The last 6 months or so I've been using TeXShop to make LaTeX files of everything I'm learning about, i.e. to produce beautiful-looking pdfs. It's going great.

The last 6 months or so I've been using TeXShop to make LaTeX files of everything I'm learning about, i.e. to produce beautiful-looking pdfs. It's going great. I have 2 or 3 files I'm working on currently; there's another few on specific themes, which will be books or papers. One is a daily diary-type one to put everything I'm learning in: names of books, papers, videos, extracts, pictures, links, quotes, extracts, my thoughts. Chapters in that one spin off into their own file when they get big enough. Another is on all the little LaTeX/TeX things I've been learning about. Before I started doing this, most of the daily stuff I do - papers and books read, thoughts about it, good pages/paragraphs - would be lost. And I have a bunch of old notebooks with everything disorganized that I've never looked at again. I'm into so many different things, keeping records about it has always been a problem for me until now. I know, sounds weird huh. Things I like about this system: hyperlinks, internal links, footnotes, endnotes are super-easy. Anything that isn't super-easy, you can just make a new LaTeX command or environment to make it super-easy. Easy to insert pictures, cropped or scaled. Mostly, the compiled pdfs look so nice, it's a great pleasure to work on them. TikZ is sometimes the best way I know to make professional-looking diagrams of stuff. So yeah, learning LaTeX (and basic TeX) isn't much fun, a few months of hard work, but StackExchange and a few LaTeX books makes it fairly painless. There are included packages that do most things you could want, the documentation that comes with them is almost always impressive. (Compared with man pages, at least!) Most of the learning time is learning how to use all these packages. I'm no expert, but I've stopped consulting SE and books; I know enough for my purposes. Also, the stuff ends up in in a virtually ready-to-publish state. Also I write quick plans, diagrams, pseudocode, ideas etc with ballpoint pens in notebooks and on graph paper.