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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I still use paper as I find the act of writing down is more useful than search. About once a year I dig into my stack of pocket paper moleskine notebooks to look something up.

I make entries for each meeting, date, participant, notes, incoming and outgoing tasks. Also adding in sketches, designs, and other stuff that I wanted to write when I didn’t have a computer near.

I started this because I found having a laptop or phone out during a discussion with someone off putting. People would open up if I was jotting small notes but would not if I had a laptop open.

I can keep the notebook in my front pocket. Started out with hardcover moleskines but am not trying out rhodia, leuchtturm, and others.

Each one lasts about 3 months and I have a stack 4 feet high so probably 10 years or so.

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Paper logs are critical for ideas.

One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s.

Anything important can be digested into markdown, but with a note to the journal page where the magic actually happened.

(It’s too bad that magic usually turns out to be gibberish thought spam.)

I like dotted grid as well. However I like Pilot Juice Up 03 gel tip .3mm. They are very precise, write in many conditions, and I’ve never had one run out of ink.

agree but zebra 401 here

I found that the Zebras, while certainly attractive and satisfying in the hand, write like crap (rough feel, inconsistent ink flow). My favorite pen these days is the Pilot V5 RT, but I wish I could throw the refill for it in a body more like the Zebra 401.

I also really like those refills but hate the pen body.

Pilot V5 RT refills fit into the Everyman Grafton pen ($35)

I used that for a while but found the pen a bit too large.

Nowadays I either use an Energel [2] or the classic Pilot V5.

[1]: https://everyman.co/collections/frontpage/products/grafton-p... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0776M8VY1

I used the zebras for many years but like the smaller point on the JuiceUps and the gel seems to work better than ball point. I miss the metal body, but I would fiddle with the clip and eventually break them off.

BIC Velocity 1.6 mm. Yeah, I like that fat, juicy writing.

If you like fine points Uniball's Signo RT1 write very well with 0.28mm tips. Ink capacity is not their strong point though. Pretty sure I was going through several a semester.

I also strongly prefer paper journals. For those of you in the US, checkout Vela [1], a little company in Michigan that makes outstanding journals. The paper is excellent quality for fountain pens and they have many choices for page setup - ruled, grid, dot grid, etc. A little pricy though.

[1] https://velasciences.com

My wallet does not like you right now. Good quality hardback journals for 'cheap' (Office Depot prices), and made by a small US-Based company? Sign me up.

EDIT: Does anyone else know of any companies like this for office supplies? Notebooks, pens, inks etc.? I support Noodler's Ink since they are entirely US-based, but even they have some of their pens made in India etc.

> One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s.

Counterpoint: Yes they can.

There’s this weird fetishization about paper notebooks. It’s like the people who say that vinyl is unequivocally better (it’s not).

For some people the end result of digital notes is vastly superior to anything they can scribble in a notebook.

Except, vinyl fundamentally solves the same problem as another medium of storing audio.

Paper offers a different level of expression. The comparison is thus not equivalent.

Usually when you offer a counter point you don’t just disagree, but provide some basis or example to show the statement or proposition in question is false.

Fetishising notebooks aside, parent mentioned expressiveness. Clearly everything that can be _expressed_ in Markdown can be expressed on paper, but it’s not clear that the opposite is true.

The difference is there is literature and research to support paper note taking as superior to digital in terms of comprehension and creative thought. If you've indexed your notebooks, it isn't hard to go back find relevant info years later.

As far as end results go, obviously My Life And What I Learned Along The Way.pdf is obviously going to win out over a pile of scribbles.

Regarding my original point, it’s what you use to get to the finished product that counts, and I maintain that hacking markdown is inferior to freeform pen and paper thinking.

Do you have a good system for drawing diagrams and plotting graphs in Markdown? Maybe some hybrid of dot, octave, and latex?

I use mermaid.js for graphs and charts in markdown. It takes a long time, related to pen and paper, so I don’t use it for note taking. But it’s really nice for procedural documentation.

A digital system like GoodNotes on an iPad is a pretty good hybrid system. I can type, write by hand, sketch, paste in code and graphics, embed hyperlinks, etc...

It has built in OCR so a search will find my handwritten notes as well.

I use paper for the short (fast) 'news' with a size as 'big' as a business card -but the note has to fit the sheet of paper - and digital notes for storing all the collected stuff... since one of the notes became osbsolete.

Actually having 5 lying in front of me, 5 ideas (remarkable in my opinion) One sayin: "Cumulative acting 'deductive'"? P-:

Somebody told me: 'Fine, than I am now able to shred all my documents, conserve a digital copy and further taking only small sheets of notes.'

> dear But... ^^

I keep a stack of paper on my desk. I don't keep a journal with it, but I've always found that blank printer paper is the best tool for fleshing out ideas and keeping quick notes on what your thought process is.

I love this quote from the article:

> The novelist Paul Theroux has said that he writes long-hand because, “The speed with which I write with a pen seems to be the speed with which my imagination finds the best… words.”

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