16 ms·

Note Taking in 2021

249 points by cyneox 5y ago

liprais 5y ago
I grew up learning using pen and paper,I will stick to that. Younger digital native generation wants to go all digital? totally ok with me.just we have to learn to agree to disagree.
- clydethefrog 5y ago
  Would be interested to see methods how to do that better. I am more of a mechanic pencil and paper user. Sometimes use markers when feeling fancy. Has there any new developments since the "bullet journal"?
- eloisant 5y ago
  If pen and paper works for you, then so be it! I grew up with pen and paper too, but now I couldn't live without the synchronization and easy sharing enabled by digital. Also I suck at organizing with paper while digitally I can neatly organize everything in folder. However I do think digital note taking is more painful than hand writing if you want to go beyond plain text, and digital devices can be distracting when I should be focusing so I recently ordered an e-ink tablet that I'm waiting to be delivered. My hope is that it brings flexibility of paper with the organization and sync/sharing functionalities of digital.
- noud 5y ago
  Similar here, pen and paper for almost all notes. If I want to keep it for longer I might add it on my personal wiki. But I try to keep it simple and stupid. I feel people spend too much time focusing on how to make/digitalize notes instead of just make notes.
DenverCode 5y ago
Having a public repository online of notes is something that never crossed my mind - however, I am very intrigued.
ogwh 5y ago
If anyone is interested my mobile note taking consists of: Dynalist for organised notes that work well in list/tree structures Standard Notes for unorganised, random brain dumps And good old fashioned pen and paper everywhere else. The miMind app from the article looks like it may be useful.
- adfm 5y ago
  If you think miMind is interesting, check out SimpleMind.
nxc18 5y ago
Obsidian.MD works pretty well and meets all of the stated requirements. Everything is markdown on disk, but the tool is maintaining an index for linking things. The index powers search and graphing, but otherwise everything works just as well in VS Code. It works really well for me, with the one downside being it is an electron app. Because it is all markdown based, you could use a native tool of choice (I use Ulysses on iPad). They have a sync service, but I just use iCloud. https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
- swozey 5y ago
  I use Obsidian and one thing I'm not getting about peoples concerns with e2e encryption - does nobody realize once it's decrypted on the devices you use (work laptops, etc since it's your ubiquitous note taking app) that anyone with access to your laptop (IT) has full access to every single .md file downloaded to your system? People talk about encrypting their vaults and everything else all the time. I've never seen anyone mention the fact that your entire life of notes (whatever they may be) are now completely plain-text (well, markdown) files accessible to anyone with access to your machine. And IT will be well aware that you just dumped 10000 files into a directory, although hopefully they think you're just pulling git clones and don't go further. So, what, do I not use markdown when at work? Do I not care? Do I stifle my posts in case anyone at work reads them? It just seems like a terrible system for very personal note taking. Does throwing the stuff in icloud mitigate this? Gdrive? Dropbox? Even encrypting a folder gives admins access to all of my files as soon as I decrypt it. If I use an online app that I have to auth to and the connection is encrypted unless they're doing DPI they're not going to see any of my notes... This seems like a huge problem with markdown notes.
  - sunu 5y ago
    e2e encryption is not trying to solve the problem you describe. If I'm going to open and view private notes on a non-private machine, no amount of encryption will help me.
    - fauigerzigerk 5y ago
tptacek 5y ago
This is going to be one of those threads where everyone rattles off their own note-taking setup, which is great and all. So: There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and (2) sync --- I need my notes mirrored onto my phone. For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good, in fact, because it doesn't feel much better to use than does TextEdit. Both search and sync work fine. I don't have to think about what I'm writing or how it fits into the scheme of things because I'm guaranteed to be able to find things with search. I can drag screenshots of lecture videos in and write short sentences about them. I had Bear.app for awhile and was initially skeptical of it, but it has now replaced Notes.app for me; it's a better writing environment, it has sticky notes (pinned to the top of the note list) which turn out to be really valuable, does native Markdown, and search and sync work reliably on my laptop and phone. So, Notes and Bear.app are my two recommendations. I'm interested to see if anybody comes up with something macOS-supported that outdoes Bear. I'm an Emacs person, I've written a couple thousand lines of elisp, and I have never, ever been able to get into org mode.
- poglet 5y ago
  I'm considering getting an iPhone just for notes. I had an old iphone, the iOS version didn't allow the sharing of notes feature. I thought I could just log into the iCloud website and edit my notes, however you are unable to view or edit shared notes from the website. It's very confusing. I'm currently using iA Writer on Android. Notes are automaticaly saved as markdown to a Dropbox folder which I can open on my other devices fairly easily.
- z5h 5y ago
  Best note taking I’ve done is just rubber-ducking to myself in a (public) slack channel solely for that purpose. Never worry about hierarchies, and easily link back to past messages. For a dedicated app and methodology, I find https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ mimics that style.
- 5y ago
crossroadsguy 5y ago
I am back to Simplenote after trying too many alternatives. nvAlt on Mac and Simplenote app on iPhone. Bear would have been fine if it wasn’t subscription based and allowed me to choose a sync option like dropbox or iCloud sync and let me have local files. FSNotes has years , at this speed, ahead of it. Everything else is just sad Electron - web apps masquerading as native apps. No I don’t like Joplin interface. Also, among Apple cloud offerings or iCloud suite Notes.app is the only one probably that doesn’t suck disgustingly. But then I don’t trust Apple to keep the sync working fine as they deprecate apps too soon on older OS versions.
- japanuspus 5y ago
  Think we are in the same boat, although I never really made it away from Simplenote. Currently not using the actual Simplenote app, instead it is Byword on iOS, nvpy on Linux, ResophNotes on Windows and nvAlt on OS X (and syncing via Dropbox). For many years I used a small app called "notesy" on iOS, but that disapeared completely at some point -- never found out who made it. Have been thinking about joplin, but I never even tried it since I have a lot of toolchain set up around scripted edits to files (e.g. my timesheet it built by scanning notes, and I clock in and out of projects with a small script triggered from Launchy).
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  I was a big fan of Notational Velo, and then nvAlt, and the discovery of Deft mode made my migration to emacs/org possible. I wouldn't worry about Apple deprecating Notes or its sync -- both have been part of the iOS ecosystem since day one, haven't they?
  - crossroadsguy 5y ago
    I don’t remember the versions but at one point I wanted to stay back on an old OSX version and a newer iOS and the Mac was just a version behind. They made entire iCloud suite and related apps on the two incompatible. As for emacs/vim I have given up by now :) Not my cup of tea.
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KTallguy 5y ago
I tried Obsidian, Zettlr, Standard Notes, Dendron, even tried taking notes in Scrivener. In the end I bit the bullet and started using Emacs + Org-Mode/Org-Roam. The flexibility and customization are unparallelled. I use it for to-dos, for random scribbles, for in-depth musings. Categorizing thoughts and linking them together is so much easier than any other software I've used. The first few months are really tough, and for someone who has never used Vim or other terminal style interfaces before learning shortcuts took a while. But after 6 months, I can't go back.
- cyneox 5y ago
  I'm also using (Doom) Emacs + ORG-Mode. However exporting my notes to the outside world is not that smooth as with Tiddlywiki. I know there is ox-hugo (which BTW I use to write my blog posts) but for a Zettelkasten/knowledge DB I think it's not enough.
bachmeier 5y ago
I anticipated that "in 2021" would mean a discussion of the recent tools for taking notes that have exploded (Roam, Obsidian, backlinks, etc.) This could have just as well been "Note Taking in 2011". Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but the title is misleading.
jrm4 5y ago
Gotta get in the greatest (IMHO of course.) https://zim-wiki.org https://zim-wiki.org I'm continually baffled at how the rest of the world hasn't discovered this, but it could be because I sort of live at the margins of "ultra geek" and "normie." Local, self-hosted "wiki-like" tool. You write notes, it saves them, supports links and todos and calendars etc. Tons of plugins for math, git, etc etc. The killer aspect, I think, though. Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately and it's very useful. But because it saves as plain-text (Markdown-ish) with links and pages equalling files and folders, it's always infinitely extensible with Bash or other scripts. For me, it's all the extensibility of org-mode without, I mean, you know.
- waiseristy 5y ago
  ZimWiki was my favorite until I had mysterious performance issues on macos, so now I'm back to looking at browser-based solutions, ugh.
  - romwell 5y ago
    Try TiddlyWiki! It's what the author of the article uses and recommends in the article :)
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Yeah zimwiki seems to run on macos only by chance and not because anyone tested it or put any work in to it. I love using it on linux but when I tried out MacOS I had to use notes.
- happyweasel 5y ago
  I migrated to ZIM from OneNote desktop. OneNote Desktop was everything I needed. Did not migrate to the OneNote cloud thing. Nowadays it's ZIM wiki using SVN as a backend. Not missing out on anything in particular. Ok, the table plugin for ZIM is still lacking IMHO.
  - hyperluz 5y ago
    OneNote allows hand written notes, that I use every time. Does ZIM or another note taking app for Linux allow hand notes?
mr_o47 5y ago
Interesting article ! Note taking is very important as it helps you retain stuff and helps you learn better in general. I am huge on taking notes whenever I'm learning something new and the strategy that worked for me best was using markdown in vim to take notes and use git to save them. Last but not least if you are a huge note taker I would suggest using Mdbook(A project powered by Rust) as it allows you to write in markdown and uses full-text search feature which makes it easier when searching for something specific in your notes. Anyways would love to hear from you guys what tools have worked for you guys when taking notes
- flankstaek 5y ago
  Would you mind explaining what Mdbook does in this context? It seems like it fulfills a completely different purpose than what's being talked about here.
Sophistifunk 5y ago
I just want something that's not an Electron app, not plain text, and not bloody markdown. I hate markdown, and I hate that it's taken over everything.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  If not markdown then what's your recommendations?
  - criddell 5y ago
    The primary format is probably some type of WYSIWYG format.
  - Sophistifunk 5y ago
    I don't care how it's stored, as long as I can export it for backups' sake. I don't want to see markdown, I don't want to use it for formatting text, I don't want to use it as a user-interface, and I certainly don't want text jumping around and reformatting stuff as I type.
- something98 5y ago
  Having been making a go at several of the suggested applications, which all use MD, I’m also starting to like it less and less. I find the side-by-side panes of some just a hilariously stupid waste of space. And the editors that at least do live “previews” feel so janky when editing; watching pound signs appear and disappear as you move off a line, or having text shift around as bold and italics markers come and go. No, I don’t need all the formatting capabilities of a word processor. But there’s a reason why MD is often pretty-fied: it’s damn ugly and noisy as hell. I get that people want a “pure” text format for longevity’s sake; but just demand a text export-in MD if you like. But working in MD is crazy making; it’s ugly, distracting, and worst of all, the “raw” form is nothing like documents and formatting we’re all used to, so even if you get used to it, all of the other documents in the world you interact with will still be using real bold, italics, and headers of increasing size.
  - 5y ago
agambrahma 5y ago
Here's what I use: - Mostly Obsidian, with each vault (two right now) indexed within DevonThink. - Blog posts in iAWriter - Paper and pen for brainstorming etc
Timothycquinn 5y ago
FWIW, I have used single panel outlines for years starting with Omni Outliner on my OSX 10.0.1 days. However, after switching off Mac, I've come to depended on Ecco Pro[1] which I presently use on Ubuntu/Gnome via Wine. Ecco Pro only has one level of undo but it just does just what is needed and I've never had it loose any data on me. It was last compiled in 1997 but there are ways to tweak it out for modern OS's. I have automated scripts to convert Ecco outlines into Markdown also have time invoicing outputs etc. As Ecco does not have any rich text or any intrinsic special formatting coding, its easy to use Ecco as your own personal note taking DSL. For Example: .: <title_block> :. [.] - todo (open) [x] - todo (done) [~] - todo (in progress) etc... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  Man, throwback! I loved Ecco back in the day. It was definitely the spiritual successor to the niche hit Lotus Agenda, which was unfortunately so weird that Lotus gave up and created Organizer instead. That was a shame, because Agenda was insanely powerful. I was really glad to see Ecco happen, and sadder still when I eventually had to move off it.
rsyring 5y ago
I want rich text editing and easy sharing with individuals or groups, like Dropbox paper, but local, fast, and encrypted sync. Not found everything in a single app yet, please enlighten me if possible to something that fits that I've missed.
- FractalHQ 5y ago
  Same, but with back links and categories based on tags.
- mateuszf 5y ago
  local and with sharing seem like a bit contradictory features
gexla 5y ago
The trouble with notes is that it's a huge territory and people are talking about their tools without further context. Talking about preferences between a Land Rover and a Corolla isn't productive until you start breaking down your specific needs. I like Tiago Forte's approach for his PARA system. The system stands alone and may be adapted to any of your tools. This includes note taking, project management, calendar, etc. The tools for note taking are basically view layers for me.
petersellers 5y ago
Whenever one of these threads pops up I'm always surprised at the lack of responses for OneNote. For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices, supports the iPad pencil, supports OCR and text searching in images, has native apps, and it's free.
- KTallguy 5y ago
  I used OneNote for a long time. It's not bad, but it has some quirks that I wasn't fond of: why are notes in these weird draggable boxes? When I decided to export my notes to a different format it was a huge pain. I ended up creating a keyboard macro script and cycling through each note one by one. Once I exported all my notes to word documents, I was able to convert them to markdown/org from there.
  - ygra 5y ago
    For me that actually is one thing I really love about OneNote and hate about everything that tries forcing my notes from something paper-like into something text-file-like because that's just not how I take notes. I tend to scribble into corners or wherever there's space. It doesn't linearize well, but it doesn't have to (at least for me).
- darekkay 5y ago
  +1 for OneNote. I need a notes tool that works on desktop and mobile, where I can easily view and edit notes (text and images) even when being offline. Most tools unfortunately don't pass this basic criteria.
- hobabaObama 5y ago
  One small correction. OneNote is free till you expire your free OneDrive storage space. After that we need to pay for online storage.
  - criddell 5y ago
    I don't think most people around here have a problem paying for something that's valuable to them.
gooeykabuki 5y ago
Has anyone here tried Agenda? https://agenda.com https://agenda.com
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  someone was extolling its virtues uptopic.
TranquilMarmot 5y ago
Yet another opinion :) I tried emacs and org mode but my vim muscle memory was too strong. I ended up mostly sticking with vim-wiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki I have a very small script that syncs my local wiki(s) with a private GitHub repo. I set them all up to be in markdown. I use Google Keep for just random stuff I have to jot down but don't really care about organizing. Honestly though, even plain markdown doesn't work for a lot of types of notes I take. For personal stuff I find myself using Notion a lot. The LaTeX support is pretty great. At work I've actually kind of fallen in love with Confluence. Even though the editor can be a little cumbersome, the search functionality is great the pages just look really nice. Confluence mobile viewing/editing also works really nice. Now that I'm saying (er, typing) all of this out loud, I almost want to switch to Confluence for personal notes instead of Notion haha.
- ta988 5y ago
  Give a try to Doom emacs you can get your vim bindings and it works really well.
- tasuki 5y ago
  Similar here! Vimwiki for the more timeless things (recipes, keyboard shortcuts, etc), Google Keep for the (multiplayer!) shopping list and several relatively transient todo lists.
preek 5y ago
The article mentions Org mode a lot. If you want to try it, but are no Emacs user or also want to use it on mobile (iOS or Android), there is a FOSS solution called organice which I use daily for everything from notes to private and professional project management: https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  Oh, wow, interesting idea. I'm definitely bookmarking this.
  - preek 5y ago
    Thank you for the kind words _/\_ If you've got any questions, feel free to ask them anytime!
oezi 5y ago
I have recently developed my own terminal-based UI for day journalling and todo/task tracking [1] in markdown files because I was sick of rearranging todos in other tools and just needed something which provides a standard template for each day (journal, high priority, todos of the day). The main advantage is that you can "migrate" all unfinished todos to a new page/day and thus get a clean start each day. This idea comes from bullet journalling. To get it done I had to dig a bit into ncurses, which turned out more interesting than I thought. For instance, Windows Terminal just gained support for bracketed paste a couple of months ago and my tool supports it. Long term I would like to add generated views (for instance: last year this time one of your highlights was...) and support recurring tasks to be inserted into the daily log. [1] https://github.com/coezbek/rodo https://github.com/coezbek/rodo Stack: Ruby, Curses, Markdown
hyperluz 5y ago
Not even a mention to Onenote, Liquidtext and Outline? IMHO, if you want to do digital note taking in 2021, your best tools are on iPadOS, Android and Windows, where such tools allows handwritten notes and optionally allow to convert those into plain text via OCR. This or using one of those recent expensive last generation e-ink devices.
emptyparadise 5y ago
So many systems break down for me when I find out I can't just paste an image file in my note.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I spent years experimenting with note taking/personal knowledge bases. After moving on from Evernote, I even wrote my own clone in Clojure and Clojurescript with a Firefox plugin for web capture. I am now done with such time wasting nonsense. For several years I have been using Apple Notes (all my Apple devices except Apple Watch, and web browser version on Linux). I bought a simple app that exports all notes to a standard text file format for periodic backups.
- jdshaffer 5y ago
  Ah! Backups have always been by worry. What simple app are you using for the "save as TXT" backups?
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    There is a macOS app called Exporter. Search for "backup Notes" in App Store. EDIT: I just tried running it, and nothing happened. Might be a beta macOS Monterrey problem. EDIT 2: this just worked for me, needs an iPad, but copies Notes as markdown files that then also show up on my Mac: https://wimpostma.com/blog/how-to-export-and-backup-notes-from-apple-notes/ https://wimpostma.com/blog/how-to-export-and-backup-notes-fr...
ryeguy_24 5y ago
The way I classify things is as follows: 1. Notes 2. Tasks These are not mutually exclusive. And the fact that they are not mutually exclusive is, in my opinion, one of the major obstacles in being able to develop a really good process for taking notes and then operating on those notes. I frankly don’t care much for any note software out there because the note taking part is generally easy so I just default to Apple notes for jotting down “external brain hard drive” stuff. I’m actually working on a solution that integrates the notes and the tasks. See, I’m in meetings all the time so I write things like: 1. Client’s main priority is look and feel of website. (This is just a note) 2. Client needs to be done with project Dec 1 (also just a note) *3. Ryan (me) to set up meeting with Joe and Jane. (This a note but I have to do something here and track it) I can’t stand taking notes and separately having a todo list. They need to be integrated. You need to be able to take notes and quickly see all the todos that came out of it. You also need to be able to prioritize those todos and filter them as part of your day and executing on those todos. This is what I’m working on and I think it is the silver bullet for me. If anyone wants to come along my journey or wants to see the prototype, email me (ryeguy_24 at yahoo).
- metta2uall 5y ago
  I'd also want to integrate notes & TODO - but also time-tracking, i.e. the ability to "click" on any note/TODO and log time against it. Perhaps a TODO can be a note with a tag like "#todo"/"#todo-important"/etc, and time-logs can be child notes..
  - blackbear_ 5y ago
    You can do this with Org-mode in emacs! It will look something like this: * project ** DONE investigation ... ** TODO implementation [2/3] DEADLINE: <2021-06-21 Mon> :LOGBOOK: CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 13:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 16:03] => 2:33 CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 10:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 13:04] => 2:34 :END: do X and Y, be careful about Z - [X] part 1 - [X] part 2 - [ ] part 3 And you can quickly show the time spent on each entry: #+BEGIN: clocktable :scope subtree :maxlevel 2 #+CAPTION: Clock summary at [2021-06-17 Thu 16:06] | Headline | Time | | |--------------------------+--------+------| | *Total time* | *7:40* | | |--------------------------+--------+------| | project | 7:40 | | | \_ investigation | | 2:33 | | \_ implementation [2/3] | | 5:07 | #+END: There are obviously all sorts of key shortcuts to manage this, see the wiki [1] for details. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Clocking-Work-Time.html
sAbakumoff 5y ago
remarkable 2
nixass 5y ago
What do you use for taking notes in corp environment where data security is hard requirement and using 3rd party online solution (or the one that requires you to open an account for)? So far I'm stuck with offline solution (cherrytree, I'm with them since using Linux back in the day) which is not ideal but gets me going. Also it's relatively easy to make scheduled backups to internal servers where I can retrieve them in case of laptop failure and/or migration to new hardware. Not saying I really need to use other software than cherrytree but would like to try something else (you know, that itchy feel in the back of your brain). Any good offline solution anyone would recommend?
- Alex78659 5y ago
  I use https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ for notes I need to keep off-line.
ednico 5y ago
Logseq is one I highly recommend: http://logseq.com/ http://logseq.com/ Outliner, local file storage, API plugins, todo's and loads more. On top of everything, it is free.
- pps 5y ago
  > it is free I would like to point out that this is temporary, for people who don't want to pay at all for note taking https://discuss.logseq.com/t/what-is-logseqs-business-model/389/6 https://discuss.logseq.com/t/what-is-logseqs-business-model/... (And yes, Logseq is great, couldn't agree more)
keithnz 5y ago
I write markdown in text files and organize them into directories backed up by dropbox ( but could be anything really ). It works way better than all the different note taking apps I've used.
- inakarmacoma 5y ago
  You'll probably like Obsidian.md
  - keithnz 5y ago
    not really, vscode with preview on works in a similar way, but I don't really need to use it like that, mostly I just navigate the directories and find the file with the notes I'm interested in reading. If I do forget where something is, simple search finds it and I don't even consume it as rendered markdown, usually just as plain text. I find it really useful, I have a ton of notes on all kinds of things that I keep referring to.
aj2 5y ago
<shameless plug> building https://www.instanote.io https://www.instanote.io. Notes, just like chat without any complexity.
going_ham 5y ago
I need help in making notes. Whenever I make some notes, the problem with my notes is that I don't revisit them because they seem to lack information on my first read. So I go back to the source and read it again. Each time I do it, I get new insight. So everytime I see these note taking posts, I don't get the point of making notes. How often do you guys revisit your notes?
- lugu 5y ago
  I wrote my notes by topics in the form of flashcards so I revisit them randomly. I also have a journal but it is not meant to be reviewed.
privatdozent 5y ago
Remarkable 2?
- eloisant 5y ago
  That's a tool that lets you combine the flexibility of paper and some of the features of digital, but just using it doesn't tell you how to write your notes, how to organize them, etc.
Datagenerator 5y ago
Using TiddlyWiki on VPS so it's online accessible from my home IP address without authorization and with from any other location. Served using the Caddy webserver which automatically handles the TLS certificates. Taking notes for years using Tags for search and grouping.
insanet 5y ago
Syncthing on desktop + mobile + RaspberryPi home server for syncing. Sublime Text for editing markdown notes on desktop. Markor (Markor: Markdown Editor) for editing those on Android. Highly recommended.
wolpoli 5y ago
After spending countless hours researching, trying (and then abandoning) notetaking apps such as OneNote, Evernote, Zimwiki, plain markdown files, and more, I ended up writing notes in Docx and then putting them on Onedrive. While Docx might be clunky, I could edit it from my phone, on the web, and on my desktop. I could put images in them. The file format has enough momentum that I am sure I could still open it 20 years from now. Most importantly, I could store the Docx file next to my other project resources, and when I am done, I could archive the whole folder away.
nxpnsv 5y ago
I've been down this rabbit hole too many times. My advice is take notes - it is good and fun. There are lots of ways to take notes, pick one you like and stay happy. While there are differences between approaches, the big thing is notes or no notes. Also remember, what works well for you might not be the same as what is hip at the moment...
marcus_cemes 5y ago
I did a lot of research on the topic when I started my university studies in microengineering. At the start of uni, there's a lot of money and time being spent by students to set up the "best note taking environment" to ensure their success, usually resulting in expensive iPad Pros with Apple Pencils or the Windows Surface equivilent. In the end I chose a simple piece of software for my 2012 Thinkpad: OneNote. Why? Equation support. There are so many problems with it, but after trialing it against paper and pen, I never looked back, just for the ability to quickly flip back to last-year's lecture/exercices on-the-go. We each have our own journey and find our preferred solution, but here are a few reasons why I chose OneNote over the plethora of other available solutions. It's free. I wouldn't mind paying for something, but this gives you peace of mind that it will stay yours without restrictions, like Google Docs/Sheets/etc. Secondly, it's fast. It's an optimized Windows app that starts in the blink of an eye and uses few system resources. It's visually simple, doens't distract you and has nice smooth animations, it's easier to read/write formatted text with equations than muck around with Markdown/LaTeX. Instant sync, in fact, real-time like Google Docs between devices. The equation support is great once you learn it, it's almost as good as LaTeX. It has pretty decent spell check (although I wish I could set a preferred writing language and not have it deduce from my active keyboard). Good organisation into books, sections and pages. Students get unlimited storage with OneDrive, so no problem there, and trust me, it will be a while until you exhaust your free storage with note taking. Paste images/screen captures, tables. I've never used the pen mode because I don't have any device with a stylus, but I prefer text anyway for it's searchability and typing speed. It takes a little while to really understand the formatting engine, but once you get a feel for the markdown-like underlying invisible structure, it makes it easier to format and move things around. You create your own style and organisation that you can understand and navigate quickly. It's one of the things keeping me on Windows, sadly. Encryption is absolutely not important for me for lecture note-taking, anything remotly important I'll stick in 1password or on a locally encrypted drive. The day I want to migrate, I'll export it as PDF and archive it in the fairly unlikely event I will want to refer back to something. Over time I've learnt that what's in your head is more important than having a perfectly organised personal wiki of knowledge. I would reconsider it for the long-term, but it's fantastic to use something that feels polished and backed by a large company, like GMail vs settings up your own VPS/email software and client. I'm not a fan of big-tech endorsed products, but I can't seem to keep myself away from this one.
maxs 5y ago
Like everyone else on this tread I built a note-taking system! Mine is called MindPalace and its special feature is that it is focused on spaced repetition and remembering the notes after they were written. For me, whenever I would take notes, they would become stale and forgotten. Despite Emerson's quote “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”, I felt that there is a lot more to be gained from remembering them. For instance, I can remember meetings past and insights gained by following up on meeting notes, or insights I got from reading books. I have almost a 1000 notes in my personal notebook. BTW, the app is self-hosted and avilable here if anyone is interested: https://github.com/msipos/mind-palace https://github.com/msipos/mind-palace I'd be curious if anyone else does "spaced repetition note taking" and if anyone can share cool tools for that (my tool is not particularly good)
hyb 5y ago
I recommend 'nb' (https://github.com/xwmx/nb https://github.com/xwmx/nb) CLI and local web plain text note‑taking, bookmarking, and archiving with linking, tagging, filtering, search, Git versioning & syncing, Pandoc conversion, + more in a single portable script.
slightwinder 5y ago
It's kinda fascinating how something as simple as notetaking is still one of the big unsolved challanges in IT. We are constantly reimplementing the same decade-old concepts again and again, in slight variations and combinations, but yet hardly moving into a higher level of conquering this domain. One reason is for sure is the wide number of requirements that everyone has. But another one seems to be the lack of big money flowing into that area and the low effort in researching it as a result. It's basically all just personal preference and randomness spreading.
- eloisant 5y ago
  I wouldn't say it's unsolved, many people have a workflow that have worked for them for many years. Including people who used paper 20 years ago and still do today with the same techniques. It's a little like project management: there is no right or no wrong way to do it, just things that work for some people (or teams) and others that work better for different people (or teams). Additionally, the frontier between "note taking" and "personal project management", or "todo list" is blurry as they're usually done with same tools. The main difference is that notetaking being personal, there is no reason to converge and all use the same techniques. By contrast in project management, you have to work more or less the same way with the rest of your team or organization.
  - slightwinder 5y ago
    > I wouldn't say it's unsolved, many people have a workflow that have worked for them for many years. I mean it's unsolved in the sense that there is not dominating solution that works as a foundantion for a broader set of features and exchangable workflows. Everyone is constantly reinventing the same solutions, building the same low effort apps. It's all many many little isolated silos. > It's a little like project management: there is no right or no wrong way to do it There is many standardization in project-managment, from low to high levels. Though, it's true that on lowest levels there is also similar widespread of silos, because people avoid the complex solutions or simly don't know them.
- marttt 5y ago
  > It's kinda fascinating how something as simple as notetaking is still one of the big unsolved challanges in IT. IIRC, author of the (now closed) Taking Note blog [1] once said that you're actually lucky if you haven't yet decided for a "final" note taking technique by your 40s or even 50s. Unfortunately I can't find the exact quote. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021201608/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201021201608/https://takingnot...
bronlund 5y ago
Yet again I have an excuse to recommend https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ I have tried a gazillion ways to sort out my stuff, but this one stuck :)
jcelerier 5y ago
-My setup is zim for saving stuff, lists, etc and Remarkable 2 for raw thinking. I'd really like to find a good way to combine the two.
mtsolitary 5y ago
Plugging my setup which works fantastically for me after a very long time searching: https://www.mtsolitary.com/20210309194647-my-org-mode-setup/ https://www.mtsolitary.com/20210309194647-my-org-mode-setup/ Based on emacs org-mode, org-roam and Hugo.
noisy_boy 5y ago
Tried Tiddlywiki based on recommendations on this page. Started nice and saved few pages, could update the settings etc. Then updated the setting to widen the wiki column size and suddenly all the links (like Home/Settings etc) stopped working with exception of Theme/Appearance and Save. Thankfully didn't put a lot of content in it. I guess I'll have to continue with dokuwiki + my plaintext markdown note setup.
- jaotl 5y ago
  I know, it shouldn't be possible to mess it up that way. .. _But_ the links didn't stop working. You probably made the "wiki column size" (aka story-river) wider and didn't move the sidebar out of the way. So the story-river did "catch" the clicks... There are some changes on the way, that should make it harder, to create confusion like this.
ntaso 5y ago
I dumped all note-taking tools and just use Sublime. I took the idea of timestamp-based ids from Zettelkasten and simplified it even more. My setup now is: Create text file named `YYYY-MM-DD Title of the Note.txt`. Save to a folder. Write freeform. I think it's important to understand one concept of note-taking: You can either spend more time organizing to spend less time retrieving information later. Or you can spend less time organizing and (slightly) more time retrieving information. If you're starting out or don't refer to older notes that often, it's a better idea to just dump everything with as little friction as possible and use a search tool to find information.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  This is basically org journal. With a quick search you can find everything you need. I agree the tagging aspect and organization is overkill for many purposes, but the benefits is that it might help you remember related topics that a search would not have turned up.
- pps 5y ago
  I'm also using Sublime, but with https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk that makes it much smoother
least 5y ago
I think plain text is a pretty bad medium for note taking, at least with regards to how my brain functions. I want pictures and audio and bookmarks to websites and embed pdfs into it. I don't want to have to worry about where i'm storing the media relative to my notes files, they should just be a part of it as soon as I drop it into it. And sometimes i want to rearrange bits spatially. Dragging each part around the 'canvas' to help make sense of everything in a way so the scattered thoughts in my head can be considered and potentially organized in a way that makes sense. I know that this also falls more into "brainstorming" but that is largely what my notes are used for. Plain text just doesn't really fulfill my needs. I think Curio [1] is probably the closest thing to what I want in my head, though one of those HUGE downsides to software like this (and why plaintext is vastly preferred by the HN crowd) is that it's not at all portable or even necessarily decipherable. If Zengobi disappears or I lose access to their software then I'm just out of luck, which has made me hesitant to even try using it and why despite my feelings about it, a great deal of notes I've written are simply in plain text. If anyone has suggestions for solutions that are like this, I'm all ears. [1] https://www.zengobi.com/curio/ https://www.zengobi.com/curio/
- Multicomp 5y ago
  Onenote does all those things. clunkily in the case of free arrangement, but hold ALT and it will do it. In my crazy moments, I imagine porting Onenote's files to a linux program for read/writing Onenote pre-Windows 10 local files. Then I remember there's almost no way I'm up to finishing that task, even if the file format is open, and I never get past the quagmire of 'what IS desktop linux, is it a .deb, a .rpm, must I use C or C++ i wanna use F#, GTK or QT and strange licenses and and'...then i fire back up my Windows pc and jot down my thoughts, embedded images, files, audio and all right in one file, and decide not to start yet another software project. Onenote is just about irreplaceable for the following use cases, but open source stuff is close. roam and notion dont even get on my list 1. notes are stored in an offline file notewiki and wikidpad falls short here. 4. viewable images inline cherrytree iirc falls short here? or maybe not but it deserves to be on the list ranked better than 'cloud notes' 5. tables it is below here where joplin falls short afaik 7. ink and touch features it is below here where xournal++ falls short though they have a ticket open to eventually use a newer file format that would support this use case...and then i plan to switch if at all practical 2. embed files right in the same file so i only have to sync / backup one file, not any linked files all over the disk 3. image / audio embeds that display/play the media inline
armitage 5y ago
I like the Synology Notes app well enough (desktop and iPhone apps), and it's locally hosted on my NAS which is nice.
iamsanteri 5y ago
I just use Google Keep + OneNote + Google Docs as an extensive, interlinked knowledge system. It is very similar to the Zettelkasten method, where Google Keep is the “slip-box”, and then once a week I organize and interlink the notes in a more extensive Google Doc system I call my “second brain”. Best part? By default I can search and retrieve everything from my spotlight search on iPhone or Google Drive. It indexes everything really well and you can interlink any part with Google Doc bookmarks and normal HTML links.
dfal 5y ago
+1 recommendation for QOwnNotes
- animesh 5y ago
  Hello, fellow QOwnNotes user! A rare sighting :)
bnj 5y ago
At WWDC apple announced that notes.app is going to support tags in the new version -- I thought that was great because while I don't use it exclusively, it's one more place things tend to accumulate. But I've been thinking a lot about tags rather than specific tools lately. I've been hoping to find prior art on how to approach tagging in a clean way. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm seen Johnny Decimal[0] and I guess the itch I'm trying to scratch in my brain is to find a description of a way to approach tagging things which addresses the ways they can be hierarchical, and the ways they can be relational. A meta-tagging approach. It's surprisingly difficult to find. [0]: johnnydecimal.com
cyneox 5y ago
Wow! Author of the article here ... It wasn't my intention to have such a big thread. I couldn't anticipate that "2021" in the title would trigger so many people to share their personal thoughts about apps and note taking techniques. While the article's main focus was about note taking itself, I didn't want to compare existing solutions or even have some ranking. I also didn't have the time to try everything out (like Roam, Obsidian etc.). It's just that I have a strong preference for Tiddlywiki since I've been using it for years (not only for a Zettelkasten and note taking but also as a great UI for visualizing links between objects). Nevertheless I'll definitely have a look at your recommendations.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social. In grad school I was for a year part of a small study group. We shared notes, on paper and aloud. It made each of us far, far better at the subject than we could have been on our own. And we were at most 7 people (sometimes only 3). When developing Hode[1], and when helping develop Semantic Synchrony[2], I imagined some kind of mind-meld utopia where superbeings would not just frolic in but also tend each others' knowledge gardens. (Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ... which I can't remember ...) Reading nonlinearly is a faster way to accumulate knowledge than reading linearly. That's is why people who really care prefer newspapers to watching the news on TV. And a format that lets lots of people contribute their input can potentially convey more than a format that locks you into reading a single author. Alas, the potential for noise is higher too -- but still, this is why Wikipedia has been so wildly successful. One might ask, "We've already got Wikipedia; what possible improvement on that do you see?" The thing about Wikipedia is it presents what the author(s) consider(s) settled knowledge. It is a place for record, not a place for debate. A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable. In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos. I once frolicked for an afternoon through Andy Matuschak's[4], which was quite enjoyable. But it was mostly about ... can you guess? ... how to build a knowledge base. If someone finds a scheme that scales, I believe it could be much more powerful than what we currently call AI. [1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode [2] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/ https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/ [3] https://twitter.com/brandontoner https://twitter.com/brandontoner [4] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Knowledge_work_should_accrete https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Knowledge_work_should_accret...
- arata 5y ago
  > Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ... Is it #digitalgarden? > I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social. AFAIK note taking apps often have a feature to share notes, if that counts, e.g., Obsidian (view-only), Roam (view and edit), Notion (view, edit, and comment), and so on. With sharing and comments enabled, you can even use Google Docs as your PKB (some people actually do this), given that you don't need fancy features like bi-directional links. Just like regular blogs, some gardeners also implement a social protocol called Webmention [1]. It's more like a pingback in WordPress than a collaboration tool though. > A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable. I would love to see this implemented in existing apps. The current solutions I know either involve 3rd party plugins (e.g., hypothes.is), or you have to self-hosted it yourself (e.g., cactus.chat, based on Matrix protocol). Another alternative, which I learned from visiting other gardeners [2], is that you can link the edit button in your note to a GitHub PR. It's not friendly to non-developers who visit your garden, but this is better than nothing IMO. > In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos. 5 months ago there is a Show HN about a decentralized knowledge graph called Agora [3]. The cool thing is, everyone is part of one large knowledge graph, which means nodes (notes) from multiple users can be aggregated around [[topic]]. I hope the project is still alive.. ps. I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.. I only started researching on this topic recently to create my own PKB (I literally published my first note couple days ago [4]). [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25573523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25573523 [4] https://arata.page/notes/Web/Safari/WWDC21/ https://arata.page/notes/Web/Safari/WWDC21/
speedcoder 5y ago
Foam bubble helps you build a knowledge graph of your notes via vscode/github: https://github.com/foambubble/foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam
yinyang_in 5y ago
Couldn't find much about notion.so, is there specific reason people here avoid it ? Is there any similar tool for managing notes via Dropbox/self-hosted, I mean with some control over your notes, but similar interface. Notion I hate is you don't have any control over your data.
andrewzah 5y ago
I'm surprised that Joplin hasn't really been mentioned here. It supports hierarchical or tag based notes + to-do lists, in plaintext/markdown/wysiwyg. It supports syncing to several providers, and I sync with my personal webdav server. It has vi/emacs keybindings and supports external editors. It also has a mobile app. So I use that for digital notes, and a nice leuchtterm grid journal for physical notes. I generally do language studies in the physical journal and use the digital notes more for references.
replwoacause 5y ago
I've been happy with NimbusNote [1], although I wish their tables let you filter like Notion's do but they said this feature is on the roadmap. [1] https://nimbusweb.me https://nimbusweb.me
fairramone 5y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this, but if you are on a Mac, KeepIt[1] is great. It is basically an overlay on top of the normal Mac file system (a bit like DevonThink in that regard). [1]: https://reinventedsoftware.com/keepit/ https://reinventedsoftware.com/keepit/
qwerty456127 5y ago
I would actually love to use pen and paper. The problem is I have very hard time reading the notes I have taken when it was important to write fast. I'm not a great typist either but recognizing extremely heavily misspelled (because of fast blind-typing I have never learnt to do right) words consisting of actually readable letters is much easier than deciphering the weird glyphs I produce when fast-writing.

Note Taking in 2021

249 points by cyneox 5y ago

I grew up learning using pen and paper,I will stick to that. Younger digital native generation wants to go all digital? totally ok with me.just we have to learn to agree to disagree.

clydethefrog 5y ago
Would be interested to see methods how to do that better. I am more of a mechanic pencil and paper user. Sometimes use markers when feeling fancy. Has there any new developments since the "bullet journal"?
eloisant 5y ago
If pen and paper works for you, then so be it! I grew up with pen and paper too, but now I couldn't live without the synchronization and easy sharing enabled by digital. Also I suck at organizing with paper while digitally I can neatly organize everything in folder. However I do think digital note taking is more painful than hand writing if you want to go beyond plain text, and digital devices can be distracting when I should be focusing so I recently ordered an e-ink tablet that I'm waiting to be delivered. My hope is that it brings flexibility of paper with the organization and sync/sharing functionalities of digital.
noud 5y ago
Similar here, pen and paper for almost all notes. If I want to keep it for longer I might add it on my personal wiki. But I try to keep it simple and stupid. I feel people spend too much time focusing on how to make/digitalize notes instead of just make notes.

DenverCode 5y ago

Having a public repository online of notes is something that never crossed my mind - however, I am very intrigued.

ogwh 5y ago

If anyone is interested my mobile note taking consists of: Dynalist for organised notes that work well in list/tree structures Standard Notes for unorganised, random brain dumps And good old fashioned pen and paper everywhere else. The miMind app from the article looks like it may be useful.

adfm 5y ago
If you think miMind is interesting, check out SimpleMind.

nxc18 5y ago

Obsidian.MD works pretty well and meets all of the stated requirements. Everything is markdown on disk, but the tool is maintaining an index for linking things. The index powers search and graphing, but otherwise everything works just as well in VS Code. It works really well for me, with the one downside being it is an electron app. Because it is all markdown based, you could use a native tool of choice (I use Ulysses on iPad). They have a sync service, but I just use iCloud. https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/

swozey 5y ago
I use Obsidian and one thing I'm not getting about peoples concerns with e2e encryption - does nobody realize once it's decrypted on the devices you use (work laptops, etc since it's your ubiquitous note taking app) that anyone with access to your laptop (IT) has full access to every single .md file downloaded to your system? People talk about encrypting their vaults and everything else all the time. I've never seen anyone mention the fact that your entire life of notes (whatever they may be) are now completely plain-text (well, markdown) files accessible to anyone with access to your machine. And IT will be well aware that you just dumped 10000 files into a directory, although hopefully they think you're just pulling git clones and don't go further. So, what, do I not use markdown when at work? Do I not care? Do I stifle my posts in case anyone at work reads them? It just seems like a terrible system for very personal note taking. Does throwing the stuff in icloud mitigate this? Gdrive? Dropbox? Even encrypting a folder gives admins access to all of my files as soon as I decrypt it. If I use an online app that I have to auth to and the connection is encrypted unless they're doing DPI they're not going to see any of my notes... This seems like a huge problem with markdown notes.
- sunu 5y ago
  e2e encryption is not trying to solve the problem you describe. If I'm going to open and view private notes on a non-private machine, no amount of encryption will help me.
  - fauigerzigerk 5y ago

tptacek 5y ago

This is going to be one of those threads where everyone rattles off their own note-taking setup, which is great and all. So: There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and (2) sync --- I need my notes mirrored onto my phone. For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good, in fact, because it doesn't feel much better to use than does TextEdit. Both search and sync work fine. I don't have to think about what I'm writing or how it fits into the scheme of things because I'm guaranteed to be able to find things with search. I can drag screenshots of lecture videos in and write short sentences about them. I had Bear.app for awhile and was initially skeptical of it, but it has now replaced Notes.app for me; it's a better writing environment, it has sticky notes (pinned to the top of the note list) which turn out to be really valuable, does native Markdown, and search and sync work reliably on my laptop and phone. So, Notes and Bear.app are my two recommendations. I'm interested to see if anybody comes up with something macOS-supported that outdoes Bear. I'm an Emacs person, I've written a couple thousand lines of elisp, and I have never, ever been able to get into org mode.

poglet 5y ago
I'm considering getting an iPhone just for notes. I had an old iphone, the iOS version didn't allow the sharing of notes feature. I thought I could just log into the iCloud website and edit my notes, however you are unable to view or edit shared notes from the website. It's very confusing. I'm currently using iA Writer on Android. Notes are automaticaly saved as markdown to a Dropbox folder which I can open on my other devices fairly easily.
z5h 5y ago
Best note taking I’ve done is just rubber-ducking to myself in a (public) slack channel solely for that purpose. Never worry about hierarchies, and easily link back to past messages. For a dedicated app and methodology, I find https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ mimics that style.
5y ago

crossroadsguy 5y ago

I am back to Simplenote after trying too many alternatives. nvAlt on Mac and Simplenote app on iPhone. Bear would have been fine if it wasn’t subscription based and allowed me to choose a sync option like dropbox or iCloud sync and let me have local files. FSNotes has years , at this speed, ahead of it. Everything else is just sad Electron - web apps masquerading as native apps. No I don’t like Joplin interface. Also, among Apple cloud offerings or iCloud suite Notes.app is the only one probably that doesn’t suck disgustingly. But then I don’t trust Apple to keep the sync working fine as they deprecate apps too soon on older OS versions.

japanuspus 5y ago
Think we are in the same boat, although I never really made it away from Simplenote. Currently not using the actual Simplenote app, instead it is Byword on iOS, nvpy on Linux, ResophNotes on Windows and nvAlt on OS X (and syncing via Dropbox). For many years I used a small app called "notesy" on iOS, but that disapeared completely at some point -- never found out who made it. Have been thinking about joplin, but I never even tried it since I have a lot of toolchain set up around scripted edits to files (e.g. my timesheet it built by scanning notes, and I clock in and out of projects with a small script triggered from Launchy).
ubermonkey 5y ago
I was a big fan of Notational Velo, and then nvAlt, and the discovery of Deft mode made my migration to emacs/org possible. I wouldn't worry about Apple deprecating Notes or its sync -- both have been part of the iOS ecosystem since day one, haven't they?
- crossroadsguy 5y ago
  I don’t remember the versions but at one point I wanted to stay back on an old OSX version and a newer iOS and the Mac was just a version behind. They made entire iCloud suite and related apps on the two incompatible. As for emacs/vim I have given up by now :) Not my cup of tea.

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KTallguy 5y ago

I tried Obsidian, Zettlr, Standard Notes, Dendron, even tried taking notes in Scrivener. In the end I bit the bullet and started using Emacs + Org-Mode/Org-Roam. The flexibility and customization are unparallelled. I use it for to-dos, for random scribbles, for in-depth musings. Categorizing thoughts and linking them together is so much easier than any other software I've used. The first few months are really tough, and for someone who has never used Vim or other terminal style interfaces before learning shortcuts took a while. But after 6 months, I can't go back.

cyneox 5y ago
I'm also using (Doom) Emacs + ORG-Mode. However exporting my notes to the outside world is not that smooth as with Tiddlywiki. I know there is ox-hugo (which BTW I use to write my blog posts) but for a Zettelkasten/knowledge DB I think it's not enough.

bachmeier 5y ago

I anticipated that "in 2021" would mean a discussion of the recent tools for taking notes that have exploded (Roam, Obsidian, backlinks, etc.) This could have just as well been "Note Taking in 2011". Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but the title is misleading.

jrm4 5y ago

Gotta get in the greatest (IMHO of course.) https://zim-wiki.org https://zim-wiki.org I'm continually baffled at how the rest of the world hasn't discovered this, but it could be because I sort of live at the margins of "ultra geek" and "normie." Local, self-hosted "wiki-like" tool. You write notes, it saves them, supports links and todos and calendars etc. Tons of plugins for math, git, etc etc. The killer aspect, I think, though. Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately and it's very useful. But because it saves as plain-text (Markdown-ish) with links and pages equalling files and folders, it's always infinitely extensible with Bash or other scripts. For me, it's all the extensibility of org-mode without, I mean, you know.

waiseristy 5y ago
ZimWiki was my favorite until I had mysterious performance issues on macos, so now I'm back to looking at browser-based solutions, ugh.
- romwell 5y ago
  Try TiddlyWiki! It's what the author of the article uses and recommends in the article :)
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Yeah zimwiki seems to run on macos only by chance and not because anyone tested it or put any work in to it. I love using it on linux but when I tried out MacOS I had to use notes.
happyweasel 5y ago
I migrated to ZIM from OneNote desktop. OneNote Desktop was everything I needed. Did not migrate to the OneNote cloud thing. Nowadays it's ZIM wiki using SVN as a backend. Not missing out on anything in particular. Ok, the table plugin for ZIM is still lacking IMHO.
- hyperluz 5y ago
  OneNote allows hand written notes, that I use every time. Does ZIM or another note taking app for Linux allow hand notes?

mr_o47 5y ago

Interesting article ! Note taking is very important as it helps you retain stuff and helps you learn better in general. I am huge on taking notes whenever I'm learning something new and the strategy that worked for me best was using markdown in vim to take notes and use git to save them. Last but not least if you are a huge note taker I would suggest using Mdbook(A project powered by Rust) as it allows you to write in markdown and uses full-text search feature which makes it easier when searching for something specific in your notes. Anyways would love to hear from you guys what tools have worked for you guys when taking notes

flankstaek 5y ago
Would you mind explaining what Mdbook does in this context? It seems like it fulfills a completely different purpose than what's being talked about here.

Sophistifunk 5y ago

I just want something that's not an Electron app, not plain text, and not bloody markdown. I hate markdown, and I hate that it's taken over everything.

markus_zhang 5y ago
If not markdown then what's your recommendations?
- criddell 5y ago
  The primary format is probably some type of WYSIWYG format.
- Sophistifunk 5y ago
  I don't care how it's stored, as long as I can export it for backups' sake. I don't want to see markdown, I don't want to use it for formatting text, I don't want to use it as a user-interface, and I certainly don't want text jumping around and reformatting stuff as I type.
something98 5y ago
Having been making a go at several of the suggested applications, which all use MD, I’m also starting to like it less and less. I find the side-by-side panes of some just a hilariously stupid waste of space. And the editors that at least do live “previews” feel so janky when editing; watching pound signs appear and disappear as you move off a line, or having text shift around as bold and italics markers come and go. No, I don’t need all the formatting capabilities of a word processor. But there’s a reason why MD is often pretty-fied: it’s damn ugly and noisy as hell. I get that people want a “pure” text format for longevity’s sake; but just demand a text export-in MD if you like. But working in MD is crazy making; it’s ugly, distracting, and worst of all, the “raw” form is nothing like documents and formatting we’re all used to, so even if you get used to it, all of the other documents in the world you interact with will still be using real bold, italics, and headers of increasing size.
- 5y ago

agambrahma 5y ago

Here's what I use: - Mostly Obsidian, with each vault (two right now) indexed within DevonThink. - Blog posts in iAWriter - Paper and pen for brainstorming etc

Timothycquinn 5y ago

FWIW, I have used single panel outlines for years starting with Omni Outliner on my OSX 10.0.1 days. However, after switching off Mac, I've come to depended on Ecco Pro[1] which I presently use on Ubuntu/Gnome via Wine. Ecco Pro only has one level of undo but it just does just what is needed and I've never had it loose any data on me. It was last compiled in 1997 but there are ways to tweak it out for modern OS's. I have automated scripts to convert Ecco outlines into Markdown also have time invoicing outputs etc. As Ecco does not have any rich text or any intrinsic special formatting coding, its easy to use Ecco as your own personal note taking DSL. For Example: .: <title_block> :. [.] - todo (open) [x] - todo (done) [~] - todo (in progress) etc... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro

ubermonkey 5y ago
Man, throwback! I loved Ecco back in the day. It was definitely the spiritual successor to the niche hit Lotus Agenda, which was unfortunately so weird that Lotus gave up and created Organizer instead. That was a shame, because Agenda was insanely powerful. I was really glad to see Ecco happen, and sadder still when I eventually had to move off it.

rsyring 5y ago

I want rich text editing and easy sharing with individuals or groups, like Dropbox paper, but local, fast, and encrypted sync. Not found everything in a single app yet, please enlighten me if possible to something that fits that I've missed.

FractalHQ 5y ago
Same, but with back links and categories based on tags.
mateuszf 5y ago
local and with sharing seem like a bit contradictory features

gexla 5y ago

The trouble with notes is that it's a huge territory and people are talking about their tools without further context. Talking about preferences between a Land Rover and a Corolla isn't productive until you start breaking down your specific needs. I like Tiago Forte's approach for his PARA system. The system stands alone and may be adapted to any of your tools. This includes note taking, project management, calendar, etc. The tools for note taking are basically view layers for me.

petersellers 5y ago

Whenever one of these threads pops up I'm always surprised at the lack of responses for OneNote. For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices, supports the iPad pencil, supports OCR and text searching in images, has native apps, and it's free.

KTallguy 5y ago
I used OneNote for a long time. It's not bad, but it has some quirks that I wasn't fond of: why are notes in these weird draggable boxes? When I decided to export my notes to a different format it was a huge pain. I ended up creating a keyboard macro script and cycling through each note one by one. Once I exported all my notes to word documents, I was able to convert them to markdown/org from there.
- ygra 5y ago
  For me that actually is one thing I really love about OneNote and hate about everything that tries forcing my notes from something paper-like into something text-file-like because that's just not how I take notes. I tend to scribble into corners or wherever there's space. It doesn't linearize well, but it doesn't have to (at least for me).
darekkay 5y ago
+1 for OneNote. I need a notes tool that works on desktop and mobile, where I can easily view and edit notes (text and images) even when being offline. Most tools unfortunately don't pass this basic criteria.
hobabaObama 5y ago
One small correction. OneNote is free till you expire your free OneDrive storage space. After that we need to pay for online storage.
- criddell 5y ago
  I don't think most people around here have a problem paying for something that's valuable to them.

gooeykabuki 5y ago

Has anyone here tried Agenda? https://agenda.com https://agenda.com

ubermonkey 5y ago
someone was extolling its virtues uptopic.

TranquilMarmot 5y ago

Yet another opinion :) I tried emacs and org mode but my vim muscle memory was too strong. I ended up mostly sticking with vim-wiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki I have a very small script that syncs my local wiki(s) with a private GitHub repo. I set them all up to be in markdown. I use Google Keep for just random stuff I have to jot down but don't really care about organizing. Honestly though, even plain markdown doesn't work for a lot of types of notes I take. For personal stuff I find myself using Notion a lot. The LaTeX support is pretty great. At work I've actually kind of fallen in love with Confluence. Even though the editor can be a little cumbersome, the search functionality is great the pages just look really nice. Confluence mobile viewing/editing also works really nice. Now that I'm saying (er, typing) all of this out loud, I almost want to switch to Confluence for personal notes instead of Notion haha.

ta988 5y ago
Give a try to Doom emacs you can get your vim bindings and it works really well.
tasuki 5y ago
Similar here! Vimwiki for the more timeless things (recipes, keyboard shortcuts, etc), Google Keep for the (multiplayer!) shopping list and several relatively transient todo lists.

preek 5y ago

The article mentions Org mode a lot. If you want to try it, but are no Emacs user or also want to use it on mobile (iOS or Android), there is a FOSS solution called organice which I use daily for everything from notes to private and professional project management: https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

ubermonkey 5y ago
Oh, wow, interesting idea. I'm definitely bookmarking this.
- preek 5y ago
  Thank you for the kind words _/\_ If you've got any questions, feel free to ask them anytime!

oezi 5y ago

I have recently developed my own terminal-based UI for day journalling and todo/task tracking [1] in markdown files because I was sick of rearranging todos in other tools and just needed something which provides a standard template for each day (journal, high priority, todos of the day). The main advantage is that you can "migrate" all unfinished todos to a new page/day and thus get a clean start each day. This idea comes from bullet journalling. To get it done I had to dig a bit into ncurses, which turned out more interesting than I thought. For instance, Windows Terminal just gained support for bracketed paste a couple of months ago and my tool supports it. Long term I would like to add generated views (for instance: last year this time one of your highlights was...) and support recurring tasks to be inserted into the daily log. [1] https://github.com/coezbek/rodo https://github.com/coezbek/rodo Stack: Ruby, Curses, Markdown

hyperluz 5y ago

Not even a mention to Onenote, Liquidtext and Outline? IMHO, if you want to do digital note taking in 2021, your best tools are on iPadOS, Android and Windows, where such tools allows handwritten notes and optionally allow to convert those into plain text via OCR. This or using one of those recent expensive last generation e-ink devices.

emptyparadise 5y ago

So many systems break down for me when I find out I can't just paste an image file in my note.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I spent years experimenting with note taking/personal knowledge bases. After moving on from Evernote, I even wrote my own clone in Clojure and Clojurescript with a Firefox plugin for web capture. I am now done with such time wasting nonsense. For several years I have been using Apple Notes (all my Apple devices except Apple Watch, and web browser version on Linux). I bought a simple app that exports all notes to a standard text file format for periodic backups.

jdshaffer 5y ago
Ah! Backups have always been by worry. What simple app are you using for the "save as TXT" backups?
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  There is a macOS app called Exporter. Search for "backup Notes" in App Store. EDIT: I just tried running it, and nothing happened. Might be a beta macOS Monterrey problem. EDIT 2: this just worked for me, needs an iPad, but copies Notes as markdown files that then also show up on my Mac: https://wimpostma.com/blog/how-to-export-and-backup-notes-from-apple-notes/ https://wimpostma.com/blog/how-to-export-and-backup-notes-fr...

ryeguy_24 5y ago

The way I classify things is as follows: 1. Notes 2. Tasks These are not mutually exclusive. And the fact that they are not mutually exclusive is, in my opinion, one of the major obstacles in being able to develop a really good process for taking notes and then operating on those notes. I frankly don’t care much for any note software out there because the note taking part is generally easy so I just default to Apple notes for jotting down “external brain hard drive” stuff. I’m actually working on a solution that integrates the notes and the tasks. See, I’m in meetings all the time so I write things like: 1. Client’s main priority is look and feel of website. (This is just a note) 2. Client needs to be done with project Dec 1 (also just a note) *3. Ryan (me) to set up meeting with Joe and Jane. (This a note but I have to do something here and track it) I can’t stand taking notes and separately having a todo list. They need to be integrated. You need to be able to take notes and quickly see all the todos that came out of it. You also need to be able to prioritize those todos and filter them as part of your day and executing on those todos. This is what I’m working on and I think it is the silver bullet for me. If anyone wants to come along my journey or wants to see the prototype, email me (ryeguy_24 at yahoo).

metta2uall 5y ago
I'd also want to integrate notes & TODO - but also time-tracking, i.e. the ability to "click" on any note/TODO and log time against it. Perhaps a TODO can be a note with a tag like "#todo"/"#todo-important"/etc, and time-logs can be child notes..
- blackbear_ 5y ago
  You can do this with Org-mode in emacs! It will look something like this: * project ** DONE investigation ... ** TODO implementation [2/3] DEADLINE: <2021-06-21 Mon> :LOGBOOK: CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 13:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 16:03] => 2:33 CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 10:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 13:04] => 2:34 :END: do X and Y, be careful about Z - [X] part 1 - [X] part 2 - [ ] part 3 And you can quickly show the time spent on each entry: #+BEGIN: clocktable :scope subtree :maxlevel 2 #+CAPTION: Clock summary at [2021-06-17 Thu 16:06] | Headline | Time | | |--------------------------+--------+------| | *Total time* | *7:40* | | |--------------------------+--------+------| | project | 7:40 | | | \_ investigation | | 2:33 | | \_ implementation [2/3] | | 5:07 | #+END: There are obviously all sorts of key shortcuts to manage this, see the wiki [1] for details. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Clocking-Work-Time.html

sAbakumoff 5y ago

remarkable 2

nixass 5y ago

What do you use for taking notes in corp environment where data security is hard requirement and using 3rd party online solution (or the one that requires you to open an account for)? So far I'm stuck with offline solution (cherrytree, I'm with them since using Linux back in the day) which is not ideal but gets me going. Also it's relatively easy to make scheduled backups to internal servers where I can retrieve them in case of laptop failure and/or migration to new hardware. Not saying I really need to use other software than cherrytree but would like to try something else (you know, that itchy feel in the back of your brain). Any good offline solution anyone would recommend?

Alex78659 5y ago
I use https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ for notes I need to keep off-line.

ednico 5y ago

Logseq is one I highly recommend: http://logseq.com/ http://logseq.com/ Outliner, local file storage, API plugins, todo's and loads more. On top of everything, it is free.

pps 5y ago
> it is free I would like to point out that this is temporary, for people who don't want to pay at all for note taking https://discuss.logseq.com/t/what-is-logseqs-business-model/389/6 https://discuss.logseq.com/t/what-is-logseqs-business-model/... (And yes, Logseq is great, couldn't agree more)

keithnz 5y ago

I write markdown in text files and organize them into directories backed up by dropbox ( but could be anything really ). It works way better than all the different note taking apps I've used.

inakarmacoma 5y ago
You'll probably like Obsidian.md
- keithnz 5y ago
  not really, vscode with preview on works in a similar way, but I don't really need to use it like that, mostly I just navigate the directories and find the file with the notes I'm interested in reading. If I do forget where something is, simple search finds it and I don't even consume it as rendered markdown, usually just as plain text. I find it really useful, I have a ton of notes on all kinds of things that I keep referring to.

aj2 5y ago

<shameless plug> building https://www.instanote.io https://www.instanote.io. Notes, just like chat without any complexity.

going_ham 5y ago

I need help in making notes. Whenever I make some notes, the problem with my notes is that I don't revisit them because they seem to lack information on my first read. So I go back to the source and read it again. Each time I do it, I get new insight. So everytime I see these note taking posts, I don't get the point of making notes. How often do you guys revisit your notes?

lugu 5y ago
I wrote my notes by topics in the form of flashcards so I revisit them randomly. I also have a journal but it is not meant to be reviewed.

privatdozent 5y ago

Remarkable 2?

eloisant 5y ago
That's a tool that lets you combine the flexibility of paper and some of the features of digital, but just using it doesn't tell you how to write your notes, how to organize them, etc.

Datagenerator 5y ago

Using TiddlyWiki on VPS so it's online accessible from my home IP address without authorization and with from any other location. Served using the Caddy webserver which automatically handles the TLS certificates. Taking notes for years using Tags for search and grouping.

insanet 5y ago

Syncthing on desktop + mobile + RaspberryPi home server for syncing. Sublime Text for editing markdown notes on desktop. Markor (Markor: Markdown Editor) for editing those on Android. Highly recommended.

wolpoli 5y ago

After spending countless hours researching, trying (and then abandoning) notetaking apps such as OneNote, Evernote, Zimwiki, plain markdown files, and more, I ended up writing notes in Docx and then putting them on Onedrive. While Docx might be clunky, I could edit it from my phone, on the web, and on my desktop. I could put images in them. The file format has enough momentum that I am sure I could still open it 20 years from now. Most importantly, I could store the Docx file next to my other project resources, and when I am done, I could archive the whole folder away.

nxpnsv 5y ago

I've been down this rabbit hole too many times. My advice is take notes - it is good and fun. There are lots of ways to take notes, pick one you like and stay happy. While there are differences between approaches, the big thing is notes or no notes. Also remember, what works well for you might not be the same as what is hip at the moment...

marcus_cemes 5y ago

I did a lot of research on the topic when I started my university studies in microengineering. At the start of uni, there's a lot of money and time being spent by students to set up the "best note taking environment" to ensure their success, usually resulting in expensive iPad Pros with Apple Pencils or the Windows Surface equivilent. In the end I chose a simple piece of software for my 2012 Thinkpad: OneNote. Why? Equation support. There are so many problems with it, but after trialing it against paper and pen, I never looked back, just for the ability to quickly flip back to last-year's lecture/exercices on-the-go. We each have our own journey and find our preferred solution, but here are a few reasons why I chose OneNote over the plethora of other available solutions. It's free. I wouldn't mind paying for something, but this gives you peace of mind that it will stay yours without restrictions, like Google Docs/Sheets/etc. Secondly, it's fast. It's an optimized Windows app that starts in the blink of an eye and uses few system resources. It's visually simple, doens't distract you and has nice smooth animations, it's easier to read/write formatted text with equations than muck around with Markdown/LaTeX. Instant sync, in fact, real-time like Google Docs between devices. The equation support is great once you learn it, it's almost as good as LaTeX. It has pretty decent spell check (although I wish I could set a preferred writing language and not have it deduce from my active keyboard). Good organisation into books, sections and pages. Students get unlimited storage with OneDrive, so no problem there, and trust me, it will be a while until you exhaust your free storage with note taking. Paste images/screen captures, tables. I've never used the pen mode because I don't have any device with a stylus, but I prefer text anyway for it's searchability and typing speed. It takes a little while to really understand the formatting engine, but once you get a feel for the markdown-like underlying invisible structure, it makes it easier to format and move things around. You create your own style and organisation that you can understand and navigate quickly. It's one of the things keeping me on Windows, sadly. Encryption is absolutely not important for me for lecture note-taking, anything remotly important I'll stick in 1password or on a locally encrypted drive. The day I want to migrate, I'll export it as PDF and archive it in the fairly unlikely event I will want to refer back to something. Over time I've learnt that what's in your head is more important than having a perfectly organised personal wiki of knowledge. I would reconsider it for the long-term, but it's fantastic to use something that feels polished and backed by a large company, like GMail vs settings up your own VPS/email software and client. I'm not a fan of big-tech endorsed products, but I can't seem to keep myself away from this one.

maxs 5y ago

Like everyone else on this tread I built a note-taking system! Mine is called MindPalace and its special feature is that it is focused on spaced repetition and remembering the notes after they were written. For me, whenever I would take notes, they would become stale and forgotten. Despite Emerson's quote “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”, I felt that there is a lot more to be gained from remembering them. For instance, I can remember meetings past and insights gained by following up on meeting notes, or insights I got from reading books. I have almost a 1000 notes in my personal notebook. BTW, the app is self-hosted and avilable here if anyone is interested: https://github.com/msipos/mind-palace https://github.com/msipos/mind-palace I'd be curious if anyone else does "spaced repetition note taking" and if anyone can share cool tools for that (my tool is not particularly good)

hyb 5y ago

I recommend 'nb' (https://github.com/xwmx/nb https://github.com/xwmx/nb) CLI and local web plain text note‑taking, bookmarking, and archiving with linking, tagging, filtering, search, Git versioning & syncing, Pandoc conversion, + more in a single portable script.

slightwinder 5y ago

It's kinda fascinating how something as simple as notetaking is still one of the big unsolved challanges in IT. We are constantly reimplementing the same decade-old concepts again and again, in slight variations and combinations, but yet hardly moving into a higher level of conquering this domain. One reason is for sure is the wide number of requirements that everyone has. But another one seems to be the lack of big money flowing into that area and the low effort in researching it as a result. It's basically all just personal preference and randomness spreading.

eloisant 5y ago
I wouldn't say it's unsolved, many people have a workflow that have worked for them for many years. Including people who used paper 20 years ago and still do today with the same techniques. It's a little like project management: there is no right or no wrong way to do it, just things that work for some people (or teams) and others that work better for different people (or teams). Additionally, the frontier between "note taking" and "personal project management", or "todo list" is blurry as they're usually done with same tools. The main difference is that notetaking being personal, there is no reason to converge and all use the same techniques. By contrast in project management, you have to work more or less the same way with the rest of your team or organization.
- slightwinder 5y ago
  > I wouldn't say it's unsolved, many people have a workflow that have worked for them for many years. I mean it's unsolved in the sense that there is not dominating solution that works as a foundantion for a broader set of features and exchangable workflows. Everyone is constantly reinventing the same solutions, building the same low effort apps. It's all many many little isolated silos. > It's a little like project management: there is no right or no wrong way to do it There is many standardization in project-managment, from low to high levels. Though, it's true that on lowest levels there is also similar widespread of silos, because people avoid the complex solutions or simly don't know them.
marttt 5y ago
> It's kinda fascinating how something as simple as notetaking is still one of the big unsolved challanges in IT. IIRC, author of the (now closed) Taking Note blog [1] once said that you're actually lucky if you haven't yet decided for a "final" note taking technique by your 40s or even 50s. Unfortunately I can't find the exact quote. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021201608/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201021201608/https://takingnot...

bronlund 5y ago

Yet again I have an excuse to recommend https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ I have tried a gazillion ways to sort out my stuff, but this one stuck :)

jcelerier 5y ago

-My setup is zim for saving stuff, lists, etc and Remarkable 2 for raw thinking. I'd really like to find a good way to combine the two.

mtsolitary 5y ago

Plugging my setup which works fantastically for me after a very long time searching: https://www.mtsolitary.com/20210309194647-my-org-mode-setup/ https://www.mtsolitary.com/20210309194647-my-org-mode-setup/ Based on emacs org-mode, org-roam and Hugo.

noisy_boy 5y ago

Tried Tiddlywiki based on recommendations on this page. Started nice and saved few pages, could update the settings etc. Then updated the setting to widen the wiki column size and suddenly all the links (like Home/Settings etc) stopped working with exception of Theme/Appearance and Save. Thankfully didn't put a lot of content in it. I guess I'll have to continue with dokuwiki + my plaintext markdown note setup.

jaotl 5y ago
I know, it shouldn't be possible to mess it up that way. .. _But_ the links didn't stop working. You probably made the "wiki column size" (aka story-river) wider and didn't move the sidebar out of the way. So the story-river did "catch" the clicks... There are some changes on the way, that should make it harder, to create confusion like this.

ntaso 5y ago

I dumped all note-taking tools and just use Sublime. I took the idea of timestamp-based ids from Zettelkasten and simplified it even more. My setup now is: Create text file named `YYYY-MM-DD Title of the Note.txt`. Save to a folder. Write freeform. I think it's important to understand one concept of note-taking: You can either spend more time organizing to spend less time retrieving information later. Or you can spend less time organizing and (slightly) more time retrieving information. If you're starting out or don't refer to older notes that often, it's a better idea to just dump everything with as little friction as possible and use a search tool to find information.

twobitshifter 5y ago
This is basically org journal. With a quick search you can find everything you need. I agree the tagging aspect and organization is overkill for many purposes, but the benefits is that it might help you remember related topics that a search would not have turned up.
pps 5y ago
I'm also using Sublime, but with https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk that makes it much smoother

least 5y ago

I think plain text is a pretty bad medium for note taking, at least with regards to how my brain functions. I want pictures and audio and bookmarks to websites and embed pdfs into it. I don't want to have to worry about where i'm storing the media relative to my notes files, they should just be a part of it as soon as I drop it into it. And sometimes i want to rearrange bits spatially. Dragging each part around the 'canvas' to help make sense of everything in a way so the scattered thoughts in my head can be considered and potentially organized in a way that makes sense. I know that this also falls more into "brainstorming" but that is largely what my notes are used for. Plain text just doesn't really fulfill my needs. I think Curio [1] is probably the closest thing to what I want in my head, though one of those HUGE downsides to software like this (and why plaintext is vastly preferred by the HN crowd) is that it's not at all portable or even necessarily decipherable. If Zengobi disappears or I lose access to their software then I'm just out of luck, which has made me hesitant to even try using it and why despite my feelings about it, a great deal of notes I've written are simply in plain text. If anyone has suggestions for solutions that are like this, I'm all ears. [1] https://www.zengobi.com/curio/ https://www.zengobi.com/curio/

Multicomp 5y ago
Onenote does all those things. clunkily in the case of free arrangement, but hold ALT and it will do it. In my crazy moments, I imagine porting Onenote's files to a linux program for read/writing Onenote pre-Windows 10 local files. Then I remember there's almost no way I'm up to finishing that task, even if the file format is open, and I never get past the quagmire of 'what IS desktop linux, is it a .deb, a .rpm, must I use C or C++ i wanna use F#, GTK or QT and strange licenses and and'...then i fire back up my Windows pc and jot down my thoughts, embedded images, files, audio and all right in one file, and decide not to start yet another software project. Onenote is just about irreplaceable for the following use cases, but open source stuff is close. roam and notion dont even get on my list 1. notes are stored in an offline file notewiki and wikidpad falls short here. 4. viewable images inline cherrytree iirc falls short here? or maybe not but it deserves to be on the list ranked better than 'cloud notes' 5. tables it is below here where joplin falls short afaik 7. ink and touch features it is below here where xournal++ falls short though they have a ticket open to eventually use a newer file format that would support this use case...and then i plan to switch if at all practical 2. embed files right in the same file so i only have to sync / backup one file, not any linked files all over the disk 3. image / audio embeds that display/play the media inline

armitage 5y ago

I like the Synology Notes app well enough (desktop and iPhone apps), and it's locally hosted on my NAS which is nice.

iamsanteri 5y ago

I just use Google Keep + OneNote + Google Docs as an extensive, interlinked knowledge system. It is very similar to the Zettelkasten method, where Google Keep is the “slip-box”, and then once a week I organize and interlink the notes in a more extensive Google Doc system I call my “second brain”. Best part? By default I can search and retrieve everything from my spotlight search on iPhone or Google Drive. It indexes everything really well and you can interlink any part with Google Doc bookmarks and normal HTML links.

dfal 5y ago

+1 recommendation for QOwnNotes

animesh 5y ago
Hello, fellow QOwnNotes user! A rare sighting :)

bnj 5y ago

At WWDC apple announced that notes.app is going to support tags in the new version -- I thought that was great because while I don't use it exclusively, it's one more place things tend to accumulate. But I've been thinking a lot about tags rather than specific tools lately. I've been hoping to find prior art on how to approach tagging in a clean way. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm seen Johnny Decimal[0] and I guess the itch I'm trying to scratch in my brain is to find a description of a way to approach tagging things which addresses the ways they can be hierarchical, and the ways they can be relational. A meta-tagging approach. It's surprisingly difficult to find. [0]: johnnydecimal.com

cyneox 5y ago

Wow! Author of the article here ... It wasn't my intention to have such a big thread. I couldn't anticipate that "2021" in the title would trigger so many people to share their personal thoughts about apps and note taking techniques. While the article's main focus was about note taking itself, I didn't want to compare existing solutions or even have some ranking. I also didn't have the time to try everything out (like Roam, Obsidian etc.). It's just that I have a strong preference for Tiddlywiki since I've been using it for years (not only for a Zettelkasten and note taking but also as a great UI for visualizing links between objects). Nevertheless I'll definitely have a look at your recommendations.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social. In grad school I was for a year part of a small study group. We shared notes, on paper and aloud. It made each of us far, far better at the subject than we could have been on our own. And we were at most 7 people (sometimes only 3). When developing Hode[1], and when helping develop Semantic Synchrony[2], I imagined some kind of mind-meld utopia where superbeings would not just frolic in but also tend each others' knowledge gardens. (Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ... which I can't remember ...) Reading nonlinearly is a faster way to accumulate knowledge than reading linearly. That's is why people who really care prefer newspapers to watching the news on TV. And a format that lets lots of people contribute their input can potentially convey more than a format that locks you into reading a single author. Alas, the potential for noise is higher too -- but still, this is why Wikipedia has been so wildly successful. One might ask, "We've already got Wikipedia; what possible improvement on that do you see?" The thing about Wikipedia is it presents what the author(s) consider(s) settled knowledge. It is a place for record, not a place for debate. A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable. In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos. I once frolicked for an afternoon through Andy Matuschak's[4], which was quite enjoyable. But it was mostly about ... can you guess? ... how to build a knowledge base. If someone finds a scheme that scales, I believe it could be much more powerful than what we currently call AI. [1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode [2] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/ https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/ [3] https://twitter.com/brandontoner https://twitter.com/brandontoner [4] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Knowledge_work_should_accrete https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Knowledge_work_should_accret...

arata 5y ago
> Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ... Is it #digitalgarden? > I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social. AFAIK note taking apps often have a feature to share notes, if that counts, e.g., Obsidian (view-only), Roam (view and edit), Notion (view, edit, and comment), and so on. With sharing and comments enabled, you can even use Google Docs as your PKB (some people actually do this), given that you don't need fancy features like bi-directional links. Just like regular blogs, some gardeners also implement a social protocol called Webmention [1]. It's more like a pingback in WordPress than a collaboration tool though. > A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable. I would love to see this implemented in existing apps. The current solutions I know either involve 3rd party plugins (e.g., hypothes.is), or you have to self-hosted it yourself (e.g., cactus.chat, based on Matrix protocol). Another alternative, which I learned from visiting other gardeners [2], is that you can link the edit button in your note to a GitHub PR. It's not friendly to non-developers who visit your garden, but this is better than nothing IMO. > In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos. 5 months ago there is a Show HN about a decentralized knowledge graph called Agora [3]. The cool thing is, everyone is part of one large knowledge graph, which means nodes (notes) from multiple users can be aggregated around [[topic]]. I hope the project is still alive.. ps. I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.. I only started researching on this topic recently to create my own PKB (I literally published my first note couple days ago [4]). [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25573523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25573523 [4] https://arata.page/notes/Web/Safari/WWDC21/ https://arata.page/notes/Web/Safari/WWDC21/

speedcoder 5y ago

Foam bubble helps you build a knowledge graph of your notes via vscode/github: https://github.com/foambubble/foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam

yinyang_in 5y ago

Couldn't find much about notion.so, is there specific reason people here avoid it ? Is there any similar tool for managing notes via Dropbox/self-hosted, I mean with some control over your notes, but similar interface. Notion I hate is you don't have any control over your data.

andrewzah 5y ago

I'm surprised that Joplin hasn't really been mentioned here. It supports hierarchical or tag based notes + to-do lists, in plaintext/markdown/wysiwyg. It supports syncing to several providers, and I sync with my personal webdav server. It has vi/emacs keybindings and supports external editors. It also has a mobile app. So I use that for digital notes, and a nice leuchtterm grid journal for physical notes. I generally do language studies in the physical journal and use the digital notes more for references.

replwoacause 5y ago

I've been happy with NimbusNote [1], although I wish their tables let you filter like Notion's do but they said this feature is on the roadmap. [1] https://nimbusweb.me https://nimbusweb.me

fairramone 5y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned this, but if you are on a Mac, KeepIt[1] is great. It is basically an overlay on top of the normal Mac file system (a bit like DevonThink in that regard). [1]: https://reinventedsoftware.com/keepit/ https://reinventedsoftware.com/keepit/

qwerty456127 5y ago

I would actually love to use pen and paper. The problem is I have very hard time reading the notes I have taken when it was important to write fast. I'm not a great typist either but recognizing extremely heavily misspelled (because of fast blind-typing I have never learnt to do right) words consisting of actually readable letters is much easier than deciphering the weird glyphs I produce when fast-writing.