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Have you tried OrgMode? I find it sufficient for most needs. Especially with Org-Babel you can develop and document scripts at the same time. Give it a shot if

Have you tried OrgMode? I find it sufficient for most needs. Especially with Org-Babel you can develop and document scripts at the same time. Give it a shot if you haven't before.

vidarh 9y ago
I've tried it. I find it alternatively constrains my formatting too much and uses too much syntax that I don't like. It certainly looks very flexible, and I'll probably steal ideas from it all over the place, but it's just not for me. I think that's actually one of the biggest challenges in this space. E.g. there are a zillion different Todo apps or notetaking apps largely because there is an infinite set of possible ways of working with them and people develop very specific styles. I think this is one of the reasons for the success of things like Trello: Trello is very generic and impose very few limits on what you can do with it. But even Trello won't conquer even the Todo/lists type niche entirely because it's not generic enough. Same for things like OrgMode. It may get me 90% of the way there, but paper gets me 95% of the way there, because I'm effectively implementing my own workflow in my mind exactly how I happen to decide I want it right now. And "right now" is a big part, because one of the things I've found both with plain text and with paper is that workflow at least for me does not remain static very long. My preferred format changes frequently depending on type of project or even specific tasks or just over time. Any "perfect" application to handle this would need to be able to accommodate that without making me conform to the tool. Instead when I try tools for this, I often end up finding one I like, spending time on it, only to then start feeling constrained by it not because I've learned new limitations I wasn't aware of, but because the way I use the tool is slowly drifting towards a new workflow. This might be a personal flaw, but from seeing people take notes, I think you'll often find that part of the flexibility of paper is exactly that your workflow can drift over time without making you hit a wall.

Have you tried OrgMode? I find it sufficient for most needs. Especially with Org-Babel you can develop and document scripts at the same time. Give it a shot if you haven't before.

vidarh 9y ago

I've tried it. I find it alternatively constrains my formatting too much and uses too much syntax that I don't like. It certainly looks very flexible, and I'll probably steal ideas from it all over the place, but it's just not for me. I think that's actually one of the biggest challenges in this space. E.g. there are a zillion different Todo apps or notetaking apps largely because there is an infinite set of possible ways of working with them and people develop very specific styles. I think this is one of the reasons for the success of things like Trello: Trello is very generic and impose very few limits on what you can do with it. But even Trello won't conquer even the Todo/lists type niche entirely because it's not generic enough. Same for things like OrgMode. It may get me 90% of the way there, but paper gets me 95% of the way there, because I'm effectively implementing my own workflow in my mind exactly how I happen to decide I want it right now. And "right now" is a big part, because one of the things I've found both with plain text and with paper is that workflow at least for me does not remain static very long. My preferred format changes frequently depending on type of project or even specific tasks or just over time. Any "perfect" application to handle this would need to be able to accommodate that without making me conform to the tool. Instead when I try tools for this, I often end up finding one I like, spending time on it, only to then start feeling constrained by it not because I've learned new limitations I wasn't aware of, but because the way I use the tool is slowly drifting towards a new workflow. This might be a personal flaw, but from seeing people take notes, I think you'll often find that part of the flexibility of paper is exactly that your workflow can drift over time without making you hit a wall.