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Ask HN: What's your catch-all note taker?
I use Microsoft OneNote and it has been working great for dumping all kinds of stuff (screenshots, logs, ideas, thoughts, love letters, resignation letters, resumes, code snippets and etc). That said I use an iPhone, use Linux for work, and Windows at home. So accessing the OneNote when I am not home has been difficult. What is your favorite dumpster(?) app? Do you recommend it? I am open for both free and paid solutions.
- gunnarde 8y agoPapier https://getpapier.com/ https://getpapier.com/
- b1gtuna 8y agoThanks. Looks promising, except the notes don't seem to get synced between devices according to the reviews.
- citrablue 8y agoNotion.so, its awesome.
- mihaifm 8y agoPlain text for notes/bookmarks/todo items/wishlists with my own markdown-like syntax for formatting. I use a small app (Editorial) on my iphone and Dropbox to sync.
- b1gtuna 8y agoThanks. This is probably 1 of my top 3 choices at the moment. It is timeless, no need to worry about service shutdown, and robust and free. Of course, it probably has the most learning curve as I have to type out everything.
- drKarl 8y agoVimwiki for text notes
- b1gtuna 8y agoThanks! Never seen this but I already like it. I use Vim and the fact that I don't have to leave my terminal is definitely a bonus. Have you found a way to access it via your phone/mobile?
- kowdermeister 8y agoGoogle keep
- b1gtuna 8y agoI love Google Keep, but I am afraid they'd kill it all of sudden much like Google Notebook and Inbox.
- kowdermeister 8y agoSo what? Use it till you can. The worst case scenario is that I have to spend half an hour again to pick a todo app sometime in the future :)
- sitzkrieg 8y agosure, but beware if you want to export your data from google keep, it will be HTML and not easy to import to most other tools
- rwc 8y agoIt's part of GSuite, which is a higher threshold of support and predictability. Neither Inbox or Notebook were part of GSuite.
- elefantastisch 8y agoDynalist https://dynalist.io/ https://dynalist.io/
- Mister_Snuggles 8y agoI'm also a OneNote fan. I use it in a similar fashion - tons of work-related stuff, a bunch of personal stuff, and a notebook shared with my SO so we can both update grocery lists, etc. I've got the OneNote app on my iPhone and it works well enough for what I need to access on the go. What trouble do you have accessing it when you're not at home? My biggest use-case for OneNote on the iPhone is to tick items on the grocery list - it works great and changes propagate to my SO's phone in under a second.
- b1gtuna 8y agoRight, I forgot about the iOS version of the OneNote app. I guess I am searching for a more cross-platform solution (much like Google Notebook. Also, it looks like Microsoft is migrating OneNote out of Office suite and make it available as a default app in Windows, but will require a subscription to Office 365 to unlock features [1]. So cost becomes an issue when this occurs.. [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3269056/software-productivity/microsoft-will-stop-developing-onenote-2016-in-favor-of-the-windows-10-onenote-app.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/3269056/software-productivit...
- Mister_Snuggles 8y agoThis is something I will need to keep an eye on. I've come to depend on OneNote pretty heavily. On the plus side, Office 365 is quite cheap considering you get 1TB of OneDrive storage for the price. Since you're a Linux user that might not be useful to you though.
- ukyrgf 8y agoI want to like OneNote, but I just can't stand how things can be positioned anywhere on the page. It's so hard to make my notes look neat and organized. I started using Notion.so (after a recommendation on HN recently) and the difference is incredible. All the versatility of OneNote, but there is actually somewhat of a hierarchy.
- jjuhl 8y agoEmacs org mode (https://orgmode.org https://orgmode.org).
- nine_k 8y agoWhat I badly miss about it is some kind of "org mode server" to synchronize things between several nodes, e.g. laptop and mobile, in a structure-aware way. So far I sync via git, which sort of works but is definitely not great on mobile.
- vtail 8y agoCurious why you want a structure aware way? My current setup (syncing between home and work laptops) is to auto-save files every few second in emacs, and "git pull; git commit -am `date`; git push" every few minutes in a cron. Works like a charm. edit: I also do "git add * .org; git add * .org_archive" inside the org folder before the commit, in the same cron job.
- nine_k 8y agoStructure-aware: if one change sets a TODO item to WIP, and another to DONE, a structure-aware merge algorithm could resolve this conflict, e.g. based on time; plain git needs human attention. Well, yes, immediate sync should work, all merges would be fast-forward except for a vanishingly rare case of two conflicting simultaneous pushes. It's not very practical if one of the devices is mobile, so it's not always online, and parallel changes may build up sometimes.
- vtail 8y agoThat makes sense. I realize in my use case, even if I have one device offline, e.g., working on a laptop on a flight, in most times I will be able to sync before I switch to another device, so it rarely creates a problem.
- xte 8y agoUnison it's not new and work flawlessly, all you need is the ability to reach all devices via network... BTW do not blame org for the mobile crappy OSes we have, they are not designed to serve us but to serve vendor leaving us small crumbs, milking us for commercial purpose.
- m52go 8y agoZotero. Cross-platform and open-source. You can sync it using your favorite syncing tool, and even encrypt before syncing using something like Cryptomator. I regularly use this set-up on Linux and Windows.
- privong 8y agoThere's a lot of input on this from previous ask HN's too: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20note%20taking&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20note%20taking&sort=byPop...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ArneBab 8y agoI’m using emacs org-mode. For everything, except notes on paper.
- slouch 8y agoTrello and a WhatsApp thread with myself
- cle 8y agoWhen I'm on my computer, it's Emacs org-mode. On my iPad, I use GoodNotes with an Apple Pencil, which is an amazing experience.
- gexla 8y agoAs of 37 minutes in, not one Orgmode... ;) I like Google Keep because it's one of the few apps I have found which gives me a readable preview of the notes. I generally try to keep the notes short. There is also an option to save the notes as Google Docs and then download as plain text if you like. Of you wanted to arrange the short notes into a longer form, then Scrivener is a good next step. Again, Scrivener allows me to view these short notes in a readable preview. I can also drag and drop notes onto a larger document. Plus tons more features. I have tried tons of other apps and none of them seem to allow a readable text preview. I like plain text, but I also like some sort of visual reference where I can scan loads of texts. Of course, this doesn't work well for longer text. There have been some threads here lately about Perkeep, which I think has a lot of potential. A Google Keep interface on Perkeep would be perfect. What I like about Perkeep is that all content is content addressable and you can create meta-data external to the file which can hold things like tags, links between files, hierarchy, titles and a bunch more.
- jjuhl 8y ago"As of 37 minutes in, not one Orgmode" - ehh, how did you miss my org mode comment?
- swsieber 8y agoWell, your org mode comment was made 42 minutes in. At least, as I'm posting this, the post was 52 minutes old, your org mode comment was 10 minutes old, and this comment of yours was 1 minute in... So... latency.
- nafizh 8y agoI have been using Google Keep for some time and it is really great. But I am always dreading the day Google is announcing they are shutting it down. That is why looking for an alternative.
- xte 8y agoEmacs-er (I'm a proud one) tend to live in Emacs, not in browsers so a delay it's normal :-) Especially since HN emacs interface offer a decent way to read but not a way to post and since HN itself is not much good in term of conversation (even worse than Reddit, far far far worse than classic usenet) spending time in adding post capabilities it's probably not much interesting...
- pandemicsyn 8y agoI made the switch to https://bear.app https://bear.app a while ago (over a year). Its simple yet full featured enough that its the one I've stuck with the longest.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- falcolas 8y agoVimwiki. It's pretty much an 80% solution of org mode for vim, and works a treat for my usecase. I then just store those files in a cloud file sharing system and access them everywhere.
- burkemw3 8y agoStandard Notes: https://standardnotes.org/ https://standardnotes.org/ Mostly text, Web/iPhone/Android, private, freemium+self hosted
- Daedren 8y agoStandard Notes. Encrypted, has a lot of nifty extensions such as a Markdown and Vim editors. You can even selfhost it.
- n_t 8y agoFor many years it was plain text with Vim. Then started using Trello, then Zenkit for immediate actionable things. But in parallel also used Apple notes and now days Agenda.
- cal97g 8y agoTypora. Just a simple WYSIWYG markdown editor. I use it for anything from writing articles to notes to invoices. Has pretty PDF exports which look good and professional for documentation as well a nice selection of themes.
- im_dario 8y agoAmazing editor. I'm working in a little side project and I had in my mind an editor like this one.
- Ocerge 8y agoPen and paper has yet to be defeated for me, personally
- paulgb 8y agoI switched from OneNote to Notion (notion.so) for my personal notes and love it. The mobile apps are pretty slick. There is no Linux client afaik but the web client is full-featured.
- gotrythis 8y agoFor note taking, I used to use the LiveScribe pen and paper, which records what's being said, synced to your notes. This is not simply attaching audio to notes. It's far better. You can click on a written note to hear what was being said when you wrote the note, and replay the audio and writing together. It allows you to be present in meetings and just jotting down headlines of things to review, instead of madly scribbling notes. Livescribe: https://www.livescribe.com https://www.livescribe.com However, I hated the notebooks, simply because I didn't like carrying around multiple notebooks. Now I use an iPad app called Notability, which does the same thing, without the annoyance of dealing with paper. I just wish they had a Windows version for when I get a Surface Book! Notability: http://gingerlabs.com/ http://gingerlabs.com/
- chrisscastaneda 8y agoSimpleNote https://simplenote.com https://simplenote.com Lightweight/not bloated, quick, and syncs quickly across all my devices
- pongogogo 8y ago+1 for simplenote, for plain text it's the best I have found.
- storgendibal 8y agoI used OneNote on a Surface Pro 1 for several years, but recently switched over to Goodnotes on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. Goodnotes has fewer features than OneNote, but the auto-shape tool is pretty sweet and I actually like the fact that it does not have infinite-sized pages. I do miss OneNote's OCR, text indexing/search, and seamless cross-platform sync (web, mobile, laptop).
- jmhobbs 8y agoI tend to capture stuff in Quiver[0] now. It has decent search, shared notebooks, etc. [0] http://happenapps.com/#quiver http://happenapps.com/#quiver
- BlackjackCF 8y ago+1 for Quiver. I bought it years ago. I've never looked back. Such a great notebook.
- manchmod 8y agonotability
- joshstrange 8y agonvAlt is the OS X client I use and I use the Simplenote iOS app (and backend to sync my notes). I have it on a hotkey so I can pull it up quickly. I only use if for text/links and would like one that could handle more and maybe even code snippets a little better but only if I get the same speed. NvAlt is blazing fast and always works (same for the iOS app).
- evo_9 8y agoBear Notes. It's incredibly flexible. The key feature is the ability to create complex hierarchy/tree categories with simple hash tagging of notes.
- rayiner 8y agoI use Trello. It's not great at taking notes, but it's very easy to get data into it. Each list and item within a list has an email address, and you can shoot PDFs, web pages, etc., to those from anywhere without special software. It also "spatial,"[1] which is hugely helpful in being able to find things. I've tried a few other things but I don't like them. One Note is glacially slow for notebooks hosted online. And I can never find anything in Evernote. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/
- zwieback 8y agoWe're an MS shop for office apps and I like OneNote and how it integrates with everything else and when I open it up I enjoy using it. Still I never seem to actually use it... Maybe I'm just not a note taker other than the odd post-it note.
- octorian 8y agoA disorganized collection of text files, often (but not always) in Dropbox, and random pieces of scrap paper. I've tried fancier solutions over the years, including Tomboy and Evernote (and maybe even Google Keep, for a few minutes), but none of them have had sticking power. Ultimately, my note-taking needs fall into two categories: 1) Something I can paste text into, where said text is best kept plain. (Word processor formatting would just get annoying, and cause endless problems, especially if that text is a code/command-line snippet.) 2) Something I can scribble on, where the content is likely to be some sort of sketch/diagram/chart with annotations. Most software note-taking solutions would fall flat on their head here, because its not what they're designed for. When I was in school, I actually found that taking notes on a computer only worked in liberal arts classes. In STEM classes, handwritten notes were almost always easier. FWIW, I recently picked up a reMarkable tablet as another way of attacking the "scraps of paper" problem (and as a nice offline PDF reader). Its generally nice, but still doesn't quite have the resolution to match a fine-tipped pen/pencil annotating a diagram without being close enough to the limit to drive one OCD crazy. (But it is getting fairly close.)
- anonlawyer 8y agoMy catch-all note taker is a Rhodia notebook with four different Lamy fountain pins, each with a different color ink. For digital stuff, I use Simplenote on mac, iOS, and Android and Resoph Notes (synced to Simplenote) on my Windows work laptop. I only just learned of Dynalist and may give that a spin but doubt that it will unseat Simplenote in my system.
- FreezerburnV 8y agoAs someone who also likes physical paper + fountain pen: how do you carry your fountain pens in a way that they don't leak ink when moving around in a pocket or something similar? (as in, the physical jolt of the pen moving in a pocket causes a little ink to come out of the nib, similar to if you were shaking it)
- hprotagonist 8y agoapple notes for throwaway stuff and shopping lists and other nonsense. org-mode in a git repo for everything else. notability for lectures, just for the audio synch
- mikestew 8y agoThat said I use an iPhone, use Linux for work, and Windows at home. So accessing the OneNote when I am not home has been difficult. It shouldn't be, as there's an iPhone client, a Windows client, and you can use the web version for Linux. I have my complaints about OneNote, oh I've got complaints. But cross-platform isn't one of them. I don't have a personal notebook that use much anymore, but I've got one for a local non-profit that I work with, and a couple for work, all of which are accessible anywhere I have a connection. That said, I just use vimwiki and Apple's Notes/Reminders apps. I've used OneNote since it was an internal Microsoft build running on my Toshiba Portege Tablet PC, but instead of adding features that have (IMO) been needed for over a decade, it looks like they'll be removing functionality in the next release. So it's vimwiki for anything remotely complicated, and Apple's apps for the day-to-day "remind me to buy cat food" stuff. vimwiki, which means you better be using vim, isn't a text version of OneNote, but it's close enough. And in a lot of respects I find it less annoying than OneNote's quirks. Project management, daily log, work notes, things that could use bullets and mulit-level outlining and the like. Export to HTML if it needs to be printed. As there doesn't seem to be any kind of iOS client, I might write one of these weekends when I'm bored. But I dump the wiki files to iCloud, so I can get to it from work or home, and if I were desperate I suppose I could view the raw files on iOS. Apple's stuff I use mainly in conjunction with Siri. "Hey, Siri, remind me at 8:00 tonight to pay the light bill". Quick, one-off stuff I don't want to forget and would like a reminder for later. No heavy, project-oriented stuff goes in there.
- b1gtuna 8y agoWhoa, I wasn't aware of the web version of OneNote. This is a nice surprise! I'm a Vim user so I will give vimwiki a shot as well. Thank you.
- Jasber 8y agoShameless plug: I'm building Catch Notes (https://catchnotes.app/ https://catchnotes.app/) for this The idea is to capture notes/thoughts/todos quickly and send them to any service (Trello/Basecamp/Asana/etc...). For people doing deep work (programmers, designers, writers) you want to stay in flow but also be able to capture any random thought that pops in your head. This project is a bit harder than ones I've done in the past because I'm trying to take it cross-platform (macOS first) and keep it native UI everywhere. For the past few years I've been storing almost everything in Markdown and organizing files into yearly folders—I call it my "memex". It ends up being pretty simple, but I end up missing some information that gets silo'd off in services like Trello.
- timdavila 8y agoVery cool, congrats on building it. Do you have any affiliation with the old catch.com team? I used Catch Notes for a bit several years ago before they were bought out. In case you weren't aware: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/export-your-data-from-catch-notes-before-it-shuts-down/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/export-your-data-from-catch-note...
- jaredcwhite 8y agoWow, this is fabulous! I use Trello AND Basecamp AND Apple Notes so this would be incredibly useful for me. Instant signup.
- plokta 8y agoI recently discovered VNote: https://github.com/tamlok/vnote https://github.com/tamlok/vnote Works great for me so far. Its QT based and uses plain Markdown files. Notes are organized in notebooks with (sub-)folders. Some of the features on top of this are tagging, full text search, reader-mode, vim key-bindings, attachments, MathJax, PlantUML, and Mermaid.js support.
- jdoege 8y agoI went paperless, this year, and after trying 3 or 4 different note apps, I settled on Notability on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. That I can run the app on my laptop (and phone), synchronized through iCloud makes this incredibly more useful than pen and paper. Importing pdfs and images from other places, keyboard based text entry from the laptop, proper handwriting recognition and search thereon based is amazing. I can tell when technology will work for me when I can quickly adopt it and feel no desire to go back to what I did before. That happened with ereaders for me when they came to the phone (I can read anywhere, anytime and for however long I have, I love it) and it has happened with this, as well.
- hummerbliss 8y agoI recently started using Zim Desktop Wiki (http://zim-wiki.org http://zim-wiki.org) for the sole reason being that it saves them in text files and the obvious advantages that come with it (sync, no lock-in) etc. I use them across mac, windows, and linux machines. I couldn't find an iPhone app.
- fiveFeet 8y agoZim is awesome for note taking. Highly recommended.
- xte 8y agoorg-mode, with org-capture and Emacs bookmarks. In the past I have used deft, before zim and even before a custom spaghetti-code tiny monster that was a series of script and text files...
- sjnair96 8y agoGoogle keep. Works on all devices. Only barrier right now is the annoying load up time. Especially if you install it as a desktop app, it takes too long to load up.
- vidanay 8y agoI use Keep as well, but one thing I find very annoying is how frequently it loses it's place when my phone goes to sleep. Nitpicky - but this is especially annoying for the grocery shopping list.
- h0h0h0 8y agoSublime Text for sure. I used to use Apple Notes and still have years of stuff on there. Before that it was Evernote. And before that it was text files somewhere. I came back to text files just because of the lack of formatting. It forces a primitiveness on the idea that ensures that it doesn't become distracting. A lot of people in the WIP community are starting to use Notion. Haven't looked at it yet.
- timdavila 8y agoI built my own solution for this after using many different apps and not quite being satisfied with any of them. My ideal editor is markdown based with preview as you type, available everywhere (so sublime wouldn't work), plain text storage that's easy to export, and simple linking between notes. It's at https://www.nominal.net https://www.nominal.net if you're interested.
- b1gtuna 8y agoI'm giving Vimwiki a shot at the moment. I can mark a task as finished with C-space, but is there a way to archive this finished task?
- cyann 8y agoCurrently moving from ResphNotes on PC (https://resoph.com https://resoph.com) and nvALT (http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) on Mac (with text files shared on cloud folder) to StandardNotes (https://standardnotes.org/ https://standardnotes.org/) which is E2E and supports all platforms.
- apatil 8y agoNotes (http://github.com/pimterry/notes http://github.com/pimterry/notes) on Keybase's kbfs. I really like having my notes be plain text files in an e2e encrypted network folder. The main downside is that there's no great way to create notes from keybase's Android app.
- purplezooey 8y agoIs it just me or is Trello the most overrated software ever. Stack some cards. Color em. Write some more. Woo. Get bought for a few hundred mil.
- hiroshi3110 8y agohttps://scrapbox.io https://scrapbox.io
- aprdm 8y agoGoogle drive! Just taking notes in google docs work pretty well.
- jshaqaw 8y agoEvernote. Nothing is perfect but still nothi g comes close to make sure I have everything I need across my desktop, iPad, and iPhone at all times. I like the scrolling list of notes interface and search is pretty good. I’ve had my work and life in Evernote for almost a decade now and it scales great.
- krembo 8y agoI've tried many of them, but my favorite is Gmail. Yep. Whenever there's somethin I need to keep for the long run I'm sending my self an email with it. Attachments supported, formatting supported, search is pretty awesome, so it has all I need.
- rmbeard 8y agoSlack and use integrations to back up important stuff to say evernote.