused on
| the process
|
| This has been my conclusion after years of trying different
| tools or even trying to make my own. Once I started focusing on
| the process I realized that not only I don't need a lot of
| features from a tool, I'm actually better off without any
| complex features.
|
| I just use markdown, vim, and git. This specific choice of
| tools for me is only guided by one thing: I don't want to waste
| _any_ brain cycles on figuring out / deciding how my note
| taking tools should behave. For someone else this could've been
| a Word doc and a folder structure. When you do that, then
| taking notes becomes as trivial as writing with pen and paper,
| except for the ability to edit and grep which is really all you
| need.
|
| Bonus: it's ridicuously easy to work with markdown (and
| friends) with pandoc. I routinely convert all my markdown notes
| to html and use < 100 loc of ad-hoc JS to give it a decent
| browsing UI.
| robotsquidward wrote:
| I'm temperamental and have suffered the paralysis of a hundred
| note apps/techniques. I have a notebook I handwrite in too, but
| it's just one of the many approaches on the pile.
|
| I was successful for a long time using GitHub Gists for notes, so
| much so in fact that I wrote an iOS client that lets you take
| markdown notes and saves them all directly to your Gists
| (OctoNote on iOS
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octonote/id1433164731) but since
| then I've added probably 5+ notes apps to the list.
|
| Just for fun, my feature list includes: * Markdown (ideally
| compatibility + basic styling) * Project viewing (sidebar listing
| out notes, representing folder structure) * Customizable
| themes/fonts * Git integration (or other cloud backup) * Mac app
| * iOS app
| manigandham wrote:
| After trying dozens of tools, I've come back to just using text
| files. Easy to edit, sync instantly with dropbox, compatible with
| everything. Images or other stuff just stored in folders.
| Word/excel files for more complicated stuff. Nothing beats files
| and folders.
|
| Also use a physical notepad for writing ephemeral things down
| because the tactile feeling of writing and crossing things off is
| very satisfying.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| > After trying dozens of tools, I've come back to just using
| text files.
|
| One day all of you will learn the way of the Unix.
| [deleted]
| bachmeier wrote:
| This is true for a certain class of apps. (I really like the
| website too. Clean and readable.)
|
| Having recently moved back to a Chromebook, I'll add one more to
| the long list, one that you don't really hear about. Gitlab comes
| with a very nice Web IDE. Create a new markdown file and start
| typing away. You get all the beauty of version control without
| having to use version control. Can even set it to automatically
| build your own private site. All free of charge. I'd argue this
| does stand out compared with, say, Evernote or OneNote.
| therealmarv wrote:
| I'm also tired. Now it's only a folder of Markdown files and
| pictures, Google Drive and VScode. Nobody can take it away from
| me. I'm in control.
|
| Btw. I think git is too cumbersome for notes. I don't care about
| history and git log and I don't want to push things manually for
| notes.
| leksak wrote:
| I've used Keep extensively, but have been slowly migrating over
| to Notion as I need more structure than what tags in Keep can
| afford me.
|
| The problem is probably me, I save a lot of stuff. But, Keep has
| become sluggish as a result. I'm not great at utilising tags, so
| oftentimes I'll just scroll through "everything" (sometimes
| narrowed by say searching for "images") and I have pretty decent
| visual memory so I'll readily find the thing I'm looking for just
| because things have the right shape (even text).
|
| Notion is sluggish with embeds. It doesn't deal with the visual
| information I store very well either. This might be a Firefox
| thing.
|
| Have used Evernote too, in the past. The problem with that is
| that it doesn't at all mirror my mental model of how things
| relate to one another. Granted, neither does Notion nor Keep.
|
| For me, things start out flat (Keep) and then they nest (Notion)
| but I also have interrelationships, and need pointers between
| things. Sometimes, I just want to explore the "web" of how things
| connect but I've never encountered a system that affords me
| different "cameras" to explore my curated content.
|
| I do not have the energy to build it though.
| akkshu92 wrote:
| Hmm, that's an interesting take, and I agree with all your
| points. Notion is decent, but it requires some learning curve
| to begin with. I also feel that the apps that optimize for
| taking notes in a structured, connected manner compromise on
| the UX front. There's no one size fits all.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| "Note Taking" is the wrong approach, imho. _You_ are responsible
| for putting things in and keeping it up to date, and of course
| this is prone to fatigue.
|
| An automatic knowledge base that is created from the signals you
| already generate anyway would serve you the best, I think. This
| is what I'm building with https://histre.com/
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Does it have e2e encryption? This is more or less a requirement
| nowadays for me.
| [deleted]
| kirubakaran wrote:
| From your profile: "Turtl a surveillance-resistant note-
| taking app". Nice! Looks like you've built your own note
| taking app. Of course you're not going to use mine :-)
| happyweasel wrote:
| ZIM desktop wiki (open source). For me, a real replacement for
| OneNote. Desktop app, no finicky markup skills required. Saves
| plain text files. Problem solved.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Note taking apps are stuck in a place similar to where "chat"
| apps are stuck.
|
| Competition between "chat" applications is driven by network
| effects. You don't choose Zoom because it is the best, you choose
| it because somebody else chose it for you. The overwhelming
| pattern is "CUSeeMe used to be good but now we use PalTalk,
| "Skype used to be good, but now everybody uses WebEx", or "WebEx
| used to be good and now everybody uses Zoom", or "AOL Instant
| Messenger used to be good and now everybody uses Facebook
| Messenger". Despite a large advance in the underlying technology,
| the functionality of these applications doesn't seem much better.
|
| I worked at a startup where one of our problems was finding
| documents in the 20 different cloud services we might put
| documents. The usual answer people had was to add a new cloud
| service, but that means you now have 21 places a document might
| be and it is astonishing how far people will go down this road
| without any insight into how it is an obvious dead end.
|
| The obvious way out is to build some system that sucks in content
| from places, a "note finding" app or "note organizing" app
| instead of a "note taking".
|
| What astonishes me is that so few people are working on that or
| even believe that it is possible. Two factors are that
|
| (1) People are intimidated by full text search. First people
| think "you can't beat Google" and second if you look at Google
| you see Google is not very good. That's depressing. The first
| four volumes of TREC are depressing because people try all the
| obvious things that should improve relevance. (in the 5th volume
| they discover BM25, which nobody to this day since they don't
| work to do the work to tune two numeric parameters to the data
| set) Ask people how to make a scalable full text engine and they
| say "Solr" and I say "are you kidding?" OpenText and ten thousand
| imitators will boast about the hundreds of connectors they have
| to the most enterprise-y data sources, but they will say very
| little about relevance, in fact if they participated in TREC they
| did it as an advertisement, not because they saw accuracy tuning
| as a competitive differentiator. A breakthrough is possible, but
| nobody believes it.
|
| (2) The "app economy" itself is dependent on lock-in. If there
| was "one ring to bind them all" in terms of the document spaces a
| person uses, that's an existential threat to all of the programs
| that want you to keep using them. So once you get some traction
| in this area you are going to see frantic measures taken quickly
| to cut off access -- like what happened with the Twitter API when
| they put all the alternative clients out of business.
| gexla wrote:
| Taking notes is a process. If you're tired of the apps, then you
| haven't put enough thought into the process. The available apps
| are fine.
|
| Picking a tool to solve a problem is the opposite approach to how
| you solve the problem. You instead need to define the problem and
| then find the tool which is the best fit. If you're frustrated
| with the tool, then you might need to put more thought into the
| problem.
| ClikeX wrote:
| I ran into a lot of issues with note apps over the years. Tried
| many, but none really stuck. Until I realized that software
| based note/planning tools just don't work for me. W
|
| An app is hidden away on my phone, and I need to actively open
| it to use it. But my bullet journal is always in my bag. It
| serves as a physical reminder. And it oddly gives me way more
| flexibility in how I structure it.
|
| Being a software developer myself, the irony isn't lost me.
| gukov wrote:
| Premature optimization also plays a role. Everyone should start
| with a notepad and a pencil and move up to something more
| advanced once they outgrow the most basic method of note
| taking. It's a bit like buying a top of line DSLR when you're
| just starting to get into photography.
| gexla wrote:
| Also, many people like Journals and plain text because these
| methods don't lend themselves to blaming the tool. They force
| you to think about the problem rather than the tool.
|
| Plain text doesn't fix note-taking any more than it can fix to-
| do lists. Again, there's no tool to blame.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/
| boomskats wrote:
| To add mine into the mix, I went through all the apps imaginable
| before settling on Inkdrop. The electron-ness of it all annoys me
| a bit, but aside from that it does everything I've ever wanted
| (aside from inking) very very well.
| jorgekong wrote:
| Looks good. Do you use Inkdrop with cloud or can you store save
| it locally?
| AdamGibbins wrote:
| It's cloud only, end-to-end encrypted. Usable offline. You
| can host your own sync server if need be, its just CouchDB:
| https://docs.inkdrop.app/manual/synchronizing-in-the-
| cloud/#...
| pjmlp wrote:
| I just use whatever comes with the phone, never understood the
| "market" of note taking apps.
| criddell wrote:
| Does Android ship with a note taking app?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Kind of, either you have Google's or some other one provided
| by the device manufacter.
|
| For me that use them as digital paper replacement, more than
| enough, just like on the Symbian days.
|
| Before J2ME and Symbian, I would just use SMS drafts as quick
| notes.
|
| So I am not the target market, whatever it might be.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't believe Keep comes pre-installed on Android. AFAIK,
| there's no default notes app other than email (and a lot of
| people use their email client as a notes app).
| pjmlp wrote:
| My Nokia 7 plus had it pre-installed, and my former LG,
| Asus and Samsung all had their own note taking apps pre-
| installed.
| hs86 wrote:
| There is a lot of feature overlap between these note-taking apps,
| but I always find one or two missing critical features. It seems
| like most apps try to be a one-size-fits-all solution, and they
| fail in doing so.
|
| My new approach uses dedicated apps for each use case. I am
| trying Raindrop.io (or Pinboard.in) as web clippers / persistent
| bookmark managers, I am using Todoist to organize (and gamify) my
| tasks, and I use VSCode for general note-taking. Especially
| VSCode, with its vast extension marketplace, seems to be a
| balanced solution for customizing the note-taking experience. I
| can pick my preferred Markdown extension with LaTeX math support
| and add additional comfort features like TabNine or Grammarly for
| a better writing experience than whatever these one-size-fits-all
| solutions such as Evernote or Notion can offer.
| chrisbai wrote:
| Easy cross-linking notes and the ability to categorize with tags
| are essential to note taking apps. A fast and powerful search is
| as much important. If the note taking app can be turned into a
| Zettelkasten system, then you definitely should have a more
| detailed look at the app. https://passfindr.com does exactly
| this. Passfindr also lets one encrypt user generated content so
| it can be used as a password/secrets store as well. It needs to
| work on every internet enabled platform and devices. So your
| choice must be the best maintained application: the web browser.
| As an everyday user for my micro documents, articles, secrets and
| all kind of resources and ideas, I'm definitely not tired of
| Passfindr.
| bobflorian wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but it's a crowded market that if
| there was an easy, elegant solution that met everyone's needs
| we'd already have some leaders out there. Maybe we already do. My
| person preference is Notion at the moment.
| akkshu92 wrote:
| That's nice. I used to like taking notes on Notion. But one
| day, I got annoyed when I was not able to quickly search an old
| note as it was nested under some other note. Took a while for
| me to realize and make sense of that.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| I think the reason writing things down is stickier than the apps
| is because they have a dedicated "always on" quality.
|
| I wonder if you could get part of the way there by having an iPad
| or remarkable tablet that is just always on and charged ready to
| take notes.
| m0xte wrote:
| My go to is goodnotes on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. Has a
| desktop app for macos as well. Literally I haven't touched a
| physical notepad since. It is always ready, expressive and just
| works. Plus I can split screen with PCalc to crunch some
| numbers.
| powersnail wrote:
| Digital notes are too limiting in my opinion.
|
| All digital note apps have the problem of making me work very
| hard to fit my thought into their "organization" of things:
| hyperlinks, a list of some arbitrary order, a tree,
| synchronization quirks, and whatever.
|
| It's very painful to work outside their envisioned use cases.
|
| For instance, most open-source solutions focus on a plain text,
| and if I do use plain text, they are reasonably good. They
| problem is I need more than that. I need diagrams and tables.
| Tables written with ascii characters are really hard to
| maintain.
|
| In the end, I went back to a notebook, and occasionally a stack
| of sticky memos when I need to clean up some disorganized
| thoughts. The benefit of the physical world is the freedom of
| doing whatever I want to the medium: ordering, clustering,
| rotating, clipping, pasting, etc.
|
| I guess that the digital user experience just isn't there yet.
| rs23296008n1 wrote:
| I'm still using my old note app I wrote years ago back in 2003
| and keep porting to every gadget I use. Its amusing to use such
| an old ppc app under Windows 10.
| ineedanaccount wrote:
| Just use a piece of paper. What's so hard about that?
| CareyB wrote:
| I've tried many, many different apps, and approaches over the
| years. On of my peeves is doing things twice, so here are, to my
| mind, the important decision making factors:
|
| 1. cross-device/platform support. Once I was entirely Apple, I
| settled on Drafts (post processing when necessary), and Apple
| Notes. If you have multiple OS's involved, the decision is harder
| (Evernote). The logic is that I wanted some contextually
| sensitive templates for field notes, and Drafts does that with
| its version of 'macros'. Having the MacOS version makes writing
| reports from my notes is dead easy.
|
| If you're less concerned with re-typing, and/or transcribing, do
| what you want.
| groby_b wrote:
| There is a non-zero chance you won't always be on the same
| platform. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use the best app for
| your platform, but it's worth to think about how you migrate
| data out when that day comes.
|
| I've spent roughly a decade or so on each platform I've been
| on, and then moved on, because either the platform lost its
| way, or I needed different things. I've learned the painful way
| that you want data liberation.
| sjellis wrote:
| Yes, this is one of the reasons that I decided to use Joplin:
| it's Open Source and cross-platform. I never want my notes to
| be locked to one or two platforms.
| paulcole wrote:
| > helps me stay in touch with my handwriting
|
| What does this even mean?
| bt1a wrote:
| I too am paralyzed by the number of choices available. I've found
| that a simple todo.txt in Sublime with a Notes syntax
| highlighting package is all that I need.
| https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Notes
| JSavageOne wrote:
| I don't have a solution for mobile (not a big deal for me), but
| at least on desktop I just use a git repository of markdown files
| with Sublime Text.
|
| My main complaint is that markdown hyperlinks are just extremely
| ugly to look at in text form, so I wish there was a nice editor
| or extension that supports hyperlinks. I've stuck with Sublime
| Text for the note-taking simply because it loads so fast and the
| keyboard shortcuts are great, but open to alternative editors
| (ideally open source). Or maybe there's a good Markdown extension
| for Sublime that I'm not aware of.
| sylens wrote:
| Check out Bear. You can write notes in Markdown format but with
| some QoL features from traditional note taking apps, including
| a nicer hyperlink experience
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Sad that it's Mac/iPad/iPhone only :\
| dageshi wrote:
| Roam Research was the one I settled on. It melds exactly with how
| my mind works. I think it's probably doubled my productivity.
| msamwald wrote:
| I got very motivated to use Roam, but then settled for
| Dynalist. It's more polished, cheaper, and they recently added
| backlinks as well.
| dageshi wrote:
| Opposite way around for me interestingly, I used dynalist
| (and paid for it) last year before moving to roam. The thing
| I really like about roam other than the graph is the auto
| generated daily todo pages, so you've always got somewhere to
| immediately start writing. And the TODO overview page, which
| lets you see all the todos you added across all notes. The
| two are really powerful, you can organically write out
| whatever is in your head, leaving todo's as breadcrumbs to
| regain context later.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| If it matters to you: athens research is an open source
| alternative
|
| https://github.com/athensresearch/athens
| DigitallyFidget wrote:
| I actually use GIMP for taking notes and save as both an xcf and
| pdf. GIMP is basically a simplified and free Photoshop. I can
| doodle concepts that can't be explained clearly with text alone
| unless I do a bunch of formatting and ASCII art.
| unixhero wrote:
| Radical!
| tmsh wrote:
| I find the Things.app very convenient (and worth the one time
| cost for macOS and iOS since I use it 10-100 times per day).
|
| The key part of using inbox-oriented task apps is to have a
| process to review the inbox and fold it into some shallow
| hierarchy of "folders" or "projects" etc. I didn't realize this
| was the key part of all systems like bullet journaling or GTD (or
| the different org mode flows or NV as I understand them).
|
| It's basic data structures. But after a certain point it's not
| efficient to access things linearly, so you need to introduce
| some sort of tree.
|
| Recently I took the time to go through my almost 1000 inbox notes
| and fold them into 'promo notes' or 'startup ideas' or 'startup
| resources'. All of which can be usually grouped into one more
| level for even faster access ('no code resources', 'design
| resources', etc).
|
| It all comes down to caches being fast for writing and reading
| but then there needs to be maintenance to preserve access speed.
|
| It took me three years (and 1000 unfinished notes) to realize
| this. But you just need that process to organize periodically and
| then the structure in place is there (now I daily just move
| things to the right project/area; and assess whether to create
| new projects / refactor maybe once a month).
| thallukrish wrote:
| I write a lot of notes in a notebook with pen. But I never see
| them. Very rarely I may revisit something. And I have often found
| that even if I read them they don't seem to matter to me now. So
| is all the hype of taking notes justified I wonder?
| WalterBright wrote:
| "I've finally resorted to the most personal and easy alternative
| -- writing things down."
|
| Haha, we've come full circle! I have a $.79 spiral notebook on my
| desk for notes. When it fills up, I scan it in, and buy another
| one.
| greenhacker wrote:
| Because of many of your noted downfalls of popular note-taking
| apps, I spent a few years developing MinimaList Outline: a nested
| list mobile app for Android.
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.toadlybrood...
|
| I use it everyday as it easily helps me organize huge amounts of
| data in a clean hierarchical manner. Give it a try, let me know
| what you think!
| wb14123 wrote:
| I use QOwnNote with NextCloud. It has a lot of features and is
| very enjoyable to use. It doesn't lock you down with a specific
| format. It just adds an additional database for tags. You have
| the raw files with txt or markdown format organized perfectly in
| your folders. And with the ability to host the sync server by
| yourself, you don't need to give the sensitive information to
| third-party organization.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I am not tired of my notepad.exe
| jp42 wrote:
| I had same issue of using several apps and not sticking to
| anyone. Now I forced myself to stick to apple notes and its
| working fine. plain text + cloud sync worked out for me.
| MH15 wrote:
| I've been using Google Keep for temporary things, e.g. grocery
| lists or ideas I'll need to expand upon later; and I use
| notebooks to brainstorm/document my ideas as I actually go in
| depth. This is what works for me for software engineering and my
| general life.
| anonymousse1234 wrote:
| I'm using Pilot Custom 74 fountain pen with my favourite inks on
| high quality paper notebooks. It makes me want to take notes due
| to the whole experience and does't restrict me in any way the
| computer does . For longer text/programming related stuff nothing
| beats pure text and files in common directory.
| unixhero wrote:
| Simplenote for the win. Used it for 4 years, absolutely no fuzz.
|
| https://simplenote.com/
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| I used it for a long time - really liked how no frills it is,
| but the fact that notes aren't stored encrypted in the cloud
| (by design) was a deal-breaker for me in the end. I use the
| notes as a brain backup and they're absolutely unfiltered
| thoughts, which need to be stored securely. In the end I
| switched to standard notes, which has functioned perfectly well
| for me since then (a bit over a year I think).
| tonymet wrote:
| If you do a feature by feature comparison , including data
| retention , uptime , throughput , graphics support ( writing
| enables unlimited diagramming ) , power requirements ,
| reliability -- Pen and paper come out on top every time .
|
| I recommend getting into fountain pens. They are the mechanical
| keyboards of the writing world . And the ink flow is cathartic
| tonymet wrote:
| also environmental impact.
| nojito wrote:
| The amount of notion spam on the internet is pretty remarkable.
|
| Every year...there's a new FOTM note taking app, but this post
| hit the nail on the head....they are all absolutely awful and
| cater to serial movers.
| dade_ wrote:
| My concern is usability and not being locked into proprietary
| formats, also I use NextCloud for syncing. So, no single app does
| the trick, but this is working well for me here days:
|
| For had written notes, sketches, Daily journal & learning (graph
| paper with straight lines and snapping) - Write by Stylus Labs,
| works on iPad, Android, Window, etc. Files in svg/svgz. App opens
| nearly instant.
|
| Joplin for Tasks, Notes, recipes, web clippings. Markdown with
| proprietary indexed folders, but easy import/export. Local
| storage on my phone, so instant access to my information with
| search.
|
| QOwnnotes for long form, journal, blog entries. Markdown in
| regular file structure. For iPad I use Writemator.
| andylynch wrote:
| I think this post almost touches on an interesting point - note
| taking apps & software are also competing against pen and paper,
| which are many ways stronger.
|
| As a product for example, Moleskine (arguably the brand leader)
| most recently reports nearly EUR 175M in sales - nearly double
| that of Evernote, and you have many good alternatives in any
| stationer for just a few dollars.
| djhworld wrote:
| > software are also competing against pen and paper, which are
| many ways stronger.
|
| for scratchy notes that you don't care about sure, but if you
| want to search, copy/paste, erase etc. physical notebooks are
| the worst.
|
| I was an advocate for moleskine books at one time, but got sick
| of trying to remember where I wrote something
| agustif wrote:
| Hopefully evernote (or any software vs physical) has a better
| margin?
| 100-xyz wrote:
| I use beastnotes and like it. I like the way it's organized into
| books and chapters.
| Errancer wrote:
| I started doing my notes in ms access database and it's currently
| working really well for me. I'm doing zettelkasten inspired
| system and right now it's having only 3 columns - notes, sources
| and tags. The ability to fully modify the relation between them
| is something I find infinitely more valuable than anything an app
| can provide.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| > add screenshots/images, links, etc
|
| A printer and a url shortened would replace these
| Maha-pudma wrote:
| I used both.
|
| If I'm learning I will write notes with a pencil and paper
| (pencil over pen every time). This means I have to think more
| about what I'm writing and for me is more flexible. I use an A4
| squared pad with an index at the front, each page is split
| similar to the Cornell note taking system which is good for
| summarising and adding tags for quickly finding information. My
| notes are scribbled and messy. I will then transcribe these onto
| a computer using text files and folders for structure. You can't
| beat text files. As a front end for this I use Zim Desktop Wiki.
| Cross platform, portable, and easy to use with a simple markup
| syntax. It offers many excellent features, including a journal,
| tasks, diagrams, spell checking, interlinking, back links,
| searching, tags, images, tables, version control, and many
| others. Drop the notes into Dropbox and you have syncing.
|
| If the worse comes and Zim disappears it's all just text files
| and folders. Pandoc can convert Zim to markdown or whatever you
| like.
|
| For other quick notes I use a reporters jotter. I will transcribe
| them onto the computer if they are important. But generally these
| notes are throw away.
| jcelerier wrote:
| vouching for zim too
| Maha-pudma wrote:
| The way Zim organises the notes really makes sense to me. I
| know you could do what Zim does manually and use built in
| Linux tools to accomplish most if not all its features but
| it's nice to have it all in one package.
| techntoke wrote:
| Markdown and similar markup languages is the perfect note taking
| solution.
| mechhacker wrote:
| I've been really happy with combining both Nebo and Evernote
|
| Nebo has great handwriting/math/schematic recognition and I can
| export as recognized text to Evernote. That way both the original
| handwriting and the text are stored in two different places.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| Author hasn't prioritized note taking as an important part of her
| daily life, so she writes a blog post blaming apps for it. If you
| want your life to be better, _you_ have to make it better.
|
| This the same rant I went on a rant about with exercise apps
| recently. These apps aren't going to do anything for you that you
| wouldn't already do for yourself if they didn't exist.
|
| If a pen and notebook didn't get you into daily note taking, then
| an app one either, just like it wont get you fit. You have to
| change yourself. You have to take responsibility for your
| behavior and your actions, and that's how you drive change. Not
| by waiting for whizbang app features.
| douglaswlance wrote:
| Nothing beats plaintext.
| grugagag wrote:
| I learned that a while ago and settled on notepad++ to organize
| my daily work. Every new tab opens and without needing to be
| saved is persisted even if computer restarts. That is a perfect
| scratchpad for ideas.
|
| What I want to keep gets named and is then classified. For is
| no longer useful the tab gets closed and not saved.
|
| Notepad++ allows for searching all documents within folders as
| well.
|
| Another great option is moving lines up and down for
| prioritizing lists for which there is a shortcut
| ctrl+alt+up/down arrows.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I absolutely love notepad++; for many reaosns including but
| not limited to: beinglightweight, fast, quite featureful even
| before resorting to the many plugins, etc. The only downside
| is it is for windows only. For my dayjob i'm forced to use
| windows, so can enjoy notepad++ for everything (from dev. to
| basic notetaking, to journaling)...but all my personal
| machines run linx OS...so no notepad++. I love the choice of
| note-taking apps on linux - kwrite, leafpad, etc. - but i
| wish notepad++ would exist for linux distros. If anyone could
| recommend a notepad++ clone but for linux, would greatly
| appreciate it!
|
| Also, yeah, I've learned so long ago that plain text -
| regardless of which actual app i use - is awesome (flexible,
| scriptable, readable far off into the future, no system lock-
| in, etc.).
| douglaswlance wrote:
| VSCode can support most any plaintext workflow, as long as
| you're ok with the electron overhead.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I tried to give VSCode a decent shot...and it is not bad
| at all; actually pretty good. I do like its
| customizability, the plugins, etc...and it does check the
| box of being available on the major operating systems
| that i use (windows for work, linux for personal)...but
| it can get quite heavy on resources. I'm on the fence
| about anything electron-related: great to be able to roll
| out on numerous OS/platforms, but heavy on resources.
| Ultimately, because of the heavy overhead - in my mind -
| i've put vscode as only a second-best text editor to my
| preferred notepad++. Thank you very much, though, for the
| recommendation!!
|
| p.s. - Because of some comments here, I'm actually trying
| Geany (seems lightweight, cross-platform, etc.)...we'll
| see if it can replace notepad++ for me.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I agree with y'all there is magic when writing on paper. When
| you're actually writing. That's why Sony's DPT-RP1 (DPT-S1, DPT-
| CP1) feel like magic and future for note taking the only downside
| is the price and the availability of replacements pen tips. While
| there is, of course, a lot that could be improved, I was moved by
| the core idea itself, virtually infinite notebook. Imagine how
| much different your experience through schools and life would be
| of all of your notes from elementary school until now we're
| always in one place, always available to you. So much
| potential... Makes me quite excited for the future. (There are of
| course other 'digital paper' devices (remarkable, ...), but
| DPT-S1 was my first love, although we never got to meet, I did,
| for a week, own DPT-RP1 before I returned it to Amazon, because
| at the time I couldn't afford a ~700-900EUR device)
| dilandau wrote:
| Creating a note-taking app and/or a Todo list are effectively
| rites of passage. There's something aspirational both in the
| creation of the app and the creation of a more orderly daily
| existence.
|
| Looked at this way, I think we can explain both the proliferation
| for, and the dissatisfaction with note taking apps.
| RMPR wrote:
| Emacs org-mode (Desktop) + syncthing + Orgzly (mobile)
|
| And I have pretty much everything to take a note when I want to +
| it's plain text so I don't even need the apps to write, very
| convenient if for one reason or another I don't have access to
| one of my devices.
| 13415 wrote:
| I'm using Leuchtturm 1917 Notebooks with enumerated pages and a
| table of contents. I've tried many electronic notetaking
| solutions but none of them have the flexibility, especially not
| with regards to formulas and diagrams.
| aftergibson wrote:
| I'm liking PARA with Notion right now. I make pretty heavy use of
| linked databases to keep track of things day to day and I can get
| a high level view of what I've got going on/completed for
| reviews/1:1s/when people ask what I did 2 quarters ago. I can
| throw a bunch of varied data formats into Notion too, which is
| great.
|
| This is all only for work-life however, normal-life doesn't fit
| into this approach or more specifially I don't want to ruin life
| outside work with this approach(believe me I tried, it's a great
| way to feel like a constant failure). I have yet to find anything
| useful for non-work insights. Nothing fits, but maybe it doesn't
| matter?
| Firehawke wrote:
| I get that these aren't for everyone, but I'd rather have too
| many choices than not enough. Finding the precise tool that does
| exactly what one needs is a challenge even with the number of
| note-taking apps out there.
|
| In my case, I've recently switched to using Trilium Notes which
| ALMOST meets my needs, but I still need OneNote as well for
| sketch-based notes for the time being.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| My note taking app or choice is Squid/Papyrus. Works best with a
| stylus.
|
| It is essentially virtual paper, it replaces a notebook, no more,
| no less.
|
| But the thing it has that I've seen nowhere else is that it is
| vector based, with an unlimited size canevas and high zoom
| (10%-1000%).
|
| It sounds so obvious as a feature. I mean, if you have a stylus,
| besides drawing, taking notes is the most obvious thing you can
| do with it. And what can a screen do and paper cannot? Scrolling
| and zooming. And because smartphones are powerful computers and
| we have good algorithms, there is no reason to limit canevas size
| artificially.
|
| So I went in and looked at the most popular note taking apps,
| thinking: these are made by many-million dollar companies they
| must have that. And no. All I found was cloud-synchronized text
| files. None took advantage of the drawing capabilities of
| smartphones, or they did it in a half-assed way. The S-Note app
| (I have a Galaxy Note 4) is nice, but it is bitmap and with a
| limited canevas size, why? Can't Samsung do better?
|
| Only one app did it right and that's Squid (previously Papyrus).
| And it is a little known one compared to the likes of Evernote.
| It isn't even mentioned in the article even though it is the
| closest thing to the "writing things down" solution it
| recommends, so I suspect the author doesn't know its existence.
| Otherwise I think he would have mentioned it, even if it is just
| to talk about how it doesn't fit his needs.
| AJRF wrote:
| Yes this is self promotion, but its also under a thread about
| people frustrated with note taking apps so I think it is ok - I
| made NitroNotes[0] because I was annoyed at even the slow startup
| speed of Apple Notes.
|
| You have 7 Dots, each one corresponding to a separate note. You
| swipe between each note (or on macOS you can Click Cmd+1, 2,
| etc).
|
| The app is less than a MB on iOS, and just over a MB on macOS.
|
| It syncs using your iCloud account between macOS, iOS & iPadOS.
|
| Its like the Sticky Notes app for Mac, but cross platform and
| with zero-friction sync.
|
| Email me @ adam@adamfallon.com if you can't afford the $4.99 and
| I will send you over a promo code.
|
| [0] - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/nitronotes/id1502080216
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| US apple store, for the ones in the US [0]. Just made me
| discover that the Apple App ID is the same. Only difference is
| :s/GB/US/g
|
| [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nitronotes/id1502080216
| AJRF wrote:
| Thank you for that.
| buybackoff wrote:
| I used emails to self for notes. Tried Evernote, OneNote, Keep.
| The problem always was: it is a separate app/page, more actions
| are needed than just writing an email.
|
| But since Google added three buttons and panel at the right of
| GMail web interface with tasks, calendar and Keep - that problem
| is gone. It's also possible to attach an email to a task or note,
| and tasks with notifications go automatically to the calendar.
|
| I still miss some features from Keep, e.g. richer formatting or
| markgown would be nice, but the main friction is gone and I use
| tasks and Keep quite regularly.
|
| For work I use StickyNotes in Windows, one per projects. Before
| that it was just notepad, but StickyNotes have richer formatting
| (than nothing) and autosave.
| Hippocrates wrote:
| Notes on iOS/OSX/iPad is the only one I use. Plenty of formatting
| and media features, search (and from spotlight) sync between
| devices, sharing/collab, and on iPad I can hand-write and it will
| transcribe and index my handwriting.
|
| Nothing else has come close for me and it's free.
| leonroy wrote:
| The title of this blog post strikes a chord although whilst I
| love writing with a fountain pen, transcribing my notes to
| computer later is a royal pain.
|
| It's also irritating to have bunches of notes in Apple's Notes
| app, in Confluence, in Notion, in Google Docs and goodness knows
| where else.
|
| The movement to cloud has driven a coach and horses through the
| whole reasoning behind the EU/US push to get Microsoft to be more
| open and not hold institutions to ransom with data locked within
| a proprietary vendor's platform:
|
| https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...
|
| Now we've gone full tilt towards a world of proprietary clouds
| where we don't even have custody of our own data and instead
| entrust it to a MongoDB cluster somewhere managed by the latest
| hot, new note taking startup.
|
| Where are the regulators when you need them to ensure we can get
| our data in and out of these platforms?
|
| As for me, I find vim or Sublime and Markdown synced via Dropbox
| work tolerably well. I keep toying with the idea of writing an
| open source Markdown syncing solution with open source clients
| for note taking...
|
| That aside the proprietary nature of the cloud and especially how
| it pertains to note taking (and todo apps) is a real step
| backwards. The regulators who forced Microsoft to submit in the
| past would be gnashing their teeth at the situation we have
| today.
| SllX wrote:
| It's easy to be overwhelmed by choice, but consider all of the
| different ways that people have recorded paper notes, and you can
| figure that there will be at least as much diversity in
| electronic notes. What we're seeing today is just the tip of the
| iceberg, we'll probably keep inventing new note taking software
| for as long as we have interesting computers to do so with.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Not so much tired of it as extremely indifferent. I'm simply not
| the type of person that uses tools like this; at all. I know
| plenty of people that take notes, use post its, etc. I can't even
| read my own handwriting and wielding a pen is physically painful
| for me. So not a thing in my life.
|
| I tend to treat written notes as short lived and transient. I'll
| literally create a new tab in whatever editor, write or paste
| something there and typically never even bother to save it.
| Either I act on it or it's a form of documentation that ends up
| in a more permanent place like a README, issue report, article,
| code comment, etc.
| antisthenes wrote:
| I'm in the same boat.
|
| Every minute I spend taking notes on something is probably
| better spent doing the actual thing. I have tabs open until I
| do the thing, then I just archive them and close them.
|
| Same goes for any to-do list.
| stevedonovan wrote:
| Except for written dialog with my inner Rubber Duck. But then
| it's all about process, and the result is not important after
| a few days.
| mstngl wrote:
| After this thread became a discussion of competing, sometimes
| extreme approaches, I want to add one alternative. Markdown
| files, organized in folder hierarchy and synchronized by the
| service of choice are fine for me - for notes and knowledge
| collection. Recently I started to add the superpower of tags and
| links to other files by using Apps like Obsidian[1] and Zettlr[2]
| which are very similar. The great advantage is, that you just
| show these apps the par of your notes folder and are not
| maintaining notes in an app-specific environment. The syntax for
| tags and links is simple and will not disturb massively even if
| opening the files in a text editor.
|
| This approach merges the simplicity of plain text, the power of
| tags and links and keep this independent of the of
| synchronization, backup or future development of these apps or
| anything in this stack of tools.
|
| [1] https://obsidian.md/ [2] https://www.zettlr.com/
| kevinslin wrote:
| if you are looking for an open source version of
| obsidian/zettlr, I would check out https://dendron.so
| (disclaimer, I'm the author). supports all the same features
| and built on top of vscode. use it to manage my personal
| knowledge base of 20k md files
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| Obsidian's licensing makes it immediate non-starter for me and
| I would imagine the same for most people who would want to use
| it for work, side projects, or anything they hope to make money
| off of.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| TL;DR: I decided to write things down, because no single note-
| taking app convinced me so far.
|
| Well, obvious. I use Notion (and love/hate it), and write things
| down a lot. What a surprise.
| koheripbal wrote:
| I've tried many different systems, and the one I settled on is a
| single simple doc. It's the only method I've used for over a
| year.
|
| You can do google doc or office doc, but the key for me was
| having one doc that I just keep prepending to.
|
| Each day i'll add the date yyyy-mm-dd (dow) in bold and then list
| my work for the day... I use hyperlinks to dedicated docs or
| online guides for more involved projects (quick ctrl-k), and add
| a little check mark when it's done.
|
| By adding days in the future, I am able to schedule work or set
| reminders, and with ctrl-f I can search the doc for anything I've
| done previously as it also acts as a journal.
|
| I often used to get lost in the minutia of catagorization, and
| having list sorting help me determine priority, but I've come to
| realize that I already know what needs to be done, and roughly in
| which order. ... my bottleneck was always focus. Excessive task
| structure can be a procrastination in itself.
|
| Going back to paper as op suggests seems like a step back.
|
| It's not perfect, but it works. I do still wish I could add some
| sort of hierarchy to line items and also be able to zoom out to
| see the bigger picture, but for now that just sits in another
| dedicated doc that I schedule myself to look at now and again.
|
| Hitting 18 months now on this system. Have never felt so
| organized.
| tedmiston wrote:
| An outliner app like WorkFlowy (YC S10) or TaskPaper is nice
| for adding nesting and the ability to zoom in and out.
|
| You can also directly link to any node, at least in WorkFlowy.
|
| My approach is similar to yours except it's one hierarchical
| entry per day.
|
| https://workflowy.com/
|
| https://www.taskpaper.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner
| submeta wrote:
| +1 for TaskPaper.
|
| Markdown for notes and Taskpaper for tasks, projects and
| outlines. It is a format and a Mac app, that is extremely
| well made. Super fast keyboard navigation, customizable
| styles and scriptable in JavaScript. Love it.
| lukebyear wrote:
| I've landed on the same approach, in WorkFlowy. I'll tag
| lines #todo for tasks, or a project-specific hashtag, so it's
| really easy to see everything I've written about a subject.
| Only two months in but it's great and very low-friction.
| Using RocketBook to merge in handwritten notes I make in the
| mornings and evenings sometimes.
| dicytea wrote:
| I'm sad there's still no good offline and native clone of
| Workflowy/Dynalist after all these years. I've tried many
| other outliner-like note-taking software, but I haven't found
| anything that is more comfortable to use than the outliner
| system in Workflowy/Dynalist. To paraphrase a quote I've
| heard online, "it fits my brain like a glove."
| msamwald wrote:
| Dynalist has an offline app (which syncs with the server
| when online). See https://dynalist.io/download . It's the
| same interface as on the web (so not 'native'), though.
| DougWebb wrote:
| I've ended up in the same place, but I use a text file. After
| years of trying to use time tracking systems, TODO systems, and
| journaling systems, I could never get past their data-entry-
| inefficiency compared to just opening a text file in vim and
| typing.
|
| I do need a better way to view and report my data though, so
| what I've done is write a read-only reporting GUI that can
| parse my text file, give me daily/weekly/per-task/per-client
| reporting on my time tracking, per-day views of any journal
| entries, and a TODO list. It can even export the current week's
| entries in a format that pastes into my invoice spreadsheet
| template.
|
| This is all managed in a per-year text file, 2020.txt, that's
| easy to back up and could be version controlled if I needed to
| do that.
| mlboss wrote:
| I have been using a single text file for past 5 years. Ability
| to do vim regex search is a big plus. Lately I have been
| thinking of adding a search engine on top of mac's notes.sqlite
| db.
| lazyjeff wrote:
| I've written a bit about combining a todo list with
| notetaking in a single text file:
|
| https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/
|
| Last time I posted it on Hacker News, quite a few people told
| me they adopted this workflow.
| ufmace wrote:
| This is a lot like what I've been using for over 5 years now.
| Key points for me are:
|
| * Plain text only, no graphics, formatting, outlining, tagging,
| categories, etc. These are all distractions to actually getting
| your point down and don't really add any value, don't get
| sucked into them.
|
| * Ability to do simple text search and go to specific date. Big
| lifesaver for any problem that looks like "So exactly what did
| I do on this one specific day 3 months ago?"
|
| Paper is nice for avoiding distracting formatting details. But
| losing out on free text search is too much of a drag.
| heimatau wrote:
| I appreciate this suggestion.
|
| It can act a journal, as you mentioned but...it's a linear
| overview of the things churning in your mind. And something
| great can come out of it but regardless, it helps you in more
| than one way.
|
| I appreciate the insights and methods you use. I sometimes
| over-complicate solutions when all that's needed is a catch-all
| drawer.
| 5986043handy wrote:
| The primary disadvantage of handwriting notes for me is a total
| lack of search functionality.
| fenesiistvan wrote:
| I was trying and using one single app for this purpose:
| Simplenote.
|
| Installed a few years ago to all my devices. Simple and works.
| Why should anyone waste time trying all alternatives, after a
| first good enough app have been found which fulfills most needs?
| ddelphin wrote:
| Trying to use all the bells and whistles of a note taking app is
| a distraction from just using the app to write things down.
| Depending on the platform, get yourself a stylus and just write
| as you normally would on paper. Later you can learn the
| features... Worked for me and I love it! I use my digital
| notebook as a secondary brain.
| aae42 wrote:
| i would definitely consider myself one of those who jumps around
| but never becomes a repeat user..
|
| just recently i came across the first exception to that...
| Joplin... https://joplinapp.org/
|
| been using it for a little while now and am planning on sticking
| to it for a bit longer, i have it integrated with my personal
| nextcloud instance
| residualmind wrote:
| I'm mostly using text files at the moment:
|
| I have a 'global' notes file in my home directory and then
| sometimes project specific notes in project directories.
|
| My .envrc in project directories prints the project-specific
| notes file when I cd into there.
|
| I have aliases and scripts that make adding a line to a file
| easy:
|
| m foobar # (m for memo) appends "* foobar" to my global notes.
|
| t foobar # (t for task) appends "o foobar" to it (the `o` I
| replace with an x when it's done)
|
| There's an alias to print the notes file and one to edit it.
|
| The notes file is synced bidirectionally to a server from my
| laptop.
|
| My android phone is doing the same sync. The phone displays the
| notes in a widget which lets me edit it with one tap.
|
| This way I can add notes from the command line and they get
| synced to my phone. When I edit them on my phone they get synced
| back.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| this sounds neat
| noja wrote:
| QOwnnotes is a cross-platform markdown gui app that integrates
| with NextCloud Notes. https://www.qownnotes.org/
| tananaev wrote:
| I used to use Simplenote, but after I lost some changes due to a
| glitch in their system, I decided to switch to something safer.
| Now I'm just using a Google Doc.
| glenstein wrote:
| This is exactly what happened to me. A glitch, lost changes and
| unpredictable behavior at unpredictable times. It's too bad,
| because I thought it was a keeper.
| vijayshankarv wrote:
| I really liked Andy Matuschak's article "Better note-taking"
| misses the point; what matters is "better thinking" -
| https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z7kEFe6NfUSgtaDuUjST1oczKKzQ...
|
| Over the years, I have also moved from one app to another when it
| comes to note-taking. Frankly, I was using them more as a place
| to put things that I might want to refer to later than using them
| to think about the problems that I was trying to solve.
|
| Personally, I find that there are times when I need more of a
| free flowing format like paper or an iPad, but most of the time,
| text suffices. For the last six months or so, I have been using
| Roam Research and related apps(Obsidian) and they do really help
| me evolve a structure around my thoughts without having to have
| one when I am starting out.
| Andrex wrote:
| I migrated from Chrome Scratchpad to Google Keep when the former
| got killed as Google is wont to do.
|
| And I've been pretty happy with it, though I am a simple man with
| simple needs. My biggest angst with using Keep has been
| uncertainty over Google's interest in it, they did kill the
| original note taking app I used, but it's been getting pretty
| good updates for the past few years. And each note has an "Export
| to Google Docs" option as a last resort, I suppose.
|
| Keep's simplicity and especially reliability have been golden in
| my use. Even syncing is almost-real-time between devices. It
| "just works."
| galkk wrote:
| I dropped Keep after finding (hard way) that there's no way to
| revert accidental edit if you switched note.
|
| I love card view though, I wish OneNote had it.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Shameless Plug: ThinkType[1] comes pretty close to just writing
| things down in a notebook. It's probably even easier, though it
| doesn't support formats other then text.
|
| [1]: https://thinktype.app
| dgut wrote:
| I've been using Notational Velocity + Alfred to quickly take
| notes for years. Recommended for anyone who wants something
| lightweight.
| kevinslin wrote:
| longtime notational velocity user. loved how simple it was but
| found that I needed some more structure as I took more notes.
| ended up creating https://dendron.so, a local-first markdown
| note taking app build on top of vscode. same modeless file
| lookup/creation as notational velocity combined with features
| like backlinks, tagging and vim bindings
| m3kw9 wrote:
| If you are iOS user apples notes is the best. Is like the camera
| theory that the camera with you all the time is the best camera.
| In this case is always gonna be around, auto back up, no install
| needed, available on all devices. The best part is it does 90% of
| what the most advanced note apps does.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| It would be nice to have a small tools approach to note taking.
|
| Small tools for searching and discovery. Another small tool for
| editing that uses another small tool to manage and lint any
| linking.
|
| The use of hashtags in Bear is great, but it's tied to its own
| filesystem.
|
| Notable's live editor is the best, with a great focus mode, but
| it's tied to a single directory of notes where, in the case of
| macOS, titles with colons get mangled because the filesystem
| can't cope with titles == filenames. It also stopped being open
| source without being bug free. I can't fix bugs in it myself.
|
| Atom has a lovely focus mode but no built in way of organising
| notes (left side columns) like Bear and Notable have.
|
| And they all default to markdown instead of the functionally
| superior asciidoc. Markdown is fine up until you have material
| you wish to format with any kind of seriousness. Or to boil it
| down another way: Asciidoc has table width hints and markdown
| don't.
|
| I do love, at least, the level of choice we have these days.
| 52-hertz_whale wrote:
| https://remarkable.com/
|
| Combines the best of analog and digital.
|
| I use mine every day all day. Works great.
| elihawkins wrote:
| try out
|
| https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/
|
| super clean and nice.
| wistlo wrote:
| Plain text, for me, after being burned multiple times.
|
| Occasionally, I'll fire up Word to paste in screen shots, but for
| most everything, I now write it out in plain text in Notepad++.
|
| I felt burned when Microsoft's abandoned the Outlook Journal,
| where I had collected years of notes--notes that were almost all
| plain text.
|
| Microsoft came out with OneNote and I watch colleagues diligently
| recording their thoughts there, but not me. Plain text, from here
| out. I may eventually print them and put them in a binder, so I
| can have "papers" that survive me.
|
| The git solution intrigues me, but I would use my words and
| little else if I recorded notes there.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I moved from Evernote to OneNote six or seven years ago and use
| that for a mix of work notes, document scans and the occasional
| TIL-style note (as well as a few things I want to keep track of
| between work/real life).
|
| Everything else goes onto my public wiki/blog (taoofmac.com),
| which is just Markdown inside a git repo.
|
| But I am struggling with web page snapshots (the OneNote clipper
| is horrible when compared to Pocket, which I also use) and more
| structured notes, since OneNote has become quite slow on iOS of
| late and it is a pain to draft anything beyond a few paragraphs.
| dmortin wrote:
| For me the most important part of note taking is quickly
| retrieving previous notes. Paper notes don't work for this if one
| has lots of notes, so digital it is.
| runjake wrote:
| I took a different approach than the author.
|
| I just found a notes app that worked and stuck with it and
| stopped worrying about the options. I still get all the
| advantages of digital notes.
| [deleted]
| hliyan wrote:
| I believe I shared this once before. After twenty years of trying
| every possible note taking app from Word 95 to Notion, this is
| now the entirety of my note taking app:
| #!/bin/bash read text _date=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
| echo -e "\n$_date: $text" >> ~/Dropbox/notes/stream.txt
| kostarelo wrote:
| So you only take notes while on your actual computer. You never
| take notes besides when you are on your computer.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| This can also work on mobile if you SSH into a cloud VM for
| example.
| b3kart wrote:
| I've set-up an iPhone's Shortcuts workflow which basically
| replicates the shell script above. Works very well. Reading
| on mobile is a bit painful, but doable, and I mostly do it at
| a computer anyway.
| danfritz wrote:
| I use a paper A5 atom notebook. You can easily rip out pages and
| rearrange them. I mostly use it for quick todos, db relation
| schemas and writing down some logic.
|
| I do take some notes with Apples Notes but I periodically clean
| them out. I don't see the benefit in keeping old notes. If a
| project is done the notes are also deleted / trashed.
|
| Why do people keep their 5 year old notes anyway? From a IT
| programming perspective anything that old is probably out date
| and not relevant.
| 5986043handy wrote:
| I do some frontend web dev and all my tech notes from >2 years
| ago is heavily outdated.
| sasaf5 wrote:
| Note-taking is best served by a system, not by a single app.
|
| I used to struggle with note taking apps until I started to use
| org-mode on termux. Human interface relies on emacs, syncing and
| versioning relies on git, agenda and TODOs rely on org. Never
| needed any other note taking app.
|
| As a bonus, emacs color themes look really nice on a crisp OLED
| screen.
| vijucat wrote:
| My theory about handwritten note-taking is that the bandwidth
| difference between thinking (fast) and writing (slow) is somehow
| extremely beneficial to the process of generating creative and
| evocative output. There have been so many journaling sessions
| which I started with the absolute conviction that I had nothing
| new to say, and after 4 pages of extremely creative and detailed
| ideas, _surprising even to me_ , I had no choice but to exclaim,
| "Now where did that even come from?!". Maybe the hypnotic act of
| twirling the pen on paper slowly puts the mind into that sub-
| conscious creative state similar to what happens when one is
| about to fall asleep? It is honestly magical. I now use OneNote
| every day (because I can search through a large volume of notes
| easily), and I quite miss the dramatic revelations of pen on
| paper journaling. My notes were about programming and trading.
| For those who write fiction, I bet slow, old, typewriters are
| similarly more beneficial than the latest ergonomic keyboard and
| Word 365!
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Similar experience here. Digital notetaking on non-touch
| devices fundamentally doesn't work, because non-textual
| expression requires too much work, digital notetaking with a
| stylus is better, but still doesn't work for the reasons you
| outlined.
|
| Writing with a fountain pen on good paper is like meditation to
| me; you wouldn't want to contaminate meditation with computers,
| like they contaminated everything else...
| sooheon wrote:
| Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Fiction" is one
| of the best treatments I've read on this topic.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...
| gverrilla wrote:
| The secret here is about the input: a key stroke on the
| keyboard is always the same movement, more or less, while
| letters are each a different symbol/drawing. There's very
| little creativity to pressing keys on a keyboard, while
| handwritten text is unique to each person, in time.
| heyoni wrote:
| Every keystroke isn't the same if that's how deep you're
| going to get into it. You never use the exact amount of
| force, or fall from exactly the same angle when typing
| either.
|
| It has nothing to do with that. There's nothing inherently
| creative about writing. But it adds value in that it forces
| you to spend more time on a single thought while writing,
| which is not the case while typing. On a computer, you write
| your notes so much quicker that by the time you're done, you
| barely put any thought into it.
|
| I have so notes I don't even remember creating, but that
| never happens with handwritten ones.
| laudable-logic wrote:
| Have you tried using OneNote's handwriting recognition feature?
| I am curious if that experience would allow for the regaining
| of the pen-to-paper "magic".
|
| Edit: typo
| corty wrote:
| I have, and it doesn't work. The recognition is good enough
| for a demo, in the store you will be really impressed how
| well it works. However, when really taking notes on the go
| you use your own abbreviations it doesn't know, use slang or
| scientific/technical language. Thats where it breaks down and
| degrades into the usual "I hate you, autocorrect" spiel.
|
| Also, OneNote does it's recognition and replaces your
| handwritten text by printed text of a different size. This
| makes all kinds of diagrams, side-by-side-text, tables, etc
| impossible.
|
| I have gone back to a paper notebook.
| ygra wrote:
| You don't have to replace your handwritten text. It's
| searchable even as ink. Can't say I've ever used the ink to
| text feature.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I think you could even generalize that a bit, and say that
| limits tend to foster creativity.
|
| My best software designs happen when I'm taking notes on paper,
| and I think it's largely what you say - I can't write as fast
| as I can think, which more or less forces me to think more
| carefully.
|
| The founder of You Need a Budget makes a similar argument about
| budgeting and not spending on credit - the financial limits
| encourage you to manage your entire lifestyle more creatively.
|
| It's often observed that small, scrappy, _hungry_ companies
| tend to come up with more creative solutions than large, well-
| capitalized corporations, and even observed that formerly small
| and creative startups seem to lose that spark as the money
| rolls in.
|
| There's that section in _The Odyssey_ with the island of the
| lotus-eaters.
|
| Speaking of poetry, I suspect that many poets would say that
| their creativity is enhanced by working within the limits
| imposed by a poetic form.
| jhwhite wrote:
| I almost feel the opposite. I've had tons of ideas and when I
| started writing them out they flowed out of my mind faster than
| I could write. But I don't have the best retention either. So I
| would have tons and tons of ideas and by the time I got it to
| paper I could remember maybe 3 things and couldn't recall the
| rest.
| intended wrote:
| That's my issue with the Microsoft surface stylus work- and a
| lesser extent Apple.
|
| They don't compare to written, and a decent amount is the pen
| tip friction.
|
| Wacom comes close.
|
| However the apps themselves ?
|
| I'd like to use one note more, but PDFs don't become copy-able
| text. Searchable but not copyable.
|
| Writing on a surface device is ugh. And I had really high hopes
| that they would push on the tech.
|
| Procreate -iOS- has the best redo and undo features and
| gestures - which may as well be a lost art since no one else
| seems to be copying them and saving us manhours of annoyance.
| claudeganon wrote:
| They make screen films to recreate this friction on the iPad
| Pro. A lot of my artists friends use them:
|
| https://paperlike.com/
| bosie wrote:
| Another endorsement for paperlike. The latest version is
| even better. And it's much smoother and you don't lose as
| much sharpness of the screen
| dopu wrote:
| Haven't used paperlike, but I use a much cheaper matte
| protector from TechArmor for drawing / taking notes on my
| iPad Pro and it's great. Would definitely recommend getting
| something like it. Bare screen's always felt too 'slippery'
| for me.
| intended wrote:
| Thanks ! I'll look into it.
|
| Now if only the surface writing experience were comparable
| - I like one note 2016 more than the one on the iPad.
|
| God cmon MSFT, make this stuff just work.
|
| During one of the surface launch events, a presenter said
| her entire life was on one note.
|
| I can see that happen. But I can only see it, I can't
| believe it will happen until the input modalities feel much
| better.
| mbreese wrote:
| I also use Paperlike. The version 2 of their film is really
| nice. It feels so much better drawing on that than the
| smooth glass surface. And I have no issues watching video
| through the film at all -- it's still bright and clear.
| amelius wrote:
| I always get bubbles under my screen protectors. And I
| don't use Apple. Not for me, I guess.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Another huge benefit of physical note taking is that if you are
| doing it in a meeting other people won't think you are on Slack
| or otherwise distracted and not listening. Instead people will
| feel more appreciated, since you are valuing what they are saying
| though to write it down.
|
| The same can be accomplished with some iPad note taking apps.
| Abtin88 wrote:
| I like to look at notes-taking as a broader way of capturing
| information you have seen. The value of keeping notes is to
| eventually make use of them. The tool should focus on serving
| this core workflow, not creating overhead.
|
| We created a tool that tries to minimize the cognitive load for
| capturing things. We were inspired by messaging system and email
| to yourself, and build a tool for capturing infos on the go for
| ourself. We're testing it with small group. If you are interested
| and willing to write us feedbacks, drop me a line and I will
| invite you to the beta community.
|
| abtin.setyani@gmail.com
| kirstenbirgit wrote:
| I have used Apple Notes since I got my first iPhone, there's
| still notes from back then in there! Mainly for quick lists and
| things I need to remember, ideas, shopping, etc. Haven't really
| found any issues with it.
| satysin wrote:
| Yes I use Apple Notes for actual notes. It works well enough
| for everything I do with the only draw back (to me) being it
| isn't available as raw text. Although copy/paste works just
| fine so not a huge deal tbh.
|
| For anything that I find lives in Apple Notes a bit _too_ long
| I move it over to plain text and use iA Writer. I try to keep
| anything in Apple Notes as short term notes. Anything I plan to
| keep around as more (small) documentation I switch over to iA.
|
| A few years ago I just got tired of trying out all these
| different notes apps. I figured I have iA Writer and Apple
| Notes and that works well enough so gave up trying every new
| note taking app that came out and haven't had any regrets.
|
| Recently I tried out Notion and god it was awful. I felt I
| spent longer arranging things in Notion than I did working on
| things.
|
| These days I find a more limited and simpler solution is better
| for me. I switched back to Things 3 a year or so ago as I found
| Todoist overwhelming after a while. Sure Things is more limited
| but I like that. It is basically a post-it note and I realised
| that is all I needed.
| atarian wrote:
| I put everything in Apple Notes as well. I love how I can sync
| my personal notes to iCloud and my work-related notes on
| Exchange.
| akkshu92 wrote:
| That's great!
| celeritascelery wrote:
| This is why I love Emacs org-mode. You can create the note taking
| app that you want. Don't like something? change it. Which it had
| feature X? Add it. There so many great packages already that
| often what you want is done for you.
| znpy wrote:
| I settled on Rednotebook on Linux on my work laptop.
|
| It has almost no features beyond a daily page and a term cloud
| (basically, an index of terms where the most frequent terms have
| bigger fonts).
|
| I use some informal markdown syntax, in the sense that i mostly
| recognize visually.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| In the early days of blogging, I used to write anything and
| everything. People read them. If I find a better way to move a
| sprite on a timeline, I write about it. If I find a way to hack
| an animation sync with a kicker layered audio, I write about it.
| People will read about it, discuss on forums, and sites such as
| Adobe would link to it.
|
| Then, I became smarter. Before writing, I'd then research,
| ponder, and then find a solution someone did. Awesome, there it
| goes.
|
| I do still write notes -- Handwritten, erstwhile in Evernote,
| Apple Notes, etc. Then I wanted to simplify it, in the hope that
| the notes will likely stay on even after I'm no more. Recently, I
| chose to stay with plain text, markdown is the next-step up, and
| then perhaps plain HTML.
|
| Markdown - I write it as plain as possible. It is easily readable
| as Plain Text, if needed. HTML - I'm pretty confident that HTML
| as its saner, plain form will remain and live through time.
|
| So, now, I have started collecting, writing pieces of notes in a
| set of Plain Text Collections - akin to your Org-Mode but much
| much simpler. In order to publish it[1], I threw in Jekyll for
| now but I'm not married to that and I'm keeping it such that if I
| just change a tool the next time, I can do it without much
| jugglery.
|
| Of course, I still use quite a few Note-Apps but most of them are
| the tools to my needs. I've stopped looking at Note-Apps that
| ingest and keeps it there. For instance, I can write in iA Writer
| and the file stays where it has. I can then continue writing it
| with SublimeText + Markdown. I will try to write more, be naive
| all over again. I don't want to know who reads it, how things are
| -- but just things that interest me.
|
| 1. https://oinam.fyi
| didip wrote:
| Between Apple Notes, private git repo, and sending myself links
| via email... this problem is solved forever for me.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| I write a lot when designing software, but hate paper, so I
| ordered reMarkable 2, which I expect to change my note-taking
| habits completely. I plan to write everything into it.
| atrus wrote:
| I have that similar feeling, I don't want a bunch of paper
| around, but writing on paper is just SUPERIOR to anything
| digital, as it's so much easier to freeform write, add
| sketches, etc. That's why a bought (several sizes now) a
| Rocketbook. Paperish, can write/draw, easy to digitize and
| reusable.
| [deleted]
| meagher wrote:
| I did the same thing!
| cik wrote:
| The problem with note-taking (currently) in app form is the way
| we do things differently by hand, versus digitally. By hand I
| write notes, draw items that matter to me. I frequently mix
| languages on a page - simply because it works for me. But, I can
| flip through a notebook in seconds, compared to clicking through
| Evernote/Onenote/Notion/etc. when something is 2-3 days back. I
| keep trying. I've used Evernote, Onenote, local TagSpaces,
| Notion, Wikis of various sorts, a VIMWiki that I used to keep. I
| bought RocketBook notebooks, their beacons, the whole thing. I'll
| keep trying digital note taking.
|
| The reality is that pen and paper is infinitely faster and the
| brain processes finding things more quickly. Some people like
| myself are wired such that merely writing the note is the method
| of locking it into memory. Unfortunately, the digital tools solve
| history and retrieval better than the tactile, writing answer.
|
| For now, I write with fountain pens, some great ink, and a
| Stalology B6 notebook. I just spent a month, once again trying to
| make Notion work. The reality is that writing is just better at
| this - even though I constantly hope it won't be. At least for
| me.
| [deleted]
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| I have yet to find a cloud based notes system that doesn't have
| dumpster fire levels of responsiveness and search. Any
| suggestions? I've taken to just syncing a text file across
| devices.
| codeknight11 wrote:
| Lol. This is exactly what I was thinking the other day. Everyone
| is churning out new notetaking tools as if we don't have enough
| already.
| threatofrain wrote:
| What are people's preferred solutions for markdown + latex?
| kevinslin wrote:
| https://dendron.so has markdown and latex support (disclaimer,
| I'm the author). its an open source, markdown-based note taking
| app that works with markdown notes on your file system. also
| supports backlinks, hierarchies, tagging, and more. its built
| as a plugin for vscode so you also have access to vim
| keybindings and anything else you might need with vscode
| extensions
| iflp wrote:
| Coming from an academic background where I need to reference
| theorems and equations frequently, I've found pandoc and madoko
| closest to usable. But plain LaTeX (with the help of macros)
| turns out to be more convenient.
| tristor wrote:
| I feel mostly the same as the author of this blog post. I have
| been through so many note taking apps and nothing has yet
| completely replaced just having a pen and a notepad with me at
| all times. But, I have gotten close. For me, I am very word-
| heavy, I don't need to draw (and if I do, I want a whiteboard,
| not a notepad).
|
| Just this month I started doing notes on my computer again after
| being introduced to an app here on HN in another thread that
| seems to have hit the high points for me. More than anything, it
| seems to work for me because it just gets out of my way. Try
| Standard Notes if you haven't yet. I like writing in Markdown, so
| I use it as I would a text editor, but rather than needing to
| search at the command line and maintain a git repo, it has
| tagging and search built-in as well as encrypted cloud syncing,
| but otherwise just stays out of my way. It works really well.
| jamil7 wrote:
| I'm in the same boat with standard notes, been using it for a
| few years now. Recently after a bout of RSI I've been trying to
| do more note taking and sketching on pen and paper to alleviate
| the typing between coding and other tasks.
| [deleted]
| hanklazard wrote:
| I also prefer writing things down. However, the ability to
| quickly search and link years worth of notes is the reason I'm
| putting effort into org-roam ... dozens of notebooks on a shelf
| will never be able to do that.
| JohnL4 wrote:
| I've recently started using org-capture and org-agenda (LONG-time
| org-mode user with a hot-key (Auto HotKey) to bring up emacs).
| Seems to work pretty well. (I'm always at my keyboard during the
| work day, and sometimes even when not.)
|
| With just my phone, Google Keep.
|
| If I was back in school, Live Scribe (but only with a pen with a
| manual on-switch; the Aegir turns itself on too much and the
| battery drains fast).
| JohnL4 wrote:
| P.S. sometimes Orgzly/Drpbox when mobile.
|
| Evernote being my bookmark tool now that Delicio.us has been
| nerfed. (If it's even still around.)
|
| (Also this P.S. because Materialistic doesn't seem to allow
| editing.)
| emiliovesprini wrote:
| I've tried dozens and none work better for me than
| $EDITOR $HOME/txt/note
|
| where $EDITOR is Good. The only thing I want from a notes app is
| to sync txt with my phone, let me edit the files and do exactly
| nothing else. They all fail.
|
| Side note: there was a laughing emoji in the previous text but HN
| removes it. Anyone know why that might be?
| perlgeek wrote:
| store txt/note in Dropbox, then you also have the sync.
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