Ask HN: Any good alternatives to pen and paper? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any good alternatives to pen and paper?

47 pointsmartin_a52 comments

I'm taking quite a few notes at work, sometimes just reminders, sometimes a quick scribble, you know the deal.

I think I've filled several notebooks this year and I wonder whether there's something better than putting ink on dead wood.

Does HN have any good alternatives? Possibly without some strange app which is coupled to a 3rd party service or something like that.

Full digitalization of the notes would be great, but I'm up to whatever you can recommend.

Thanks!

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I have a two media philosophy.

1) Physical: I use a TWSBI ECO fountain pen and a Rhodia wirebound 6" x 8.25" notepad. A good fountain pen on good paper is the most pleasurable means I've found for note-taking. Pleasure is important to me. The notepad has perforations on each page, so if I ever need to digitize something, I just tear the page off and snap a pic using Dropbox, which creates a nice PDF for me. The PDF looks beautiful. Beauty is also important to me.

2) Electronic: For digital notes, I just use Google Docs. I have a single continuous document full of thoughts, observations, etc., each thought separated by an em-dash (--) on a new-line. I've tried more complicated systems, but simplicity ultimately won out. Also I can access Google Docs on my desktop, work computer, phone and tablet. I've since learned that some of my favorite writers scribble their thoughts on Google Docs too.

Do the two systems converge? Sometimes. Sometimes I transcribe stuff from my Rhodia notepad to my Google Docs document, but often times I don't. In my philosophy, they don't have to converge.

Note-taking on Google Docs is about archiving information.

Note-taking on a notepad about training the mind. I remember things better when I write them. Being able to flip through pages helps builds spatial memory. I rarely go back to stuff I write on a notepad because I tend to remember them. If I really need to remember them long-term and make them searchable, I transfer them to Google Docs, and in the process, reinforce that memory.

Having a two media approach sounds inefficient from an information collection perspective because your info is dispersed and exists in two disjoint forms. But if your objective isn't just to store information in a repository but to supercharge your own thinking, this turns out to be a surprisingly effective approach, I've found.

That's cool on the TWSBI ECO, that's what I use as well. Some questions, if you don't mind:

A - what ink do you use? I'm still looking for one that works really well. Main thing is I hate blead through the paper B - Do you use the Rhodia paper one sided or two sided? I'm looking for a paper that I can use two sided with no bleed through, but other than super thick sketch paper haven't found anything.

I wanted a really black ink, so I settled with the Rohrer und Klingner Leipziger Schwarz (~$11). It's black with dark navy tones. I really like how it looks on paper. Inks I tried that weren't black enough: Herbin Perle Noire, Noodler's American Eel.

Rhodia paper -- I use it two-sided with no bleed through (Rhodia Dotpad No 16, ~$6). Rhodia and Clairefontaine paper can generally be used both-sided with no issues. There's a Japanese brand, Profolio that I also like, and 2-sided is not an issue. The best paper I've ever written on is the Rhodia No 18 premium. It's $16 per pad (A4 sized) but the glide is smooth and the quality is amazing.

I'm a huge fan of A4 notebooks and fountain pens!

I'm currently partial to the Leuchtturm 1917 master series, at least in part because of all the beautiful colors there are to choose.

Also Jetpens has a good survey of fountain pen paper.

https://www.jetpens.com/blog/the-best-fountain-pen-paper/pt/...

I'm also a heavy fountain pen user and I've found Parker ink (the same my father used), dries fast for fine-sized nibs. The black-blue looks really good on paper.

Currently using a Waterman fountain pen, but also have a Lamy safari nearby. Still don't know which one I like best.

For me the best part of using fountain pens is that I enjoy writing and taking notes more than with a regular pen. Also, my handwritting looks easier to read with the fountain pen.

Just my 2c.

Oh wow, this looks like what I thought of, but the price tag is... well... it's present. :-D

https://remarkable.com/

And the contrast does not look nearly as good as pen & paper.

Looks interesting, but I clicked "buy now" to view the price, and there's just an infinite loop of a Javascript loading indicator...waited 4 seconds and dipped out.

starts at $499

Yeah, but with a cover and the "nicer" stylus, you are around $700. :-(

Could get a top-of-the-line tablet for $750AUD

This is e-ink. It's not always pleasant to stare at a lightbulb when reading for long periods.

In practice, the remarkable main issue that often prevent it to replace pen and paper for me, is that it takes too long to start or wake up, while it's almost instant to grab a pen a find a piece of paper.

Oh, I thought this would be some kind of snappy "almost-on" just like a Kindle feels. Don't want to have a "long" bootcycle for my paper, yeah. :-)

Also looking at the video, it seems that there's a subtle delay between pen touching and display (like 0.1s). This might stress you out in a long run.

EDIT: Sony has also released something similar. https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper-notepads/dpt-...

Have been pen and paper for decades, saw the prerelease announcement for this a year or two ago, bought it...and it sits unused.

It is a very well done product, quite satisfying to write on, useful as a reader, successful at syncing.

But the extent to which I use writing as a memory-enhancing practice became clear to me when it stopped working when I used the Remarkable for writing. My observation was that not being able to physically page through prior writing meant it was down the memory hole. Paging through a digital device is too absent context.

I am back to the levenger circa paper and zebra pens.

I use mine practically every day.. Scribbling feels awesome and one of the most recent updates made it feel even better.

The only downside is that undo seemingly has gotten a bit slower, so it's often much faster to erase than undo.

Except for that I really like it.

It's expensive but I think it's well worth it and it has definitely replaced paper for me. I also expect it to vastly outlive an iPad or Android tablet.

After years of experimenting, I've concluded that it's not the medium, it's the ritual.

Things like meeting minutes I take electronically, but I still use physical notebooks as my main idea capture. I then go through and transcribe the notes onto the computer if I feel like follow-up action is needed.

I find that the most valuable part of the process is reviewing those written notes. Theoretically, I should be able to do the same thing with a program like Evernote, and I've tried that. In practice, I wound up taking shortcuts.

Going through and re-evaluating or adding to your original thoughts when moving from one medium to another is a valuable exercise.

If money is not really a problem you could use the 3rd gen iPad Pro with 12.9" display and apple pencil. The default note taking app works well enough. It's kept my notes over the last several years. The pencil is pretty great for drawing diagrams and figures, so I would definitely purchase that with it. I found the 12.9" display works best for me, because I like to split the tablet window in half with 1 app on each side with my notes app usually being on one of the sides. The other apps I use alongside the notes are brilliant.org's app and pdfs of math or programming texts.

If your looking for something more around the ~$400 range you may look at a cheaper alternative. I've seen advertisements for this paper-like e-ink tablet Remarkable [1] quite a bit and it seems like it might be a nice alternative.

[1]: https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable

I used an iPad 2 with a note taking app during my 2 years of engineering master in college. It was synced with my Google Drive, I didn’t struggled with complex equations and drawings and allowed in text search (which wasn’t that great at the time). I used a free pen given by a random company during a job fair and raised eyebrows to costly alternatives.

It was great however the battery lifetime and occasional bugs made me nervous sometimes.

Confort wasn’t that great, I couldn’t put my wrist on the screen and learnt to write without. The device was quite thick, which you suddenly notice compared to a classic paper when you take notes for hours.

Its the only notes I still have since I couldn’t easily scan perforated seyes paper (often double pages) that I used at the time and I let my huge binders at my parent’s home. Just for this, it has tremendous value. Maybe if I had to do it again today I would spend a few hours mastering LaTeX to being faster to take note of huge equations on a laptop.

In terms of focus and tactile cues to help you remember your notes, unfortunately probably not.

I've used an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, iPad Mini with pencil, Microsoft Surface with that pen, and a couple of different dedicated notes taking tablets (though not Remarkable... yet?)

Dead trees and ink, plus an app to scan and keep track of indexes has worked the best for recall and social factors. Practicing taking dense notes helps the notebooks last longer, as does only using 240+ page notebooks. Actual Bullet Journaling, instead of Instagram-worthy nonsense even the creator hates, works pretty well.

Transcribing the notes occasionally to a markdown for Git was annoying, until I realized I was editing and adding a lot by doing so, to the point where I usually updated my notebook a bit during the process.

My 2c, your mileage may vary.

You've already discovered the remarkable tablet so I'm just going to say that I'm a huge fan. I use it quite heavily for note taking. I can't recommend it enough. You may find second hand units for cheaper, since they've been around for a couple of years now and there exists a large majority of people who weren't really heavy paper users but bought it for the sake of novelty.

That said, if your primary problem is going through a lot of books quickly and you cannot afford the remarkable, even a used one, you may want to consider something like:

https://getrocketbook.com

One of my colleagues uses it and seems to be pretty happy with it.

How does Remarkable compare with the new Sony e-ink tablet?

I wouldn't know since I've not used one. I didn't even know that they had a new model of the DPT. Judging by a quick google though, I think the biggest difference is the display and touchscreen. The Sony appears to have a "Electrophoretic display" and a "Projected capacitive touchscreen" whereas the remarkable has a proprietary 'Canvas display' based on E-ink Carta -- all that to say, I can place my hand on the remarkable display and write / sketch / highlight ..etc. I'm not sure whether that is true of the DPT. The biggest problems with the writing on regular touchscreens is accidental unwanted 'writing' by your palm instead of the pen.

edit: I should add that the remarkable runs linux and as such is pretty hackable. You can ssh into it and hack it in a number of interesting ways[1] if you're into that sort of thing. Although for my purposes just adding custom writing templates itself is worth the hack-ability.

[1] https://github.com/reHackable/

I use Rocketbook daily, a simple idea but it works pretty well.

I really don't want to move away from handwriting notes. You learn better that way. Plus, most note taking apps suck, look the same, and lock you in to a proprietary system that's going to be obsolete when the devs release the next paid update. For my scripts and code I do take notes electronically, but just in .txt files stuck in relevant folders. The best system is very little system.

I nearly pulled the trigger on an e ink tablet but ended up bailing on it. Pen and paper is cheap and ubiquitous, and I can recycle it unlike the tablet that's mostly going to end up in the dump, and just another thing to charge or forget at home.

I don't think you can beat pen and paper. It's cheap, portable, it's easier to remember what you write vs digital input and it's easy to access. Given that, I think it can be improved.

I've used OneNote before and it's great at organizing note so I've started to take photos of my notes and organizing them in OneNote. In theory, it can OCR them but it's really wishful thinking given my handwriting.

I suspect that my notebooks will outlast my OneNote notes but only time will tell.

A fountain pen and paper.

I found that putting ink on dead wood with a livescribe pen gave me all the advantages of paper and a lot of the advantages of a tablet. I can search through my notebooks from several years ago with the digitised copy on my phone.

The other advantage is that you don't get distracted by email and other things on it.

Does this work decently? Is text searchable? Do you write cursive? Thanks.

Yes, it does work as long as I don't write too small. But I don't do cursive so I don't know how it would fare.

Do you want somehow to digitalize your current notes or software to create your own?

I can recommend you Zettelkasten. I actually wrote software for myself, in my opinion you get the most freedom that way and second brain should be custom tailored for you.

New software that is getting praise right now is Roam Research, but I haven’t used it

Well, I dream of some kind of eInk tablet/display thing which will do OCR on my crappy handwriting and will automatically create txt files or something like that and send them via mail. Or put them in a pre-defined folder. Maybe I could reopen those notes on the device, cross something out and it will get saved.

Pretty much like paper in the end, but without paper.

A yoga style tablet and Microsoft one note can be leveraged to do roughly the things you are describing.

It also has the advantage that when you add screenshots, those are also OCRed and searchable.

It's not quite as native feeling as grabbing a pen and paper though, so it takes some getting used to.

What's your program?

Its simple Zettelkasten with format similar to Archiver. Its written in electron sadly using codemirror.

So I can write notes using vim. I have a lot of shortcuts so its raster than clicking around in Archiver.

I also have integratation with Anki, so I can add flashcards from the program into long term memory, and have it structured in a way

Pencil and paper is excellent.

Sure it is fine. But sometimes you need to send the notes via email and it is easier if you have on digital format

Snap a photo, email it.

I'm currently going down this route myself. I fill 6-10 notebooks a year and am wondering if there is a better way. For me it's specifically how can I take what I write and then make that editable text so I don't have to duplicate work.

My current test is an iPad Pro and Apple pencil with GoodNotes. It's not inexpensive and I didn't buy the tablet specifically for this reason, but it's a test.

It's good for some things: meetings notes, proposal work, things I need to send to other people.

It is not a replacement for pen and paper. For me I like fountain pens and paper. So I still have one or two notebooks that I'm using for daily schedule, etc.

Just curious. How often to you go back to old notes?

I typically set things up as projects. When I'm working on the projects, almost daily over to make sure I remember things correctly. I also make additional notes when I'm going through the project so I can have everything in one place. A lot of the time I may work on one thing, then it's a couple of weeks and I need to get back into it.

At some point, everything will get written into a digital scope of work document or deliverable. At that point, most things become superfluous and I don't look back into notes.

Every once in a while I'll want to remember a name or a book and I like being able to have those at the tip of my fingers. Those things are typically in a different notebook.

I take a lot of notes and honestly enjoy it.

This has been my go to for about a year now. I have set up a couple templates that I use as blank pages. I keep four notebooks: one for each my day job, my side projects, house renovations and one for notes at conferences or when taking a course.

I used to carry at least two or three different note/sketchbooks and a small collection of pens. Now, just the iPad Pro and pencil.

Yeah, I'm still trying to do more on the iPad, and it's working well. At the end of the day, I really like the feeling of pen on paper, which is what it will keep me from fully going paperless.

I use onenote at work. As an editor it sucks for tables etc., but as an organisation and search system is alright, and for team collaboration it’s pretty useful. I.e. I can promote personal notes to team ones easily.

NEO2 - it's ancient but so well built. Buy used, there's no modern better product 'cause the NEO2 was so common and well made. Instant on. Neo makes a pen product now, if that's more appealing to you. But what I need now is software that auto sorts (according to tags) each note into the right place in my various notes documents. Now I'm doing that manually.

Onenote.

For everything, literally capturing meeting notes, screenshots everything. A local notebook but can sync to the cloud

Digitally, I use a variation on BuJo rapid logging, implemented in Markdown with plaintext. BuJo itself has become essentially scrapbooking for task management, but the basic idea of logging in bullet lists makes a lot of sense.

Markdown has three legal bullets for UL lists, which along with some sigils after the bullet/space is plenty for complex logging one line at a time. Here's the "key" at the top of each of my journals:

    #### Entry Key
    
    *   Event
    *   Project
    *   Planned Task
    +   New Task
    -   Note
    
    #### Event Status
    
    * ! Key
    * ? Maybe
    * % Cancelled
    
    #### Task/Project Status

    + ! Key
    + ? Watch
    + ^ Tracked
    + ~ Carried 
    + $ Completed
    + @ Delegated
    + % Dropped

Sample log for a day looks like:

    ### Friday :: November 8, 2019
    
    #### Highlights

    -   This cool thing that happened!

    #### Planned

    *   Some event
        -   Meeting notes
        +   Action Item

    *   Some planned task I copied from OmniFocus

    #### Journal
    
    + ^ Follow up on so and so issue
    + ^ Make sure stakeholders aligned
    
    -   Reached out to Coworker
        + $ Wait for followup
        + $ Schedule lunch for Tuesday
      
    - ! Some great idea
    -   DJSON awesome for nested JSON
    -   To extract from logs, wrap with [""]

I use Keyboard Maestro macros to quickly create the header skeletons from templates as needed and I fill in "Planned" during my daily prep. From there it's just appending to the bottom. I also have Alfred workflows and other scripts that know how to append a bullet line to the journal file, which helps a lot for logging notes from anywhere.

Periodically, I search for "+<tab>" in the text file, and it finds all the new tasks I haven't marked with sigils in the gutter row. That lets me quickly move them into OmniFocus for longer-term tracking. Someday I'll script it.

For you, if you really only want notes, even simpler. It's just a day header and appending a bunch of - bullets!

But there'll always be times when it comes down to paper. When all that fails, I have a nice-looking aged-brass Fisher space pen in my front pocket and a Moleskine Cahier (the cheap cardboard ones) in my back pocket. If there's something important to catch unexpectedly the last thing I want to do is fumble with my phone. The notebook is by far the quickest option.

There are some really nice leather wallets for Cahier/Field Guide-sized notebooks, and it actually helps balance my sitting posture by having wallets in both sides. Here's an example of one wallet I bought--I bought both a Horween and Chromexcel version from this seller and they're both high quality.

https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Horween-Leather-Moleskine-ref...

If you make it nice enough to carry around, it quits feeling like a chore to do so.

iPad, Apple Pencil, Paper-like screen protector & Notability

I will look into this. Bonus would be that I could use the iPad for other things, too.

hackers for hire : https://www.hackerslist.co/

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