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I have found org mode to be really useful for free form note taking. Granted, the emacs factor may scare away some users, but I think org mode is worth it even

I have found org mode to be really useful for free form note taking. Granted, the emacs factor may scare away some users, but I think org mode is worth it even if you are using emacs solely because of it. Org mode has configurable todos(todo, next, scheduled, deadline). You can attach tags to notes, have nested todos with percentage completion tracking, can write code snippets in any language with full syntax completion, log time for different tasks, and this is just all I can think on the top of my head. And to top it all, it is just plain text. You can store org documents in dropbox and access them just like your other dropbox documents.

dmos62 8y ago
As a vim user, I too only use plain-text. My general writtings are organized in folders, within a single git repo. Project specific writtings are within one file within that project's repo. I always call it notes.txt, and then when I'm within a project, to open notes it's always the same operation (`:e notes.txt` or equivalent). I also have a notes.txt in my general writtings repo. It's by far the biggest file in the repo, where I keep information that can be useful in the future. In most files, especially the bigger ones, I keep to the structure of date stamping a day's entries. For that I use a vim abbreviation. That's 1 line of code and that's the only custom code that my "system" needs. I have found it immensely advantageous to use monospace for writting and note keeping, because I can structure the writting with indentation. So my writtings are trees, I branch them similarly to how you punctuate text in English. That's very efficient for technical writting and notes, but also for ponderings and essays. It let's you drop many non-content words, because the indentation provides for sentence-glue with visual punctuation and walks you through the "thought tree". With prose it's not easy to see the structure from a glance, you only see it's biggest features. With lists, you are constrained to the point where the medium is not expressive enough for anything beyond a grocery list. With loose-form trees, you get the benefit of visual structure, text-efficiency and expressiveness. Code editors, like vim, are good for this, because they know how to wrap indented text. Example of such notes. They're not in English, but you can see the structure. It's a week of entries on a project: https://hastebin.com/raw/gurexecubi https://hastebin.com/raw/gurexecubi

dmos62 8y ago

As a vim user, I too only use plain-text. My general writtings are organized in folders, within a single git repo. Project specific writtings are within one file within that project's repo. I always call it notes.txt, and then when I'm within a project, to open notes it's always the same operation (`:e notes.txt` or equivalent). I also have a notes.txt in my general writtings repo. It's by far the biggest file in the repo, where I keep information that can be useful in the future. In most files, especially the bigger ones, I keep to the structure of date stamping a day's entries. For that I use a vim abbreviation. That's 1 line of code and that's the only custom code that my "system" needs. I have found it immensely advantageous to use monospace for writting and note keeping, because I can structure the writting with indentation. So my writtings are trees, I branch them similarly to how you punctuate text in English. That's very efficient for technical writting and notes, but also for ponderings and essays. It let's you drop many non-content words, because the indentation provides for sentence-glue with visual punctuation and walks you through the "thought tree". With prose it's not easy to see the structure from a glance, you only see it's biggest features. With lists, you are constrained to the point where the medium is not expressive enough for anything beyond a grocery list. With loose-form trees, you get the benefit of visual structure, text-efficiency and expressiveness. Code editors, like vim, are good for this, because they know how to wrap indented text. Example of such notes. They're not in English, but you can see the structure. It's a week of entries on a project: https://hastebin.com/raw/gurexecubi https://hastebin.com/raw/gurexecubi