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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

I keep trying new tools when they come out, but find myself always snapping back to Notational Velocity.

Workflowy reminds me of OmniOutliner, they share a very similar, hierarchical approach. Sadly they also share similar problems; a GUI that's too slow for my fingers and too complex for my little brain.

The GUI-complexity stems from the enforced hierarchy. Indenting stuff seems nice at first, and makes it look tidy. But after a while I'd find myself constantly futzing with the indentation in the futile attempt to structure what doesn't want to be structured.

And finally workflowy has the added drawback of living inside the browser - which is not nearly as close to my fingertips as a native app.

For me NV is ultimately the better approach. I can not praise it highly enough. Think: "full-text search for your brain". Try it out if you haven't yet.

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I have used Notational Velocity, I like it, but I absolutely love Taskpaper. I have used almost every single task-manager you could possible think of, but taskpaper for mac is the only one I found to be no-nonsense and intuitive.

Mac only. if you haven't tried it yet, you should try it. You will love it. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper

TodoPaper is the Windows equivalent: http://widefido.com/products/todopaper/

When I switched to Linux, I found that Zim

http://zim-wiki.org/

came close enough to Notational Velocity for my purposes. The key feature both share is giving me the ability to very quickly jump to a note by typing its name in. (With Zim you do this by typing cntrl-j.) I'm reluctant to try any note manager that doesn't have that feature.

Does it allow for easy syncing between multiple machines?

It works on formatted text files. So you could use Dropbox, version control, rsync, etc.

Sweet!

Project Hedgehog (http://projecthedgehog.com) was designed to address many of these complaints. The UI is almost completely keyboard-driven and fast, and stripped down to bare bones. It's a desktop app that runs on OS X and Windows. It has fast search dialog accessible with one keystroke.

Like OmniOutliner/Workflowy, though, it also is hierarchy-oriented, which I think is most natural for ordered tasks. It has a slight learning curve and the UI is very utilitarian, but it has drastically reduced the amount of stuff I have to keep in my head as I'm working.

Wow NV is exactly what I was planning to build as a webapp to scratch my itch. Single text box for both search-as-you-type and for creating a new note. Registered boxuno.com for it.

But I never expected to be able to monetize it; it'd always be a little side project. Such apps are a dime a dozen. The problem with these apps is that simpler is better, but it's hard to differentiate your app from others (or even differentiate between free and premium versions) once it's too simple. I'll be pleasantly surprised if Workflowy can crack this nut.

I also use Notational Velocity on the Mac. I sync with the iPad/iPhone app SimpleNote. The great thing is that sync'ing is automatic in each app. Now all of my ideas and notes are always on whatever device I have at hand. I tried EverNote for a while but it got in the way for quickly updating existing notes, IMHO.

I think it comes down to how a given user works and thinks. Personally, I agree with you about hierarchy (my app doesn't have it and the issue comes up periodically) but I know some that need it. I'm often amazed at how such a simple problem (managing tasks) is solved in such different ways, each which suits one subset of the population!

Sometimes the tool is irrelevant. I have one friend who used a directory structure and text editor (pretty simple) to create an enormous cluster of tasks he'd never get to. Many thousands, like the Windows registry after a couple years of random software installs. His issue was just needing a mechanism to periodically clean it out, so a change in approach rather than a different tool.

Thanks for the Notational Velocity suggestion, it looks nice (link: http://notational.net/).

The extraneous Japanese writing on their page is unbelievably tacky though. I can't figure out what they were thinking. Was it supposed to look cool? It just says mundane things like "Download" or "How to use the program." Not a good impression...

Have you tried Evernote? How does it compare?

I've been using Evernote for the past few weeks, and it's becoming a regular part of my day. I can read, write and search notes through both my computers and my phone (Nexus). Aside from some UI strangeness/ugliness I'm very happy with it.

I really like using Onenote with notebook saved on skydrive, I have been able to have the native app on my windows machines and the webapp when I am on the go. Also, there is a really good looking WP7 app now (though I have used it yet)

What do you recommend for those of us that run Linux on the desktop, not MacOS?

On linux and before discovering NV I was always snapping back to plain old vim (one big text-file).

It's been years since I switched to OSX, though. Perhaps there are worthwhile dedicated apps on linux now (back then I didn't find any).

I'm hearing that 'zim' is the thing, but am trying to figure out how it can be made to easily sync across machines.

Haven't used Zim, but looks at least a little like Tomboy, which has several options for synchronization, using a local folder (Dropbox?), SSH, WebDAV and something they call Tomboy Web. I don't love Tomboy, but it's easy and functional enough that I actually use it.

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