Tired of note-taking apps | Hacker News Reader

Tired of note-taking apps

akkshaya.blog

478 pointsakkshu92465 comments

Personally I find Apple Notes the most convenient for quick jotting down of ideas etc. It’s not the most advanced in terms of features but it loads instantly, is quick to use and is available on all of my devices. Have tried numerous alternatives but they’ve never stuck e.g. they’re slow to start up or are fussy to use or don’t work well on one platform.

For deeper sketching out of ideas, diagrams etc I really like Concepts on iPad with the Apple Pencil. It has an infinite canvas and is all vector based, which is great for never worrying about whether there’s room to fit your idea on the page or whatever. Previously I used Notability and it was good and a bit more traditionally note based, but I miss the infinite canvas. The text recognition and handwriting features in Apple Notes on iOS 14 are pretty cool though, will be nice to see what third party apps do with them.

I like Apple Notes and would use it if it did not have the following limitations:

- You cannot link between notes like a wiki (like Evernotes evernote://$note-guid)

- You cannot export all your notes in a standardised format.

- You cannot store notebooks in specific offline only encrypted disk images for privacy.

- Cannot change background (must use paper emulation)

I would argue that in a number of ways Apple Notes is one of the most advanced in terms of features.

Yes, it doesn’t bombard you with its functionality and at first glance is a simple place to jot notes (perhaps its greatest strength). But dig into the feature list, and perhaps help me find a similar application that:

1) can combine tables, rich text formatting, and in-line sketches 2) can store any file type in-line 3) can encrypt protect notes 4) can bulk share Notes + live edit 5) has a built-in complex document scanner

I know there are some alternatives that cover most of these but I think Apple Notes is king precisely because of these many layers of functionality.

I have been using Notability with great success for the last year. Having a fixed page like canvas doesn't strike me as a problem as I can move my diagrams around and scale them if I run out of space (huge advantage compared to drawing on paper).

Before Notability I was using mostly markdown files in git. However, using handwriting instead of typing has improved my cognition and creativity significantly. When I'm faced with a challenging task, I start doodling in Notability and keep being surprised at the creative solutions that emerge as I'm writing and sketching. There seems to be a richer thought process to be happending when I use my hands for thinking (rather than pressing keys on a keyboard).

Some additional spontaneous thoughts:

- Searchability of my handwritten notes is great, even after I export my notes to PDF.

- Exporting to PDF stores my notes in a long lasting standard format, preserving the character of my handwriting and diagrams.

- Being able to move/scale diagrams as I develop them has allowed me to start sketching more easily without any idea of where the diagram will go (e.g., ERD).

- Synching: I have Notability running on my desktop Mac, iPad, and iPhone. iPad Pro 12.9" is my primary device, together with Apple Pencil. Mac is for copying in screenshots from web pages, or large amounts of text. And I use it on iPhone on the go to capture ideas, access shopping lists, etc.

- Some document structure is useful: I have monthly work notes, yearly personal notes, "Inbox" on the go, and long running project notes that I keep adding to and tweak.

I have to agree with this. I was on Notion for a while, and I've tried every other app out there, but found I was wasting too much time thinking about the structure and features instead of the content.

I've gone back back to Apple's Notes and other native apps (Mail, Calendar). Yes, these apps are not perfect. Undoubtedly there are things other apps do better. But they fade into the background, they're simple and unassuming. They integrate into the OS well, are private, and will be around as long as Apple.

Apple Notes are not end to end encrypted. Thanks to programs like PRISM, US military intelligence has realtime access to the plaintext contents of much of the information you store in iCloud (including notes and photos), without a court order.

That, for me, makes it a nonstarter.

Yes, same here. I found out, that oftentimes I just need to vent something in a slightly structured way without any distraction. Apple Notes opens in an instant in an expected way, syncs and works across devices.

It is not so much a great workflow I need, it is simply frictionless noting down immediately.

After that I can go to further elaborate on the idea with a mightier tool. In my case it is GoodNotes.

After lots of attempts and frustration (Which features should I use now to get this idea out?) I now use only Apple Notes and GoodNotes.

Other than a combination of fiddling inside ~/Library and some more SQLite circus there's really no way to make Apple Notes notes portable (across platforms) and even such circuitous hacks might break in any update or upgrade. That's a big enough no for me.

This is one of those instances when the perceived Apple's walled garden convenience just falls flat. I personally prefer FSNotes (it has a long way to go but it's FOSS) and Bear. I am moving from Simplenote.

Concepts is great! It's the best cross between note-taking and drafting, with all sorts of interesting rulers and sketching guides. You can even export as DXF to laser cut vector graphics straight from a sketch or drawing.

I agree with this and notes is what I use - apple notes with cloud sync, especially on the phone. Every now and then, I move it all out of notes into standalone text files in a directory tree in Dropbox.

Why?

Because several times now I've lost notes due to Apple's cloud "sync." On a few occasions, the note turned up in the trash (with no action on my part) or simply disappeared.

Putting aside the spontaneous deletes, one thing that seems to more frequently push things into the trash is editing the same note on more than once device - the handling of this on the icloud backend appears to be "hell, just delete it."

edit: I should note that this spontaneous delete thing was more common a year ago, but then again, I've dramatically reduced the number of notes I maintain, now down to like 30 or so as opposed to the hundred+ I used to keep.

> loads instantly

This is a key feature for note-taking apps — quick to load wherever you are — and is one reason why I also gravitate toward Apple Notes for jotting down ideas. I can then reorganize into documents or spreadsheets as needed when I’m back at a desk.

Is there a way to use it on a different platform?

I like to use Linux systems and even though Microsoft sells Windows, OneNote allows me to use it in a browser.

Apple still seems to favor their walled garden so that you have to live with all their downsides in order to enjoy the good parts.

I agree - choosing a tool that makes jotting stuff down most convenient is key.

I believe that there hasn't been enough innovation in the jot-down phase of notes. Most people use Apple Notes, Google Keep, or raw text files. They're convenient for jot-down. But painful when it comes to organizing.

Notes are easier to organize when they're modular. You can add modularity, without losing convenience or speed, by writing notes like you're messaging yourself.

Fast jot-down + easy to organize in small steps = more likely to stick with it.

(I'm one of the creators of the modular, messaging-like notes tool bytebase.io)

i liked apple notes on my ipad pro until i got bit badly by the upgrade to ios 13, where all the previous pencil drawings were flattened, and features like zoom and ruler (constant-interval across zoom levels) were removed.

i used notes for personal design drawings/sketches, and it was great for that purpose until the upgrade.

The best thing about Apple notes is that I can dictate while I am hiking. The problem is that it seems to require >2 bars of service, which is a rarity when I actually need it.

Also, the 1st party support and integration is something that makes me go back. For example, being able to create a new note directly from the control center on iOS. And paired with faceID it’s seamless even when doing it from a locked screen.

Although it sucks that other developers do not get to offer their shortcuts.

How do you backup Apple Notes? The PDF export loses fidelity. I really like AN for the integrated camera, esp the document scanner. Is there another application that allows for writing as well as annotating media, video, photos and sound?

Does it integrate with Siri?

i like using siri to add to apple notes, while ideas come to me or something during walks etc. works well with airpods pro.

truer words never spoken. but what does this have to say about technology in general?

I'm constantly annoyed that there are no decent stylus apps on Android. The only one with an infinite canvas has more annoyances and issues than I can count (beginning with how scheduled backups can only be pointed at cloud storage, and manual local backups can only be made to a proprietary format) and I just absolutely hate it.

My theory about handwritten note-taking is that the bandwidth difference between thinking (fast) and writing (slow) is somehow extremely beneficial to the process of generating creative and evocative output. There have been so many journaling sessions which I started with the absolute conviction that I had nothing new to say, and after 4 pages of extremely creative and detailed ideas, surprising even to me, I had no choice but to exclaim, "Now where did that even come from?!". Maybe the hypnotic act of twirling the pen on paper slowly puts the mind into that sub-conscious creative state similar to what happens when one is about to fall asleep? It is honestly magical. I now use OneNote every day (because I can search through a large volume of notes easily), and I quite miss the dramatic revelations of pen on paper journaling. My notes were about programming and trading. For those who write fiction, I bet slow, old, typewriters are similarly more beneficial than the latest ergonomic keyboard and Word 365!

I think you could even generalize that a bit, and say that limits tend to foster creativity.

My best software designs happen when I'm taking notes on paper, and I think it's largely what you say - I can't write as fast as I can think, which more or less forces me to think more carefully.

The founder of You Need a Budget makes a similar argument about budgeting and not spending on credit - the financial limits encourage you to manage your entire lifestyle more creatively.

It's often observed that small, scrappy, hungry companies tend to come up with more creative solutions than large, well-capitalized corporations, and even observed that formerly small and creative startups seem to lose that spark as the money rolls in.

There's that section in The Odyssey with the island of the lotus-eaters.

Speaking of poetry, I suspect that many poets would say that their creativity is enhanced by working within the limits imposed by a poetic form.

Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Fiction" is one of the best treatments I've read on this topic.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

The secret here is about the input: a key stroke on the keyboard is always the same movement, more or less, while letters are each a different symbol/drawing. There's very little creativity to pressing keys on a keyboard, while handwritten text is unique to each person, in time.

That’s my issue with the Microsoft surface stylus work- and a lesser extent Apple.

They don’t compare to written, and a decent amount is the pen tip friction.

Wacom comes close.

However the apps themselves ?

I’d like to use one note more, but PDFs don’t become copy-able text. Searchable but not copyable.

Writing on a surface device is ugh. And I had really high hopes that they would push on the tech.

Procreate -iOS- has the best redo and undo features and gestures - which may as well be a lost art since no one else seems to be copying them and saving us manhours of annoyance.

I almost feel the opposite. I've had tons of ideas and when I started writing them out they flowed out of my mind faster than I could write. But I don't have the best retention either. So I would have tons and tons of ideas and by the time I got it to paper I could remember maybe 3 things and couldn't recall the rest.

I write fiction, and I write everything in longhand for this exact reason. It can be difficult start some days but once I do it’s easier to get into that “edge of sleep” state you describe, where the creative juices start flowing more freely. My handwriting is awful, but being able to quickly scribble out ideas and add margin notes is very useful. Writing longhand allows much better harmony between my brain and the page. There are no distractions on paper either!

One downside is that I have to then type all my writing up, but I use this time as an opportunity to do a first editing pass.

Have you tried using OneNote's handwriting recognition feature? I am curious if that experience would allow for the regaining of the pen-to-paper "magic".

Edit: typo

Similar experience here. Digital notetaking on non-touch devices fundamentally doesn't work, because non-textual expression requires too much work, digital notetaking with a stylus is better, but still doesn't work for the reasons you outlined.

Writing with a fountain pen on good paper is like meditation to me; you wouldn't want to contaminate meditation with computers, like they contaminated everything else...

I searched far and wide for a good note taking app a few years ago, only to find that the best solution for me was right in front of me the entire time.

  git init fall2020

Git lets me keep track of everything, and I have free hosting at multiple different websites, or my own server if I want to. It's simple and customizable, and depending on what type of notes, I have different scripts to automate new notes and searching.

Next semester, I'm going to run the above command and then make a directory for each course I'm taking. In there, there will be a series of markdown documents numbered 'nn.md' with a header at the top of the file with the date and the subject. After that, it's just plain markdown. I alternate between VS Code and Vim, but both get the same job done. When I'm done, I just 'git add . && git commit' and move about my day.

Since I currently use GitHub private repos for hosting, if I'm walking to class, I can view the rendered Markdown right on my phone. This is nice for getting a quick recap about what the last class covered.

I also use a Git repo for my journal, but with different ways of formatting entries. The entire thing is very extensible, but not as friendly as some other note taking apps if you don't like plain Markdown. Writing a web interface for this setup wouldn't require much work, and it's something that's on my list of things to do.

I've found that its hard to beat plaintext markdown notes with git. been taking notes like this for the past ten years and now have 20k+ markdown notes. just launched a markdown note taking plugin built on top of vscode to help with this sort of workflow: https://dendron.so

Even though it's restrictive, I find most of my notes of a creative nature are all done and markdown and git. Another commenter was saying how their best work was on pencil and paper, and I agree, I'm very creative in that medium as well. The only thing that comes close on the computer is markdown.

I do use OneNote at work, but it's a classic example of where the tool molds the use case. Typically I will use OneNote to track a problem, or gather notes and links from other sources. It's a great way to put together a dossier on a problem so to speak, but I don't really use my creative juices in OneNote.

I like this approach and used something similar for a while myself. For me the main drawback was syncing between devices. I had to remember to commit and push on one device and then pull on another. Maybe not a big deal for lecture notes, but a little fussy for just adding a book to a "to read" list.

Also in time I found I never really used any version control features. Backing up to a remote was the only thing I needed.

I feel like this is half a solution to me. I use Git too, but it does nothing about how notes are structured or linked, for which I lean on sublime, Obsidian and Zettelkasten.

I augment this slightly by using Typora. It's nice for writing inline and fenced math blocks (with LaTeX), which is pretty invaluable for my maths subjects, I've found.

It's nice since it renders the markdown while you write it, which I kinda need when writing LaTeX.

It's an offline tool, but I'm pretty much always near my laptop, so that's not much of a big deal for me. Tbh, having it offline was kinda a bonus for me.

No Vim support though, which is a bit frustrating.

I use git as well to track my notes, I just haven't found a good editor yet which is equally as important. Sublime Text or any code editor works fine enough for Markdown, but I really miss the ability to have hyperlinks in my notes. Markdown links are just extremely ugly to look at and overly verbose.

This is also the conclusion I came to after years of trying different things

I've tried many different systems, and the one I settled on is a single simple doc. It's the only method I've used for over a year.

You can do google doc or office doc, but the key for me was having one doc that I just keep prepending to.

Each day i'll add the date yyyy-mm-dd (dow) in bold and then list my work for the day... I use hyperlinks to dedicated docs or online guides for more involved projects (quick ctrl-k), and add a little check mark when it's done.

By adding days in the future, I am able to schedule work or set reminders, and with ctrl-f I can search the doc for anything I've done previously as it also acts as a journal.

I often used to get lost in the minutia of catagorization, and having list sorting help me determine priority, but I've come to realize that I already know what needs to be done, and roughly in which order. ... my bottleneck was always focus. Excessive task structure can be a procrastination in itself.

Going back to paper as op suggests seems like a step back.

It's not perfect, but it works. I do still wish I could add some sort of hierarchy to line items and also be able to zoom out to see the bigger picture, but for now that just sits in another dedicated doc that I schedule myself to look at now and again.

Hitting 18 months now on this system. Have never felt so organized.

An outliner app like WorkFlowy (YC S10) or TaskPaper is nice for adding nesting and the ability to zoom in and out.

You can also directly link to any node, at least in WorkFlowy.

My approach is similar to yours except it's one hierarchical entry per day.

https://workflowy.com/

https://www.taskpaper.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner

I have been using a single text file for past 5 years. Ability to do vim regex search is a big plus. Lately I have been thinking of adding a search engine on top of mac's notes.sqlite db.

I've ended up in the same place, but I use a text file. After years of trying to use time tracking systems, TODO systems, and journaling systems, I could never get past their data-entry-inefficiency compared to just opening a text file in vim and typing.

I do need a better way to view and report my data though, so what I've done is write a read-only reporting GUI that can parse my text file, give me daily/weekly/per-task/per-client reporting on my time tracking, per-day views of any journal entries, and a TODO list. It can even export the current week's entries in a format that pastes into my invoice spreadsheet template.

This is all managed in a per-year text file, 2020.txt, that's easy to back up and could be version controlled if I needed to do that.

This is a lot like what I've been using for over 5 years now. Key points for me are:

* Plain text only, no graphics, formatting, outlining, tagging, categories, etc. These are all distractions to actually getting your point down and don't really add any value, don't get sucked into them.

* Ability to do simple text search and go to specific date. Big lifesaver for any problem that looks like "So exactly what did I do on this one specific day 3 months ago?"

Paper is nice for avoiding distracting formatting details. But losing out on free text search is too much of a drag.

I appreciate this suggestion.

It can act a journal, as you mentioned but...it's a linear overview of the things churning in your mind. And something great can come out of it but regardless, it helps you in more than one way.

I appreciate the insights and methods you use. I sometimes over-complicate solutions when all that's needed is a catch-all drawer.

I do this to create a papertrail of thought and action for work but it's a vey narrow use case. What about notes for creative thought, mind mapping etc?

Funnily enough, I don’t think there is a really good one. There’s lots that almost do it but not quite. - Evernote: no note linking - Bear: lovely but no web or android version - OneNote: appalling in the way only MS can be - SimpleNotes: too simple - Zoho: too ...urgh - Keep: too Googley - Apple notes: too Appley - Standard Notes: too buggy

I’m clearly a fussy sod. But really, just a nice, oss, local files, ability to encrypt, x-platform apps: surely not too much to ask....?

What I really don't understand about OneNote is the default to a white-board-like free form placement mode for text blocks. If you move it a little, accidentally, it's not aligned the same as the other notes.

This really put me off when I first started using it, and at a client site, it's really the only option. Otherwise, the organization system is something I've come to like/live-with, but still -- why the boxes that can be moved around? Is there a "turn off free-form placement" mode that I haven't found?

I see you didn't mention Markdown. My solution for the last couple of years to this problem is to have all my notes organized into folder and .md files. A couple of advantages: - I can move around different IDEs/apps since there are a lot of different solutions for every platform there. - Same goes for search and links between folders. Rely on git for version control of the files themselves. - It gives you the flexibility of using plugins to turn into PDF or host as a gitbook private site for example.

Knowledge base organization gets discussed frequently on HN. I understand your frustration though, I've always longed to see a one fit for all platforms though. Onenote sure shows a lot of potential but is probably limited by the fact that MS wants to keep it as close to their office suite as possible.

Have you tried [Joplin](https://joplinapp.org/)?

It's FOSS, works on local files, has encryption and supports note linking.

It also has apps for several platforms.

Would you mind elaborating on why Standard Notes is too buggy? Only thing that comes to mind is the use of React Native and Electron (suboptimal performance / UX) but I've never had any issues myself.

I'd like to hear of alternatives that apply the same e2e encryption model.

I have the same frustration. The real split seems to be on local files / encryption. I ran into a couple that had encryption stapled on as an afterthought and handle the encryption/decryption in storage, which misses the point. Some use keepass for secure notes, also a clunky hack. The closest I found was Tiddlywiki, which can encrypt local files (but only if it's a single html file). I don't like Tiddlywiki, but that's what I'm using.

> nice, oss, local files, ability to encrypt, x-platform apps

Every single box is checked by Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium), plus you can self host a server if you want to sync between as many clients as you want, and you can password protect only specific notes if you want to. Only "disadvantage" is that the client is electron; if you can live with that, I think you should check it out. (I'm not affiliated, but I've been using Trilium for a while.)

Maybe I'm just not so picky, but I love OneNote. I just wish OneCalendar worked cross platform. But otherwise I find cloud sync between my different devices to be seemless and fast enough that I can use a tablet to draw while screensharing the same notepad on desktop. It accepts images exactly as I want (screenshots mostly) also.

The only problem is that sharing is a pain.

> Evernote: no note linking

What about this:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313588-How-to...

at the risk of doing some self promotion, I've had the same problem and ended up creating my own tool. https://dendron.so, is a new note taking tool (launched a week ago) that lets you take local-first markdown notes and supports links like roam. it's open source and built on top of vscode.

Happy inkdrop (inkdrop.com) user for over a year now ! Has e2e, local backups, and many features including through plugins

This is why I’ve come full circle and just use a small notepad now. I still don’t type writing by hand, though.

Taking notes is a process. If you're tired of the apps, then you haven't put enough thought into the process. The available apps are fine.

Picking a tool to solve a problem is the opposite approach to how you solve the problem. You instead need to define the problem and then find the tool which is the best fit. If you're frustrated with the tool, then you might need to put more thought into the problem.

Premature optimization also plays a role. Everyone should start with a notepad and a pencil and move up to something more advanced once they outgrow the most basic method of note taking. It's a bit like buying a top of line DSLR when you're just starting to get into photography.

I ran into a lot of issues with note apps over the years. Tried many, but none really stuck. Until I realized that software based note/planning tools just don't work for me. W

An app is hidden away on my phone, and I need to actively open it to use it. But my bullet journal is always in my bag. It serves as a physical reminder. And it oddly gives me way more flexibility in how I structure it.

Being a software developer myself, the irony isn't lost me.

Also, many people like Journals and plain text because these methods don't lend themselves to blaming the tool. They force you to think about the problem rather than the tool.

Plain text doesn't fix note-taking any more than it can fix to-do lists. Again, there's no tool to blame.

The best note app I found is a journal app. I’ve been using Day One for more than a year now, and it’s holding Evernote’s promise of remembering everything.

I do use Apple Notes too beside Day One for temp notes (email drafting, edit texts, links to check & trash, etc), but it’s on my journals where my knowledge-notes reside.

What people like from real notebooks is that you don’t have to think about organization, you just start a note in the next blank page. With Day One that’s what I got (even by email), and then, once I need to search for something in my personal log, I can organize stuff with tags or backlinking notes.

The “On this day” function also helps, as you can prune old ideas or notes that were a dead-end.

Personally, I’m sold.

I am also an avid DayOne user. It is great. My process is to have three journals in DayOne Todo, Done and Workouts. Every time I have an idea I write it down in the Todo journal. Once a week I do a GTD on that notebook. Any actionable tasks if it follows the two minute rule I do immediately or if it a longer task I move to the context specific locations in Notion, GitHub, Gmail Tasks, the CRM, org-mode, etc. so I can get them done when I am doing my context specific tasks (project management, coding, email, sales, knowledge base, etc.) then I then move the entry to the Done Journal.

Yes, it is a lot of processing things twice but I think it has some benefits. Most things aren’t actionable so it is just great for refreshing my memory. It forces me to write everything I think of down so I don’t forget anything and DayOne is great for that. I have nearly 10,000 entries. I don’t worry about note size. Some are “send contract to Ashley” others are longer thought out ideas. I’ve been using this system for the last few years and it has worked well.

One size fits all note apps never worked for me and I figured the reason for that is that a lot of what we do are context specific. We want the notes / todos for a particular type of task to live where we do the task when we are doing the task.

What i like about real notebooks is the 'flicking through'search function.

Totally agree. Having to think about how I need to organise my thoughts as the same time as coming up with the thoughts themselves always seems like a burden!

I believe I shared this once before. After twenty years of trying every possible note taking app from Word 95 to Notion, this is now the entirety of my note taking app:

  #!/bin/bash

  read text
  _date=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
  echo -e "\n$_date: $text" >> ~/Dropbox/notes/stream.txt

So you only take notes while on your actual computer. You never take notes besides when you are on your computer.

I gave up with the commercial and open source offerings and instead just wrote my own solution.

All notes are markdown, stored in a SQLite DB with full text search. It has a simple frontend and you can drag/drop images onto the editor and it will upload them.

To facilitate quick note taking I wrote a FUSE driver for it and have bound CMD+N to open a command line scratchpad window (I use i3wm) where I can write and edit notes using conventional *nix tooling.

It's not perfect, nor slick, but it works for me.

> To facilitate quick note taking I wrote a FUSE driver for it

I didn't understand this part. Why can't you just write the file and then either manually/automatically trigger an import of the text into the SQLiteDB?

Hey Daniel, I'm really interested in the solution you made because I've been thinking of a similar architecture.

What's the best way to contact you? I can't find your email on your website or Github.

Just another opinion on the balanced note taking method:

I think org-mode solves almost all offline note-taking requirements

* org-roam makes it super-easy to link notes

* emacs as an editor is as usable as any other editor

* Rich media is possible and easy to do in org-mode. Attach a snapshot, embed a video file

* Code with documentation is a feature not available in most other note taking methods/apps. It's possible to run code snippets and add comments, documentation about them in the same space

* Latex support is advanced. Inline equations work seamlessly

* Search support is advanced

Drawbacks:

* One of the main drawbacks is that all your notes end up offline. This was a deal-breaker for me. ox-hugo helps in publishing your notes to a (private) static site where it can be searched, viewed but not edited on the fly

* Publishing through ox-hugo is separate from maintaining a backup/sync of your notes in /org/ format. You'll have to do this separately through Dropbox/GDrive/etc

* A backup of your org notes is not usable until you set up your emacs environment and download all your notes

if org-mode would support Ctrl+V pasting a random image or file into it, and if it could have rudimentary inking support, it sounds just about perfect to me.

Sadly, the combo of (rich optional) text, easy paste in pictures, inking, file embedding, easy linking, open file formats / all in a sqlite file you can sync / stick on a flash drive, that runs on Windows/Android/Linux/maaaaybe web is just not there yet that I can see.

The biggest issue I have with note taking is not the medium or app, it’s the fact that I would often write something and never look at the note again. This essentially made the act of note writing, at least for me, futile since I rarely remember my notes as I’m writing them.

The best solution for this, I’ve found, is to still take notes on the bigger picture but then to add the smaller details, definitions, concepts to Anki [1], which literally forces me to review those smaller details again and again until they “stick”. Doing so then makes me want to revisit the notes to get the full picture. As a result, my memorization of all kinds of things has greatly improved, which makes future research and documentation all the more better. It’s a very good positive reinforcing learning method and I recommend it to anyone who may have similar issues.

[1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/

For me, if I have some more long-running projects or ideas I might return to and e.g. give a presentation about them at some point, I find using https://orgpad.com an alternative. It tries to be a general tool that helps you connect the dots in a graph and that helps structuring information more like your brain does instead of forcing the linear approach of lists or longer texts. It doesn't force a scheme or anything like that on you and it can quite easily be turned into presentations e.g. like this conference talk on Graph isomorphism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu8P7UwHhAA Btw. Orgpad is also a project, that is completely written in Clojure/ ClojureScript. (Full disclosure I have consulted and still consult the developers on orgpad.com infrastructure.)

I the end, if you have the wrong tool or the wrong method for anything you are going to have a bad time even if the tool or method is useful in a different setting. An analogy: You can hardly unscrew something using a hammer unless you want to have more problems then before.

For me the biggest point of writing is to remember and then safely forget about stuff.

...write something and never look at it again...

I recently started working with a new client. 7 years ago and many companies past, the now-CEO asked me to set up a system for her and I took ample, random meeting notes. I still have those notes as plain text in a folder, organized by year.

When the new client asked for a design proposal and said they're getting resistance from the C-suite, I could pull up those notes and make some seemingly omniscient recommendations quite quickly.

I tried too many of the note taking services, but really, a plain text note with a YYYY-MM-DD title and stored in a backed up directory is near-perfect and ultra-portable.

Same; some exceptions are when I write things down to turn into a presentation or blog post, or if it's like notes / actions from a meeting.

That said, for me writing things down does help me organize my thought process.

Another thing that I do think is beneficial but directly work-related is writing ADR's (https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision...; basically technical documentation, one file per decision (architectural, language, library, etc); I can start those as a stream-of-consciousness ramble, then add some research / alternatives, and finally do some formatting and commit it into my project's repository.

From there it'll take on a life of its own, I'll reconsider things down the line (most recently, replacing Reach with React Router because the former is end-of-life and in retrospect had some quirks I ran into). My hope is that when more people join my project or take over, they'll be able to read it and understand where things have come from, and then add their own ideas to it.

Of course, they'll likely opt to just ignore it entirely because tl;dr show me the code.

Samuel Suresh's YouTube video titled "How I Take Notes with My iPad Pro in Lectures" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0ql-yeY9u0) makes some pretty good points for taking handwritten notes on a device.

Akkshaya Varkhedi says in the article a couple downsides to handwriting notes on paper are:

1. Can't add screenshots, images, links, etc. 2. can't easily search for content.

Using something like Goodnotes addresses both of those items. You can take screenshots, add images, and links, and even use the devices camera to capture images (like the whiteboard/chalkboard during lecture). And (depending on how good your handwriting is), there is a search feature which searches the words you've written—and those words can be converted to type if you want to add them to a document without needing to re-type it.

Buying a tablet and stylus (like iPad and the Apple Pencil) to solve the two points paper notes does not solve seems a bit overkill—but in todays world, if you're a student going into University and need to purchase a device, those tablets are looking mighty attractive versus a standard laptop.

Ohio State University gives all incoming freshman an iPad and Apple Pencil [1]. I can say with confidence it works amazingly well for taking notes in a classroom setting and for doing homework. Copy-paste comes in handy for things like large math problems of course.

However, I don't like using it for work/personal projects. Still trying to figure out why.

[1] https://digitalflagship.osu.edu/students/technology

In the early days of blogging, I used to write anything and everything. People read them. If I find a better way to move a sprite on a timeline, I write about it. If I find a way to hack an animation sync with a kicker layered audio, I write about it. People will read about it, discuss on forums, and sites such as Adobe would link to it.

Then, I became smarter. Before writing, I'd then research, ponder, and then find a solution someone did. Awesome, there it goes.

I do still write notes -- Handwritten, erstwhile in Evernote, Apple Notes, etc. Then I wanted to simplify it, in the hope that the notes will likely stay on even after I'm no more. Recently, I chose to stay with plain text, markdown is the next-step up, and then perhaps plain HTML.

Markdown - I write it as plain as possible. It is easily readable as Plain Text, if needed. HTML - I'm pretty confident that HTML as its saner, plain form will remain and live through time.

So, now, I have started collecting, writing pieces of notes in a set of Plain Text Collections - akin to your Org-Mode but much much simpler. In order to publish it[1], I threw in Jekyll for now but I'm not married to that and I'm keeping it such that if I just change a tool the next time, I can do it without much jugglery.

Of course, I still use quite a few Note-Apps but most of them are the tools to my needs. I've stopped looking at Note-Apps that ingest and keeps it there. For instance, I can write in iA Writer and the file stays where it has. I can then continue writing it with SublimeText + Markdown. I will try to write more, be naive all over again. I don't want to know who reads it, how things are -- but just things that interest me.

1. https://oinam.fyi

I think the note taking market is due for a takeover by one of the epaper writers, like the remarkable, the Sony epaper or the onyx boox. I feel very similar to the author, at the same time I've been using my Sony epaper for reading papers and taking meeting notes which is much more convenient than using a computer. If one of these companies would come up with a good note taking app, preferably with some way of making easy cross-reference and maybe ocr for search I'd move all my notes over to handwriting again.

I agree. It seems the epaper market is missing a niche. The 'cheap remarkable'.

1. e-ink screen of more than 5", less than 18"

2. sd card (aside from the Likebook Mars, this is just about impossible to get in most eReaders, let alone one for less than $500!) and an open format (ODF-based linked files, json / svg in sqlite etc)

3. syncthing access (android or native Go binary)

4. headphone jack / built-in microphone

5. stylus (wacom or whatever, can take or leave pressure sensitivity just not-battery powered plz)

6. low latency, even if ugly artifacts drawing of the lines

I guess if someone wanted to buy it it would exist and could be purchased, but I ended up settling on the likebook mars since it did all of the above except the stylus and low latency drawing.

Remarkable has apparently pushed the low latency way down and good for them, but they IIRC off the top of my head do not support syncthing or sd cards, and they are far, far too much for the average joes of the world to purchase. $300 USD is expensive, and it barely gets you halfway to the ~700 USD (IIRC) they go for. Clearly a high-end product.

What do epaper-writers offer featurewise that normal tables with stylus-pens are missing?

I feel mostly the same as the author of this blog post. I have been through so many note taking apps and nothing has yet completely replaced just having a pen and a notepad with me at all times. But, I have gotten close. For me, I am very word-heavy, I don't need to draw (and if I do, I want a whiteboard, not a notepad).

Just this month I started doing notes on my computer again after being introduced to an app here on HN in another thread that seems to have hit the high points for me. More than anything, it seems to work for me because it just gets out of my way. Try Standard Notes if you haven't yet. I like writing in Markdown, so I use it as I would a text editor, but rather than needing to search at the command line and maintain a git repo, it has tagging and search built-in as well as encrypted cloud syncing, but otherwise just stays out of my way. It works really well.

I'm in the same boat with standard notes, been using it for a few years now. Recently after a bout of RSI I've been trying to do more note taking and sketching on pen and paper to alleviate the typing between coding and other tasks.

I used both.

If I'm learning I will write notes with a pencil and paper (pencil over pen every time). This means I have to think more about what I'm writing and for me is more flexible. I use an A4 squared pad with an index at the front, each page is split similar to the Cornell note taking system which is good for summarising and adding tags for quickly finding information. My notes are scribbled and messy. I will then transcribe these onto a computer using text files and folders for structure. You can't beat text files. As a front end for this I use Zim Desktop Wiki. Cross platform, portable, and easy to use with a simple markup syntax. It offers many excellent features, including a journal, tasks, diagrams, spell checking, interlinking, back links, searching, tags, images, tables, version control, and many others. Drop the notes into Dropbox and you have syncing.

If the worse comes and Zim disappears it's all just text files and folders. Pandoc can convert Zim to markdown or whatever you like.

For other quick notes I use a reporters jotter. I will transcribe them onto the computer if they are important. But generally these notes are throw away.

vouching for zim too

My concern is usability and not being locked into proprietary formats, also I use NextCloud for syncing. So, no single app does the trick, but this is working well for me here days:

For had written notes, sketches, Daily journal & learning (graph paper with straight lines and snapping) - Write by Stylus Labs, works on iPad, Android, Window, etc. Files in svg/svgz. App opens nearly instant.

Joplin for Tasks, Notes, recipes, web clippings. Markdown with proprietary indexed folders, but easy import/export. Local storage on my phone, so instant access to my information with search.

QOwnnotes for long form, journal, blog entries. Markdown in regular file structure. For iPad I use Writemator.

Nothing has been as frictionless as nvALT[1].

Plain text, full text search, and point it at iCloud/Dropbox/Drive and now you have your notes fully synced.

I’ve spent far more time than I care to admit trying out new note applications...

[1]: https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

I hope they'll release nvUltra soon: https://nvultra.com

I use this as well, have all my stuff in a git repo and sync it to my iOS device so I can edit it with apps like iA Writer or 1Writer easily.

Yeah. It solves the "I forgot I already have a note on this" problem too, by making search and creation the same UI.

For windows I like resophnotes, the autosave is amazing and outputting plain text means I can share with my co-workers easily

Agree.

Hotkey popup, it's free, you own your data, and just enough of a feature set to be useful without a learning curve.

I've tried a lot of note taking apps over the last 8 years. Over the past few months I've become less fussed about the tools and more focused on the process: I now have a file for each week (I call it a journal or weekly notes), with a heading for each day of the week, and a sub-heading for each meeting/conversation/thing I'm thinking about. At the each week, as part of my weekly review (GTD), I review the weekly notes file. I scan my notes for each meeting/etc. and consider whether I need to do anything with them: I often have to create a task; sometimes I want to hang on to something so I move it into an evergreen note [1] on the topic (at the moment, I have one for work, and one for personal, but I expect I'll split these out as they accumulate). But for most things in my weekly notes, no action is necessary and I'll probably never look at them again (unless I need to refer back to something someone said later, which is easy to find if I wrote it).

So far it's working pretty well for me. I think the key is the regular review/processing.

I think I could implement this in just about any tool, so long as there's an easy way to quickly add an entry with a timestamp to the current weekly note file. I happen to use org-mode in emacs for this with org-journal (using doom emacs, only switched a couple months ago) but other tools would work just as well I bet.

[1]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4SDCZQeRo4xFEQ8H4qrSqd68ucp...

> I've become less fussed about the tools and more focused on the process

This has been my conclusion after years of trying different tools or even trying to make my own. Once I started focusing on the process I realized that not only I don't need a lot of features from a tool, I'm actually better off without any complex features.

I just use markdown, vim, and git. This specific choice of tools for me is only guided by one thing: I don't want to waste any brain cycles on figuring out / deciding how my note taking tools should behave. For someone else this could've been a Word doc and a folder structure. When you do that, then taking notes becomes as trivial as writing with pen and paper, except for the ability to edit and grep which is really all you need.

Bonus: it's ridicuously easy to work with markdown (and friends) with pandoc. I routinely convert all my markdown notes to html and use < 100 loc of ad-hoc JS to give it a decent browsing UI.

Emacs org-mode (Desktop) + syncthing + Orgzly (mobile)

And I have pretty much everything to take a note when I want to + it's plain text so I don't even need the apps to write, very convenient if for one reason or another I don't have access to one of my devices.

Note-taking is best served by a system, not by a single app.

I used to struggle with note taking apps until I started to use org-mode on termux. Human interface relies on emacs, syncing and versioning relies on git, agenda and TODOs rely on org. Never needed any other note taking app.

As a bonus, emacs color themes look really nice on a crisp OLED screen.

I assume you a real keyboard for this?

I’ve tried nearly every major app/service and always end up on Standard Notes. It strikes the perfect balance for me between privacy, ease of use, and functionality.

Prior to settling on SN I was a big fan of Simplenote and nvALT, but the lack of even basic MFA for Simplenote drove me away.

Evernote, OneNote, etc just seem to be way too much for what I need. And Apple Notes, while it has gotten a lot better, does not make it easy to get your data back out.

After this thread became a discussion of competing, sometimes extreme approaches, I want to add one alternative. Markdown files, organized in folder hierarchy and synchronized by the service of choice are fine for me - for notes and knowledge collection. Recently I started to add the superpower of tags and links to other files by using Apps like Obsidian[1] and Zettlr[2] which are very similar. The great advantage is, that you just show these apps the par of your notes folder and are not maintaining notes in an app-specific environment. The syntax for tags and links is simple and will not disturb massively even if opening the files in a text editor.

This approach merges the simplicity of plain text, the power of tags and links and keep this independent of the of synchronization, backup or future development of these apps or anything in this stack of tools.

[1] https://obsidian.md/ [2] https://www.zettlr.com/

Obsidian's licensing makes it immediate non-starter for me and I would imagine the same for most people who would want to use it for work, side projects, or anything they hope to make money off of.

if you are looking for an open source version of obsidian/zettlr, I would check out https://dendron.so (disclaimer, I'm the author). supports all the same features and built on top of vscode. use it to manage my personal knowledge base of 20k md files

I really liked Andy Matuschak's article “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking” - https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z7kEFe6NfUSgtaDuUjST1oczKKzQ...

Over the years, I have also moved from one app to another when it comes to note-taking. Frankly, I was using them more as a place to put things that I might want to refer to later than using them to think about the problems that I was trying to solve.

Personally, I find that there are times when I need more of a free flowing format like paper or an iPad, but most of the time, text suffices. For the last six months or so, I have been using Roam Research and related apps(Obsidian) and they do really help me evolve a structure around my thoughts without having to have one when I am starting out.

Quick rant triggered by this... We have our

- Cloud document systems (Google docs, Dropbox paper, Notion)....

- Project management systems (Trello, Asana, Monday)

- Todo/task/notes management (Keep, Todoist, Evernote)

- Customer Ticketing systems (Zendesk, helpscout, freshdesk)

- Bug/issue tracking systems (Pivotal, Jira, Github)

- Crms (Salesforce, Hubspot, Streak)

- And then theres even specialized customer facing and internal facing KnowledgeBase products (getguru, readme.io..)

Can you see the insanity? So many apps that are just different ways of abstracting and sorting knowledge, relationships, time and next steps.

A lot of progress has been made in enabling developers to integrate customer (event) data accross apps over the past 5 years (segment, mparticle with their data layers). But what about a standard data layer for the folder / project/tickets / tasks / notes hierarchies that exists in all these apps. So our information and knowledge isnt so siloed?

You can full-send into Notion (or any one of these systems) for a "jack of all trades, master of none." Obviously, not as good as a single-purpose system, but there really needs to be a space for unified data.

I think that part of the reason there's so many options is because there's no best approach and managing information is hard.

Personally I use Apple Notes or org mode. Whenever I see an alternative, I refuse because it's not like my notes will all magically migrate to Notion/Roam/whatever. No, I'll just append on a name to the list of notetaking apps I use. That's not worth it. Even for some fancy backlinking features that I'll definitely bikeshed to hell.

What it'd take for me to move to a new note taking app (not that I'm holding my breath for a new one) is that it would have to be an information black hole. I wouldn't have to migrate notes because it would automatically suck up everything. Of course that's tricky and potentially privacy invading, so I'm not expecting a solution anytime soon.

Plain text, for me, after being burned multiple times.

Occasionally, I'll fire up Word to paste in screen shots, but for most everything, I now write it out in plain text in Notepad++.

I felt burned when Microsoft's abandoned the Outlook Journal, where I had collected years of notes—notes that were almost all plain text.

Microsoft came out with OneNote and I watch colleagues diligently recording their thoughts there, but not me. Plain text, from here out. I may eventually print them and put them in a binder, so I can have "papers" that survive me.

The git solution intrigues me, but I would use my words and little else if I recorded notes there.

My note taking app or choice is Squid/Papyrus. Works best with a stylus.

It is essentially virtual paper, it replaces a notebook, no more, no less.

But the thing it has that I've seen nowhere else is that it is vector based, with an unlimited size canevas and high zoom (10%-1000%).

It sounds so obvious as a feature. I mean, if you have a stylus, besides drawing, taking notes is the most obvious thing you can do with it. And what can a screen do and paper cannot? Scrolling and zooming. And because smartphones are powerful computers and we have good algorithms, there is no reason to limit canevas size artificially.

So I went in and looked at the most popular note taking apps, thinking: these are made by many-million dollar companies they must have that. And no. All I found was cloud-synchronized text files. None took advantage of the drawing capabilities of smartphones, or they did it in a half-assed way. The S-Note app (I have a Galaxy Note 4) is nice, but it is bitmap and with a limited canevas size, why? Can't Samsung do better?

Only one app did it right and that's Squid (previously Papyrus). And it is a little known one compared to the likes of Evernote. It isn't even mentioned in the article even though it is the closest thing to the "writing things down" solution it recommends, so I suspect the author doesn't know its existence. Otherwise I think he would have mentioned it, even if it is just to talk about how it doesn't fit his needs.

The title of this blog post strikes a chord although whilst I love writing with a fountain pen, transcribing my notes to computer later is a royal pain.

It's also irritating to have bunches of notes in Apple's Notes app, in Confluence, in Notion, in Google Docs and goodness knows where else.

The movement to cloud has driven a coach and horses through the whole reasoning behind the EU/US push to get Microsoft to be more open and not hold institutions to ransom with data locked within a proprietary vendor's platform:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...

Now we've gone full tilt towards a world of proprietary clouds where we don't even have custody of our own data and instead entrust it to a MongoDB cluster somewhere managed by the latest hot, new note taking startup.

Where are the regulators when you need them to ensure we can get our data in and out of these platforms?

As for me, I find vim or Sublime and Markdown synced via Dropbox work tolerably well. I keep toying with the idea of writing an open source Markdown syncing solution with open source clients for note taking...

That aside the proprietary nature of the cloud and especially how it pertains to note taking (and todo apps) is a real step backwards. The regulators who forced Microsoft to submit in the past would be gnashing their teeth at the situation we have today.

https://github.com/foambubble/foam

Roam-like note taking app using VS Code. Still early days but has momentum.

Been using it for a week for some project docs, and so far I like it.

Thanks for posting this! Been playing around with org-mode and org-roam but setup is definitely more challenging and it does feel like a bit of platform lock-in since the only useful org editor is emacs.

I find the Things.app very convenient (and worth the one time cost for macOS and iOS since I use it 10-100 times per day).

The key part of using inbox-oriented task apps is to have a process to review the inbox and fold it into some shallow hierarchy of “folders” or “projects” etc. I didn’t realize this was the key part of all systems like bullet journaling or GTD (or the different org mode flows or NV as I understand them).

It’s basic data structures. But after a certain point it’s not efficient to access things linearly, so you need to introduce some sort of tree.

Recently I took the time to go through my almost 1000 inbox notes and fold them into ‘promo notes’ or ‘startup ideas’ or ‘startup resources’. All of which can be usually grouped into one more level for even faster access (‘no code resources’, ‘design resources’, etc).

It all comes down to caches being fast for writing and reading but then there needs to be maintenance to preserve access speed.

It took me three years (and 1000 unfinished notes) to realize this. But you just need that process to organize periodically and then the structure in place is there (now I daily just move things to the right project/area; and assess whether to create new projects / refactor maybe once a month).

I think the reason writing things down is stickier than the apps is because they have a dedicated “always on” quality.

I wonder if you could get part of the way there by having an iPad or remarkable tablet that is just always on and charged ready to take notes.

Digital notes are too limiting in my opinion.

All digital note apps have the problem of making me work very hard to fit my thought into their "organization" of things: hyperlinks, a list of some arbitrary order, a tree, synchronization quirks, and whatever.

It's very painful to work outside their envisioned use cases.

For instance, most open-source solutions focus on a plain text, and if I do use plain text, they are reasonably good. They problem is I need more than that. I need diagrams and tables. Tables written with ascii characters are really hard to maintain.

In the end, I went back to a notebook, and occasionally a stack of sticky memos when I need to clean up some disorganized thoughts. The benefit of the physical world is the freedom of doing whatever I want to the medium: ordering, clustering, rotating, clipping, pasting, etc.

I guess that the digital user experience just isn't there yet.

My go to is goodnotes on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. Has a desktop app for macos as well. Literally I haven’t touched a physical notepad since. It is always ready, expressive and just works. Plus I can split screen with PCalc to crunch some numbers.

I've used Keep extensively, but have been slowly migrating over to Notion as I need more structure than what tags in Keep can afford me.

The problem is probably me, I save a lot of stuff. But, Keep has become sluggish as a result. I'm not great at utilising tags, so oftentimes I'll just scroll through "everything" (sometimes narrowed by say searching for "images") and I have pretty decent visual memory so I'll readily find the thing I'm looking for just because things have the right shape (even text).

Notion is sluggish with embeds. It doesn't deal with the visual information I store very well either. This might be a Firefox thing.

Have used Evernote too, in the past. The problem with that is that it doesn't at all mirror my mental model of how things relate to one another. Granted, neither does Notion nor Keep.

For me, things start out flat (Keep) and then they nest (Notion) but I also have interrelationships, and need pointers between things. Sometimes, I just want to explore the "web" of how things connect but I've never encountered a system that affords me different "cameras" to explore my curated content.

I do not have the energy to build it though.

Hmm, that's an interesting take, and I agree with all your points. Notion is decent, but it requires some learning curve to begin with. I also feel that the apps that optimize for taking notes in a structured, connected manner compromise on the UX front. There's no one size fits all.

Tried roam research for 2 weeks, don't think I'm going back. You almost never read your paper notes because you quickly can't search them.

Same - shifted to one note and then that made me start writing notes on paper.

Unless the writing experience on the tablet improves to match the real world, it’s just not going to be good enough.

Procreate on the iPad has some of the best redo/undo gestures and some excellent inking.

If they used that engine to run a note program, and allow a way to sync across ecosystems - it would be the best written note taking app bar paper.

> Procreate on the iPad has some of the best redo/undo gestures and some excellent inking.

Yes, same with Concepts (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/concepts/id560586497)—(initial... it feels a tad less user-friendly than procreate, but stores drawings as vectors and you can work with an infinite canvas. Check it out if you like Procreate:) It's great for im promptu diagrams and hand written notes.

Now, the three finger swipe gesture on iOS (Notes, annotations) just pisses me off. It's slower, more error-prone and different than any other App. I wish Apple followed Procreate/Concept on that one.

QOwnnotes is a cross-platform markdown gui app that integrates with NextCloud Notes. https://www.qownnotes.org/

I too am paralyzed by the number of choices available. I've found that a simple todo.txt in Sublime with a Notes syntax highlighting package is all that I need. https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Notes

I think some of the reasons why there are so many note taking apps are that it's easy to start with, everybody has a use case for it (easy dogfooding) and you don't need a business idea. If you need an idea for your startup, it's just too easy to either build a note taking app or a chat app.

To do: add to-do-list apps to that list

I'm also tired. Now it's only a folder of Markdown files and pictures, Google Drive and VScode. Nobody can take it away from me. I'm in control.

Btw. I think git is too cumbersome for notes. I don't care about history and git log and I don't want to push things manually for notes.

What extensions for VSCode are you using?

I'm fairly new to this, and so far I've been using Markdown Memo as the main one, with this others as Add-Ons:

- Markdown All in One

- Markdown Paste

- Auto Snippet - for configuring templates by auto-applying VSCode snippets to new markdown files

BTW: Markdown Memo is fairly new, was just released this month

I think we all end up on our own journey of trying to find the note taking style that works best for us, and the variety of styles (git, onenote, evernote, pen & paper, notes app, etc.) has lent to a variety of applications being built to cater for each.

I've got my own slightly different style of note taking that works really well for me, but only when I start to work on multiple projects simultaneously and I need a way to track tasks across them all. When I fall back to one or two projects, then my note taking needs disappear. I joined the fray anyway and turned it into a web app so I could at least have something that _I_ want: https://screwnotes.com

Years ago I took a tip from (the admittedly fictional) Mr. Sherlock Holmes: I never go anywhere without my small notebook and a pen. Back pocket for notebook (and yeah, the current one is 3/4 full and beat to hell) and pen in front pocket(preferably a black Pilot Precise V5, which is both cheap and high quality).

It's really impossible to express how many times a day this comes in handy. The most mundane information usually, for me, is also the most forgettable, and a quick jot fixes that.

And finally, when the thing is cashed, though most of the notations within are completely useless after a couple days, the object itself has, through wear and abuse, become a compelling and aesthetically pleasing artifact.

Lol. This is exactly what I was thinking the other day. Everyone is churning out new notetaking tools as if we don't have enough already.

the global note-taking management software market is estimated to reach $1.35 billion by 2026

That’s an interesting indicator. Would anyone happen to know what report the author is sourcing or have a link? I’m curious to read more of these numbers in full.

https://www.verifiedmarketresearch.com/product/note-making-m....

Not sure if it's a trusted source. Let me link it to the article though.

I would like more info on that too.

I was trying and using one single app for this purpose: Simplenote.

Installed a few years ago to all my devices. Simple and works. Why should anyone waste time trying all alternatives, after a first good enough app have been found which fulfills most needs?

I’ve tried many, many different apps, and approaches over the years. On of my peeves is doing things twice, so here are, to my mind, the important decision making factors:

1. cross-device/platform support. Once I was entirely Apple, I settled on Drafts (post processing when necessary), and Apple Notes. If you have multiple OS’s involved, the decision is harder (Evernote). The logic is that I wanted some contextually sensitive templates for field notes, and Drafts does that with its version of ‘macros’. Having the MacOS version makes writing reports from my notes is dead easy.

If you’re less concerned with re-typing, and/or transcribing, do what you want.

There is a non-zero chance you won't always be on the same platform. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use the best app for your platform, but it's worth to think about how you migrate data out when that day comes.

I've spent roughly a decade or so on each platform I've been on, and then moved on, because either the platform lost its way, or I needed different things. I've learned the painful way that you want data liberation.

Not so much tired of it as extremely indifferent. I'm simply not the type of person that uses tools like this; at all. I know plenty of people that take notes, use post its, etc. I can't even read my own handwriting and wielding a pen is physically painful for me. So not a thing in my life.

I tend to treat written notes as short lived and transient. I'll literally create a new tab in whatever editor, write or paste something there and typically never even bother to save it. Either I act on it or it's a form of documentation that ends up in a more permanent place like a README, issue report, article, code comment, etc.

I'm in the same boat.

Every minute I spend taking notes on something is probably better spent doing the actual thing. I have tabs open until I do the thing, then I just archive them and close them.

Same goes for any to-do list.

I have used Apple Notes since I got my first iPhone, there's still notes from back then in there! Mainly for quick lists and things I need to remember, ideas, shopping, etc. Haven't really found any issues with it.

Yes I use Apple Notes for actual notes. It works well enough for everything I do with the only draw back (to me) being it isn't available as raw text. Although copy/paste works just fine so not a huge deal tbh.

For anything that I find lives in Apple Notes a bit too long I move it over to plain text and use iA Writer. I try to keep anything in Apple Notes as short term notes. Anything I plan to keep around as more (small) documentation I switch over to iA.

A few years ago I just got tired of trying out all these different notes apps. I figured I have iA Writer and Apple Notes and that works well enough so gave up trying every new note taking app that came out and haven't had any regrets.

Recently I tried out Notion and god it was awful. I felt I spent longer arranging things in Notion than I did working on things.

These days I find a more limited and simpler solution is better for me. I switched back to Things 3 a year or so ago as I found Todoist overwhelming after a while. Sure Things is more limited but I like that. It is basically a post-it note and I realised that is all I needed.

I put everything in Apple Notes as well. I love how I can sync my personal notes to iCloud and my work-related notes on Exchange.

That's great!

This is true for a certain class of apps. (I really like the website too. Clean and readable.)

Having recently moved back to a Chromebook, I'll add one more to the long list, one that you don't really hear about. Gitlab comes with a very nice Web IDE. Create a new markdown file and start typing away. You get all the beauty of version control without having to use version control. Can even set it to automatically build your own private site. All free of charge. I'd argue this does stand out compared with, say, Evernote or OneNote.

I recommend not taking notes usually. Unless you're in a class or lecture, I'm not sure I see why you're taking notes. If you're learning a new technology you should be documenting that for use as you go. If you're writing code you should be adding notes to your code and readme. If you're troubleshooting, the details should be in the ticket. I'm not against note taking by any measure, but I don't see the function of it in a day to day workflow.

I take notes for others (collaboration and knowledge sharing) and to create a concept for problems I cannot keep in my head. Additionally I use a note book for quick notes, drawings and so on. Usually I will take pictures of parts that might be useful later and add them to my digital notes.

I've tried Evernote, Apple Notes, the Remarkable Tablet, vimwiki, and I keep going back to handwritten notes on paper.

My current workflow for notes is: I take notes on the notes app on the iPhone or my Mac if I don't have my A4 Moleskin notebook handy. And then I transcribe the notes on the Moleskin whenever I can. Another recent addition I have to this workflow is a Brother VC-500W label printer. I use it to print QRcode stickers for URLs that I stick on my notebook.

Yes! The act of transcribing allows for reorganization and better recall. What i find amazing about plain paper/notebooks is that we remember visually where to find info. Manually searching by flipping through the pages also further helps cement the information. Search functionality is useful in some cases but for essential notes it is a bit overrated IMO

Have you considered linking notes from one notebook to another? E.g. if you named each notebook and numbered pages, you could just point to "page X in notebook Y", and wouldn't need to transcribe. Would this be something helpful to you?

> It’s not because of limited choices. But it’s the other way around. There are so many note-taking apps you could try but end up sticking to none. At least, that’s my story. It’s a perfect example of the paradox of choice.

Either this is not a good example of the paradox of choice, or as I am more inclined to believe, the paradox of choice is mostly bunk.

While I don't discount that some consumers may be frustrated at times by an abundance of choice and may naively think their life would be better with fewer choices, I don't think reality would bear that out. Maybe easier in the moment of the choice, but less satisfactory in the experience of the outcome of that choice. I know my life would be measurably less enjoyable with fewer choices in all walks of life: fewer food options, fewer cities and towns to live in, fewer computer manufacturers, and yes, fewer note-taking apps. Fewer apps would not make the apps better. It would only remove some of the options that are satisfying niche needs for other people. It's a bit elitist to say there should be fewer of any category, because it implies that the subtlety of preference felt by others is unimportant.

Choice is the consumer side of the innovation process. If anything, the non-satisfaction with note-taking applications shows that more exploration, more innovation, and yes, more choices are in fact needed. Technology still has a ways to go before we have a robust approximation of the free-flowing paper and pencil note-taking, augmented seamlessly by the computer. We see where we're heading with things like OneNote, but we're still generations of innovation away.

> Fewer apps would not make the apps better.

I don't think the author is saying this.

You can agree on the following simultaneously:

* More competition and innovation in this space might lead to better tools and possibly better individual outcomes.

* More options might lead to more exploration, experimentation and high switching costs, paralysis by indecision, procrastination via tinkering, and possibly worse individual outcomes.

The truly major innovations are behind us: language, writing, writing instruments, paper, word processor.

Of course, other tools could accelerate your process but depending on what you're working on, if you don't pick a system and stick with it for a while, you might experience worse outcomes.

> the non-satisfaction with note-taking applications shows ... more choices are in fact needed.

Satisfaction is as much a function of our perspective as it is of the tool.

You can ask

"What is the best tool?"

or you can ask

"What is good enough?"

In fact original EverNote implementation (EverNote 2.0) used physical notebook metaphor.

Notes appeared as an "endless tape":

https://www.phonearena.com/news/Two-thirds-of-app-users-in-U...

I think we (initial EverNote dev team [1]) were first who came up with reasonable virtual list implementation for notes.

The metaphor of notes tape (a.k.a. "writing notes down") was quite natural for most of people, that's why EverNote got so many users initially. The key point was to add powerful search tools (including OCR and image recognition) and categorization (tags) on top of that tape.

Just in case: Sciter's SDK contains sample implementation[2] of such virtual tape: https://quark.sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/vtape.pn...

[1] https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

[2] https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/tree/master/samples/%2...

Are there any note apps still around that take an endless tape approach? It seems like everyone's gone away from it, but my mind still works best with endless tape + tags + search.

I took a different approach than the author.

I just found a notes app that worked and stuck with it and stopped worrying about the options. I still get all the advantages of digital notes.

The problem with note-taking (currently) in app form is the way we do things differently by hand, versus digitally. By hand I write notes, draw items that matter to me. I frequently mix languages on a page - simply because it works for me. But, I can flip through a notebook in seconds, compared to clicking through Evernote/Onenote/Notion/etc. when something is 2-3 days back. I keep trying. I've used Evernote, Onenote, local TagSpaces, Notion, Wikis of various sorts, a VIMWiki that I used to keep. I bought RocketBook notebooks, their beacons, the whole thing. I'll keep trying digital note taking.

The reality is that pen and paper is infinitely faster and the brain processes finding things more quickly. Some people like myself are wired such that merely writing the note is the method of locking it into memory. Unfortunately, the digital tools solve history and retrieval better than the tactile, writing answer.

For now, I write with fountain pens, some great ink, and a Stalology B6 notebook. I just spent a month, once again trying to make Notion work. The reality is that writing is just better at this - even though I constantly hope it won't be. At least for me.

The main feature for note taking should be it’s simplicity. I am just writing down a list. All I need is a place to keep referring to and may be search them. The problem comes when they try to cram too much functionality in it. If I wanted more functionality there are other apps like pages and numbers already available. I would just start there. It’s understandable though, Every company wants to hoard all the enterprise functionality

ZIM desktop wiki (open source). For me, a real replacement for OneNote. Desktop app, no finicky markup skills required. Saves plain text files. Problem solved.

I get that these aren't for everyone, but I'd rather have too many choices than not enough. Finding the precise tool that does exactly what one needs is a challenge even with the number of note-taking apps out there.

In my case, I've recently switched to using Trilium Notes which ALMOST meets my needs, but I still need OneNote as well for sketch-based notes for the time being.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by choice, but consider all of the different ways that people have recorded paper notes, and you can figure that there will be at least as much diversity in electronic notes. What we’re seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg, we’ll probably keep inventing new note taking software for as long as we have interesting computers to do so with.

It’s fashionable to say that the best note taking system is pen&paper, but I think it ends up being a disservice to the idea of registering knowledge. I think written and digital have completely different pros and cons.

I love to physically write things down on a moleskine, but I decided to not storage knowledge there, I just dump things from my short term memory to act upon them in the short term. I tried storing knowledge there but when I needed later I didn’t have the notepad with me, or it was in an old one etc.

Digital note taking has several disadvantages, but at least it’s always with me.

Like they say about cameras, the best one is the one that’s with you.

Having created several note taking apps (the latest being Mindown), I’m deeply interested in the note taking problem, but it seems to be impossible to create the ideal one. Sometimes we want “simple”, other times we want advanced features. This is the first layer of challenge I see in the note taking world, but I can peel this onion in almost endless layers...

I'm familiar with this conundrum. I've been taking notes, managing tasks and appointments on paper since 2015; before that I took most notes in Emacs org-mode and managed some tasks there, and some in OmniFocus.

Lack of search is a definite disadvantage of handwritten notes. Here's what I've done to blunt that:

(1) Every notebook begins with a few pages for a table of contents. (2) When a notebook is full, I scan it in as a PDF. (3) I type up the table of contents to make it searchable and add that to the PDF. (4) The PDFs are all available on my phone.

I am generally able to find things this way, but it is not as convenient as i-searching around a giant buffer in Emacs or using something like deft.el. For the moment I am continuing in this fashion, but I do periodically consider switching back to using a computer for note taking. Perhaps some day I will.

Markdown and similar markup languages is the perfect note taking solution.

I've tried dozens and none work better for me than

  $EDITOR $HOME/txt/note

where $EDITOR is Good. The only thing I want from a notes app is to sync txt with my phone, let me edit the files and do exactly nothing else. They all fail.

Side note: there was a laughing emoji in the previous text but HN removes it. Anyone know why that might be?

store txt/note in Dropbox, then you also have the sync.

It would be nice to have a small tools approach to note taking.

Small tools for searching and discovery. Another small tool for editing that uses another small tool to manage and lint any linking.

The use of hashtags in Bear is great, but it’s tied to its own filesystem.

Notable’s live editor is the best, with a great focus mode, but it’s tied to a single directory of notes where, in the case of macOS, titles with colons get mangled because the filesystem can’t cope with titles == filenames. It also stopped being open source without being bug free. I can’t fix bugs in it myself.

Atom has a lovely focus mode but no built in way of organising notes (left side columns) like Bear and Notable have.

And they all default to markdown instead of the functionally superior asciidoc. Markdown is fine up until you have material you wish to format with any kind of seriousness. Or to boil it down another way: Asciidoc has table width hints and markdown don’t.

I do love, at least, the level of choice we have these days.

I'm temperamental and have suffered the paralysis of a hundred note apps/techniques. I have a notebook I handwrite in too, but it's just one of the many approaches on the pile.

I was successful for a long time using GitHub Gists for notes, so much so in fact that I wrote an iOS client that lets you take markdown notes and saves them all directly to your Gists (OctoNote on iOS https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octonote/id1433164731) but since then I've added probably 5+ notes apps to the list.

Just for fun, my feature list includes: * Markdown (ideally compatibility + basic styling) * Project viewing (sidebar listing out notes, representing folder structure) * Customizable themes/fonts * Git integration (or other cloud backup) * Mac app * iOS app

If only somebody would make a really good, deep, explanatory review and comparison of note-taking and knowledge organizing apps available today (including old and simple tools like Apple Notes and Evernote as well as Notion, Roam and all the apps they inspired) I would even pay some real money to read it.

There's plenty of reviews and comparison posts out there; it would help if you would cite some of them and explain what you think is wrong with them.

My take: usually they're written by the note taking app themselves or an employee thereof. The rest is people who went for one app (usually emacs org-mode, lol) and are evangelizing about it.

There is a lot of feature overlap between these note-taking apps, but I always find one or two missing critical features. It seems like most apps try to be a one-size-fits-all solution, and they fail in doing so.

My new approach uses dedicated apps for each use case. I am trying Raindrop.io (or Pinboard.in) as web clippers / persistent bookmark managers, I am using Todoist to organize (and gamify) my tasks, and I use VSCode for general note-taking. Especially VSCode, with its vast extension marketplace, seems to be a balanced solution for customizing the note-taking experience. I can pick my preferred Markdown extension with LaTeX math support and add additional comfort features like TabNine or Grammarly for a better writing experience than whatever these one-size-fits-all solutions such as Evernote or Notion can offer.

I empathize with the "didn't make me a repeat user" part of the post (at least for typed notes). And being a repeat user is very important to taking notes and making them useful!

The inbox is a place you naturally visit often, and we think that makes it a great place for your simple typed notes. We made Twobird to put notes in your inbox! It leverages the same tools you use for email to help manage and remind you of stuff for your notes. I find it very useful to keep lists and basic typed notes alongside the inbox I'm already working in every day. I know I used to email myself notes -- no longer.

https://www.twobird.com

Disclaimer: I work at Ginger Labs, which makes Twobird and Notability (which is great for rich + handwritten notes).

Easy cross-linking notes and the ability to categorize with tags are essential to note taking apps. A fast and powerful search is as much important. If the note taking app can be turned into a Zettelkasten system, then you definitely should have a more detailed look at the app. https://passfindr.com does exactly this. Passfindr also lets one encrypt user generated content so it can be used as a password/secrets store as well. It needs to work on every internet enabled platform and devices. So your choice must be the best maintained application: the web browser. As an everyday user for my micro documents, articles, secrets and all kind of resources and ideas, I'm definitely not tired of Passfindr.

Yes this is self promotion, but its also under a thread about people frustrated with note taking apps so I think it is ok - I made NitroNotes[0] because I was annoyed at even the slow startup speed of Apple Notes.

You have 7 Dots, each one corresponding to a separate note. You swipe between each note (or on macOS you can Click Cmd+1, 2, etc).

The app is less than a MB on iOS, and just over a MB on macOS.

It syncs using your iCloud account between macOS, iOS & iPadOS.

Its like the Sticky Notes app for Mac, but cross platform and with zero-friction sync.

Email me @ adam@adamfallon.com if you can't afford the $4.99 and I will send you over a promo code.

[0] - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/nitronotes/id1502080216

US apple store, for the ones in the US [0]. Just made me discover that the Apple App ID is the same. Only difference is :s/GB/US/g

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nitronotes/id1502080216

Building a simple chat-like note taking app exactly for this.

Try InstaNote on iPhone (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/instanote-pro/id1499393902?ls=... or Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.instanote.i...)

Keep very simple free form text, or lists, audio notes, images, documents. Everything is backed up in the cloud. Has built in support for sharing and repeated reminders.

The main goal is to make the interface super simple to use, support journaling like note-taking and fast search.

Notes on iOS/OSX/iPad is the only one I use. Plenty of formatting and media features, search (and from spotlight) sync between devices, sharing/collab, and on iPad I can hand-write and it will transcribe and index my handwriting.

Nothing else has come close for me and it’s free.

I'm mostly using text files at the moment:

I have a 'global' notes file in my home directory and then sometimes project specific notes in project directories.

My .envrc in project directories prints the project-specific notes file when I cd into there.

I have aliases and scripts that make adding a line to a file easy:

m foobar # (m for memo) appends "* foobar" to my global notes.

t foobar # (t for task) appends "o foobar" to it (the `o` I replace with an x when it's done)

There's an alias to print the notes file and one to edit it.

The notes file is synced bidirectionally to a server from my laptop.

My android phone is doing the same sync. The phone displays the notes in a widget which lets me edit it with one tap.

This way I can add notes from the command line and they get synced to my phone. When I edit them on my phone they get synced back.

this sounds neat

I used emails to self for notes. Tried Evernote, OneNote, Keep. The problem always was: it is a separate app/page, more actions are needed than just writing an email.

But since Google added three buttons and panel at the right of GMail web interface with tasks, calendar and Keep - that problem is gone. It's also possible to attach an email to a task or note, and tasks with notifications go automatically to the calendar.

I still miss some features from Keep, e.g. richer formatting or markgown would be nice, but the main friction is gone and I use tasks and Keep quite regularly.

For work I use StickyNotes in Windows, one per projects. Before that it was just notepad, but StickyNotes have richer formatting (than nothing) and autosave.

I agree with the sentiment, but it's a crowded market that if there was an easy, elegant solution that met everyone's needs we'd already have some leaders out there. Maybe we already do. My person preference is Notion at the moment.

That's nice. I used to like taking notes on Notion. But one day, I got annoyed when I was not able to quickly search an old note as it was nested under some other note. Took a while for me to realize and make sense of that.

I've been really happy with combining both Nebo and Evernote

Nebo has great handwriting/math/schematic recognition and I can export as recognized text to Evernote. That way both the original handwriting and the text are stored in two different places.

I've tried so many options for note taking but I can never find a good solution that fits all my needs. I find writing things down helps with comprehension and retention, but using a physical notebook has its limitations when you want to reference images or snippets found online.

In the end I landed on OneNote, but I find it to be slow for larger notebooks, and it doesn't have an intuititive method of linking different notes from different sections for easy reference. However I like the handwriting recognition far better than Apple variants, and I felt like with apps like Notion I spent more time customizing and grokking the app than actually taking notes.

Im actually trying to build a note-taking app myself. I haven't gotten very far, becuase I kinda suck at managing my project. But I think if I manage to improve in that regard, sooner or later I will have a functioning note-taking app.

For the past few years I've been trying to find ideal app for notes. Google keep, Google Doc, Trello, Timers, Workflowy, Github projects, Zettlr, Notion.

The last 2 looked promising, but were lacking in some aspects. TO elaborate, note system should have 3 aspects to be easy to use:

- fast writing - fast lookup - has a connection between notes

I found out that Vim perfectly completes all 3:

- efficient writing and navigation - fuzzy search in file names and content - supports markdown links and follows them

So I keep my notes directory in Dropbox, processing it with the help of Vim and currently working on lightweight web client to create notes from any device. That can be further processed by main system.

How do you handle images? I find them necessary a lot of the time. I like to just drop them right in my notes and not bother making links in markdown. Currently I just use libreoffice odt files on my google drive service.

I migrated from Chrome Scratchpad to Google Keep when the former got killed as Google is wont to do.

And I've been pretty happy with it, though I am a simple man with simple needs. My biggest angst with using Keep has been uncertainty over Google's interest in it, they did kill the original note taking app I used, but it's been getting pretty good updates for the past few years. And each note has an "Export to Google Docs" option as a last resort, I suppose.

Keep's simplicity and especially reliability have been golden in my use. Even syncing is almost-real-time between devices. It "just works."

I dropped Keep after finding (hard way) that there's no way to revert accidental edit if you switched note.

I love card view though, I wish OneNote had it.

Honestly, markdown files + git for history/version control is all you really need for effective note taking. Use whatever editor you like, and feel free to use some paid service for backups/versioning/etc if you feel git is too complicated, but IMO there's nothing that beats the simplicity and enduring nature of plain text files combined with the power of markdown and git/version control.

I also think paper notes are vastly underrated by many people in Tech. I keep a notebook and write stuff down all day long in addition to keeping more detailed notes digitally.

I also prefer writing things down. However, the ability to quickly search and link years worth of notes is the reason I’m putting effort into org-roam ... dozens of notebooks on a shelf will never be able to do that.

I feel the author's pain. I've been trying to organize all my notes for quite some time, and for now only Onenote seems to tick some of the boxes.

My requirements for notes, alongwith the issues I face in Onenote are:

- I should be able to organize them in some way. Sure, Onenote works okayish. I like the Notebook->Section->Pages structure. However, God forbid if I try to rename a notebook... I need to open Onedrive in my browser, rename from there, wait a day for the changes to sync (no I'm not joking, some notebooks I could only open the next day), open each of the 60 or so notebooks inside Onenote 2016 (NOT Onenote UWP since it couldn't find those new notebooks, or errored out trying to open them with old names), and then open those 60 notebooks again on my two desktops and a laptop. Was an awful experience and I almost quit Onenote.

- It has to be cross-platform. I do have an iPad but my main workstations are Windows and Ubuntu, and I take notes on all of these platforms, so that basically kills almost all the Apple-only apps, which is a shame since many of them seem good.

- It should either support handwriting recognition, or LaTeX in notes. The reason is I need to write down equations and/or diagrams quite often, so if I just type I'd need LaTeX, and if I jotted derivations using Apple Pencil, I should be able to bring those up later. For Onenote, this is a hit or miss. Apple pencil + Onenote works superb for jotting down, especially with the Paperlike screen protector, BUT the delay after which it becomes searchable is totally dependent on Microsoft's servers, since the server-side OCR needs to run on my notes and I have no control on the process...

Sometimes I just give up and use my trusty pencil and paper. But if I do that, I sometimes forget which notebook I had written some random derivation in September last year. Also, there's no way to search and to archive the data unless I manually scan or take photos, and even then the archival would be super clunky in the form of pictures...

All in all, this is a pretty half-assed solution I have right now. I wish there were atleast some app which was cross-platform and supported LaTeX, or some app which magically solved my problems outlined above...

I like to look at notes-taking as a broader way of capturing information you have seen. The value of keeping notes is to eventually make use of them. The tool should focus on serving this core workflow, not creating overhead.

We created a tool that tries to minimize the cognitive load for capturing things. We were inspired by messaging system and email to yourself, and build a tool for capturing infos on the go for ourself. We're testing it with small group. If you are interested and willing to write us feedbacks, drop me a line and I will invite you to the beta community.

abtin.setyani@gmail.com

I don't have a solution for mobile (not a big deal for me), but at least on desktop I just use a git repository of markdown files with Sublime Text.

My main complaint is that markdown hyperlinks are just extremely ugly to look at in text form, so I wish there was a nice editor or extension that supports hyperlinks. I've stuck with Sublime Text for the note-taking simply because it loads so fast and the keyboard shortcuts are great, but open to alternative editors (ideally open source). Or maybe there's a good Markdown extension for Sublime that I'm not aware of.

Check out Bear. You can write notes in Markdown format but with some QoL features from traditional note taking apps, including a nicer hyperlink experience

I moved from Evernote to OneNote six or seven years ago and use that for a mix of work notes, document scans and the occasional TIL-style note (as well as a few things I want to keep track of between work/real life).

Everything else goes onto my public wiki/blog (taoofmac.com), which is just Markdown inside a git repo.

But I am struggling with web page snapshots (the OneNote clipper is horrible when compared to Pocket, which I also use) and more structured notes, since OneNote has become quite slow on iOS of late and it is a pain to draft anything beyond a few paragraphs.

I recommend webrecorder.io for web page snapshots.

I like using Notability with the Apple Pencil on the iPad. Hoping the text recognition in iOS 14 works with it.

GoodNotes is also nice. These pdf’s were created with it.

https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/tree/master/s...

I also use Bear for my Markdown notes. Having everything on my iPhone and easily searchable is important for fast retrieval.

Apple Notes doesn’t let you limit search to a folder/tag.

The purpose for me to taking notes is to help me learn, remember, and possibly come back to in the future. I almost _never_ look at my computer written notes unless I know that I am going to look it up later in the day.

To that end I have a few notebooks that I have wrote in over time. I have returned to them occasionally. The biggest downside to this, however, is space.

I just can't focus if I'm writing notes on a computer though. And it's harder for me to remember things if I don't physically ( as in, pen on paper ) write things down.

Made a few of my own. Locally I use a shared API hosted by a Pi, and then my phone(Android widget) and cross platform app(Electron) uses it. It's basic note title/body. Also have one online but it's statically encrypted. For drawing I use Krita. I was working on an SVG drawing app integrated into the cross platform app but haven't finished it. I also have a Pi-hosted URL-based notepad too where you use it by urls/whole screen is a textarea element. Work wise use both OneNote and Apple notes.

Because of many of your noted downfalls of popular note-taking apps, I spent a few years developing MinimaList Outline: a nested list mobile app for Android. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.toadlybrood...

I use it everyday as it easily helps me organize huge amounts of data in a clean hierarchical manner. Give it a try, let me know what you think!

Against my better judgement, I switched from apple notes to notion for half of my note taking. I'm using Notion to document the things I am learning, but not for anything personal. As most of my learning includes a lot of URLs, the workflow I setup in Notion is easy and speedy.

Overall though, I hate the idea of putting my thoughts on the cloud (someone else's computer) and worry about the future when tool "B" comes along and I want to move my data. I see a lot of cut n paste in my future :(

I'm using envelopes. Like the ones you get sent in the mail with invoices. I save them and take notes on them. Works great. A computer is not always the solution to every problem!

Haven't we all made a note app by now?

I spent over a month at "TodoMVC.com" playing with frameworks. After all that I couldn't decide which one I should use and ended up deciding not to use any of them and then made my own.

And I don't use it much either :D

I do look at new ones still though. Some of them have so many features that just the notion of spending the time learning how to use them puts me off.

As I write this I'm looking at 4-5 sheets of paper scattered on my desk with notes scribbled all over them.

I’d like to engage with the content of this peice, rather than share my ignorance of history and empire. So some observations / questions:

1. Its clear to me that the decades long trend of militarizing police exemplifies the author’s idea of the frontier returning to the imperial core.

2. What is the EU in this context?

3. American civilization has transformed in admirable ways away from reprehensible practices in the past, I don’t think trend extrapolation will accurately forecast the future.

4. The War on Terror has been a fiasco.

I write a lot when designing software, but hate paper, so I ordered reMarkable 2, which I expect to change my note-taking habits completely. I plan to write everything into it.

I have that similar feeling, I don't want a bunch of paper around, but writing on paper is just SUPERIOR to anything digital, as it's so much easier to freeform write, add sketches, etc. That's why a bought (several sizes now) a Rocketbook. Paperish, can write/draw, easy to digitize and reusable.

I did the same thing!

I use a paper A5 atom notebook. You can easily rip out pages and rearrange them. I mostly use it for quick todos, db relation schemas and writing down some logic.

I do take some notes with Apples Notes but I periodically clean them out. I don't see the benefit in keeping old notes. If a project is done the notes are also deleted / trashed.

Why do people keep their 5 year old notes anyway? From a IT programming perspective anything that old is probably out date and not relevant.

I do some frontend web dev and all my tech notes from >2 years ago is heavily outdated.

For me the most important part of note taking is quickly retrieving previous notes. Paper notes don't work for this if one has lots of notes, so digital it is.

I've tried a few note-taking apps, and then I've gone back to text editors. My notes are stored in an untethered, unlocked, unowned, accessible, open-format repository, and I can use a different program every day and never run out. Or, if I find a program I like, I can keep using it for as long as it serves me.

I don't really see the point of a note-taking app, except that iOS and now Android lock down the file system and force it on you.

I find Google Keep convenient it's simple and quick.

Colour coding of notes, pinning notes, add a url to a note all basic stuff I find useful.

The only missing feature is categories but I can do that manually. I add a header like "Tip" for notes I may need for work. Other categories I make up may be "Groceries " or what context the not related to.

I prefer fast and simple over anything needlessly complex I mean it's quick notes not a thesis.

I use QOwnNote with NextCloud. It has a lot of features and is very enjoyable to use. It doesn't lock you down with a specific format. It just adds an additional database for tags. You have the raw files with txt or markdown format organized perfectly in your folders. And with the ability to host the sync server by yourself, you don't need to give the sensitive information to third-party organization.

“But my greatest worry is if I’d continue using it.“

The reason people abandon note taking apps is that they are subordinate to the whims of the developer, OR they are an island of personal control with no mindshare / collaborative power.

Annotation and collaboration are what make our civilization. Everyone wants to harness this and profit off of it, but you can’t trap lightning in a bottle. The control dynamics of the channel matter a lot.

"Note Taking" is the wrong approach, imho. You are responsible for putting things in and keeping it up to date, and of course this is prone to fatigue.

An automatic knowledge base that is created from the signals you already generate anyway would serve you the best, I think. This is what I'm building with https://histre.com/

Does it have e2e encryption? This is more or less a requirement nowadays for me.

After trying dozens of tools, I've come back to just using text files. Easy to edit, sync instantly with dropbox, compatible with everything. Images or other stuff just stored in folders. Word/excel files for more complicated stuff. Nothing beats files and folders.

Also use a physical notepad for writing ephemeral things down because the tactile feeling of writing and crossing things off is very satisfying.

I've recently started using org-capture and org-agenda (LONG-time org-mode user with a hot-key (Auto HotKey) to bring up emacs). Seems to work pretty well. (I'm always at my keyboard during the work day, and sometimes even when not.)

With just my phone, Google Keep.

If I was back in school, Live Scribe (but only with a pen with a manual on-switch; the Aegir turns itself on too much and the battery drains fast).

P.S. sometimes Orgzly/Drpbox when mobile.

Evernote being my bookmark tool now that Delicio.us has been nerfed. (If it's even still around.)

(Also this P.S. because Materialistic doesn't seem to allow editing.)

Ha! I actually wrote a blog post on this today: http://peterklipfel.com/blog/taking_notes/

I have gone through a lot of note-taking iteration, and I have finally found something that really works for me. If anyone cares enough about the post, feel free to submit it on my behalf

i would definitely consider myself one of those who jumps around but never becomes a repeat user..

just recently i came across the first exception to that... Joplin... https://joplinapp.org/

been using it for a little while now and am planning on sticking to it for a bit longer, i have it integrated with my personal nextcloud instance

I'm a serious pen and paper person but the only note taking app I've stuck with is Google Keep.

I think the constraints are a virtue. No hierarchy, no structure more complex than a list. It imitates my paper workflow which is a bunch of scattered post its and single sheets on my desk.

I do like Notion for more academic or deep work but it's not something I'd fire up without a second thought.

I don't know of any good note-taking software. The best (i.e., least bad) I've found is Apple Notes, but it isn't cross-platform and uses proprietary syncing.

Something like an Evernote/Apple Notes interface on top of a 1Password-style back end would be ideal. Let me store my note vault wherever the heck I want, and if I keep it in Dropbox, I can use it wherever I want.

I think this post almost touches on an interesting point - note taking apps & software are also competing against pen and paper, which are many ways stronger.

As a product for example, Moleskine (arguably the brand leader) most recently reports nearly EUR 175M in sales - nearly double that of Evernote, and you have many good alternatives in any stationer for just a few dollars.

> software are also competing against pen and paper, which are many ways stronger.

for scratchy notes that you don't care about sure, but if you want to search, copy/paste, erase etc. physical notebooks are the worst.

I was an advocate for moleskine books at one time, but got sick of trying to remember where I wrote something

Hopefully evernote (or any software vs physical) has a better margin?

If you do a feature by feature comparison , including data retention , uptime , throughput , graphics support ( writing enables unlimited diagramming ) , power requirements , reliability — Pen and paper come out on top every time .

I recommend getting into fountain pens. They are the mechanical keyboards of the writing world . And the ink flow is cathartic

also environmental impact.

Trying to use all the bells and whistles of a note taking app is a distraction from just using the app to write things down. Depending on the platform, get yourself a stylus and just write as you normally would on paper. Later you can learn the features... Worked for me and I love it! I use my digital notebook as a secondary brain.

Another huge benefit of physical note taking is that if you are doing it in a meeting other people won't think you are on Slack or otherwise distracted and not listening. Instead people will feel more appreciated, since you are valuing what they are saying though to write it down.

The same can be accomplished with some iPad note taking apps.

I save my notes as text files (markdown format). It is universal so its not dependent to any app. It is searchable and future-proof. I save them in Apple iCloud so it auto-syncs to my iPhone and use iA Writer app to read/write to it. I used to use GitHub and git app (Working Copy app) on my phone to sync between devices.

since you're using markdown, I would check out https://dendron.so (disclaimer, I'm the author). its an open source, markdown-based note taking app that works with markdown notes on your file system. also supports back-links, hierarchies, tagging, and more. its built as a plugin for vscode so you also have access to vim keybindings and anything else you might need with vscode extensions

I take notes with Apple pencil on iPad. I feel more creative when writing. Plus, I tried to enforce structure using various apps including org mode, but it turned out either I am bad at using structured note taking or my use case of ideating and planning is not very structured. And it feels less effortful than typing to me.

Nothing beats plaintext.

Between Apple Notes, private git repo, and sending myself links via email... this problem is solved forever for me.

If you are iOS user apples notes is the best. Is like the camera theory that the camera with you all the time is the best camera. In this case is always gonna be around, auto back up, no install needed, available on all devices. The best part is it does 90% of what the most advanced note apps does.

Check out https://Kontxt.io. It’s like Pocket, Genius, and Reddit combined. There’s personal features for note taking, organization, and permission based sharing, and social features to discover the best parts of the web.

I've been using Google Keep for temporary things, e.g. grocery lists or ideas I'll need to expand upon later; and I use notebooks to brainstorm/document my ideas as I actually go in depth. This is what works for me for software engineering and my general life.

I use Microsoft Onenote. I use it because it is bundled with Office 365. It suits me encourage the use of 365 rather than another app, because my team then have less software to support. It is good enough, and that's enough for me to not be bothered with anything else.

Shameless Plug: ThinkType[1] comes pretty close to just writing things down in a notebook. It's probably even easier, though it doesn't support formats other then text.

[1]: https://thinktype.app

I write a lot of notes in a notebook with pen. But I never see them. Very rarely I may revisit something. And I have often found that even if I read them they don't seem to matter to me now. So is all the hype of taking notes justified I wonder?

I agree with y'all there is magic when writing on paper. When you're actually writing. That's why Sony's DPT-RP1 (DPT-S1, DPT-CP1) feel like magic and future for note taking the only downside is the price and the availability of replacements pen tips. While there is, of course, a lot that could be improved, I was moved by the core idea itself, virtually infinite notebook. Imagine how much different your experience through schools and life would be of all of your notes from elementary school until now we're always in one place, always available to you. So much potential... Makes me quite excited for the future. (There are of course other 'digital paper' devices (remarkable, ...), but DPT-S1 was my first love, although we never got to meet, I did, for a week, own DPT-RP1 before I returned it to Amazon, because at the time I couldn't afford a ~700-900€ device)

After Google Notes was retired, I was determined to find a replacement. Evernote is okay but will the company still be around for years? Not sure. Since I already have a hosting account, I recently installed DocuWiki. So far, I really like it!

I actually use GIMP for taking notes and save as both an xcf and pdf. GIMP is basically a simplified and free Photoshop. I can doodle concepts that can't be explained clearly with text alone unless I do a bunch of formatting and ASCII art.

I settled on Rednotebook on Linux on my work laptop.

It has almost no features beyond a daily page and a term cloud (basically, an index of terms where the most frequent terms have bigger fonts).

I use some informal markdown syntax, in the sense that i mostly recognize visually.

I'm using Leuchtturm 1917 Notebooks with enumerated pages and a table of contents. I've tried many electronic notetaking solutions but none of them have the flexibility, especially not with regards to formulas and diagrams.

I am not tired of my notepad.exe

To add mine into the mix, I went through all the apps imaginable before settling on Inkdrop. The electron-ness of it all annoys me a bit, but aside from that it does everything I’ve ever wanted (aside from inking) very very well.

This is why I love Emacs org-mode. You can create the note taking app that you want. Don’t like something? change it. Which it had feature X? Add it. There so many great packages already that often what you want is done for you.

"I’ve finally resorted to the most personal and easy alternative — writing things down."

Haha, we've come full circle! I have a $.79 spiral notebook on my desk for notes. When it fills up, I scan it in, and buy another one.

I really like TiddlyWiki for note taking. 2-way links and transclusion are important features for me. It's not Xanadu, but it's an easy to use alternative that strikes the right balance for me.

The amount of notion spam on the internet is pretty remarkable.

Every year...there's a new FOTM note taking app, but this post hit the nail on the head....they are all absolutely awful and cater to serial movers.

I have yet to find a cloud based notes system that doesn't have dumpster fire levels of responsiveness and search. Any suggestions? I've taken to just syncing a text file across devices.

The biggest problem for me is finding the stuff I wrote sometime that I might need again. What works best for me is to send myself a gmail. Google search makes finding things quick and simple.

Noteability

Audio synchronized with your typing, writing and drawing, plus WebDAV backstore and ability to drop PDFs and links into your notes. I think GoodNotes is a close second —need layers in Notability.

I'm not a daily note taking type of person but I have a notepad on my desk for doodling, sublime/notepad.exe for quick scratch pad stuff, and a todo app for longer term things

I'm liking PARA with Notion right now. I make pretty heavy use of linked databases to keep track of things day to day and I can get a high level view of what I've got going on/completed for reviews/1:1s/when people ask what I did 2 quarters ago. I can throw a bunch of varied data formats into Notion too, which is great.

This is all only for work-life however, normal-life doesn't fit into this approach or more specifially I don't want to ruin life outside work with this approach(believe me I tried, it's a great way to feel like a constant failure). I have yet to find anything useful for non-work insights. Nothing fits, but maybe it doesn't matter?

Personally I find conventional notebooks and pens work best for me. I tried note-taking apps from time to time, never sticks for more than 10 minutes and never understood why.

I had same issue of using several apps and not sticking to anyone. Now I forced myself to stick to apple notes and its working fine. plain text + cloud sync worked out for me.

My note taking app is vim editing a text file named ~/notes.

I just keep a running document with all my meetings, notes, etc. and when I need to pull things out into a more focused document, I do so. It's worked pretty well.

I used to use Simplenote, but after I lost some changes due to a glitch in their system, I decided to switch to something safer. Now I'm just using a Google Doc.

I'm still using my old note app I wrote years ago back in 2003 and keep porting to every gadget I use. Its amusing to use such an old ppc app under Windows 10.

https://remarkable.com/

Combines the best of analog and digital.

I use mine every day all day. Works great.

Simplenote for the win. Used it for 4 years, absolutely no fuzz.

https://simplenote.com/

I've been using Notational Velocity + Alfred to quickly take notes for years. Recommended for anyone who wants something lightweight.

Roam Research was the one I settled on. It melds exactly with how my mind works. I think it's probably doubled my productivity.

Note taking apps are stuck in a place similar to where "chat" apps are stuck.

Competition between "chat" applications is driven by network effects. You don't choose Zoom because it is the best, you choose it because somebody else chose it for you. The overwhelming pattern is "CUSeeMe used to be good but now we use PalTalk, "Skype used to be good, but now everybody uses WebEx", or "WebEx used to be good and now everybody uses Zoom", or "AOL Instant Messenger used to be good and now everybody uses Facebook Messenger". Despite a large advance in the underlying technology, the functionality of these applications doesn't seem much better.

I worked at a startup where one of our problems was finding documents in the 20 different cloud services we might put documents. The usual answer people had was to add a new cloud service, but that means you now have 21 places a document might be and it is astonishing how far people will go down this road without any insight into how it is an obvious dead end.

The obvious way out is to build some system that sucks in content from places, a "note finding" app or "note organizing" app instead of a "note taking".

What astonishes me is that so few people are working on that or even believe that it is possible. Two factors are that

(1) People are intimidated by full text search. First people think "you can't beat Google" and second if you look at Google you see Google is not very good. That's depressing. The first four volumes of TREC are depressing because people try all the obvious things that should improve relevance. (in the 5th volume they discover BM25, which nobody to this day since they don't work to do the work to tune two numeric parameters to the data set) Ask people how to make a scalable full text engine and they say "Solr" and I say "are you kidding?" OpenText and ten thousand imitators will boast about the hundreds of connectors they have to the most enterprise-y data sources, but they will say very little about relevance, in fact if they participated in TREC they did it as an advertisement, not because they saw accuracy tuning as a competitive differentiator. A breakthrough is possible, but nobody believes it.

(2) The "app economy" itself is dependent on lock-in. If there was "one ring to bind them all" in terms of the document spaces a person uses, that's an existential threat to all of the programs that want you to keep using them. So once you get some traction in this area you are going to see frantic measures taken quickly to cut off access -- like what happened with the Twitter API when they put all the alternative clients out of business.

lol maybe just I'm old , my method these days is: In each of my "many" current+unfinished projects. I usually have a "design.txt" or "design.plan" (when I feel very hackerman) which I just edit with my fav text editor, usually geany. This covers 85% of my note-taking requirements.

I was a long-time nvAlt (macOS + SimpleNotes on iOS) user and then used Drafts for the last 6 months which is a nice replacement (I use about 1% of the features). I'm trying to get into Notion for a few types of notes I take but it's too heavy for quick notes so I feel like I'll probably settle into using Drafts for quick notes/scratch-pad and then use Notion for structured notes/knowledge base type stuff.

I just use whatever comes with the phone, never understood the "market" of note taking apps.

I started doing my notes in ms access database and it's currently working really well for me. I'm doing zettelkasten inspired system and right now it's having only 3 columns - notes, sources and tags. The ability to fully modify the relation between them is something I find infinitely more valuable than anything an app can provide.

I love bear and use Obsidian for my PKM and writing output with bi-directional links. Love it!

The primary disadvantage of handwriting notes for me is a total lack of search functionality.

I use beastnotes and like it. I like the way it's organized into books and chapters.

I'm using Pilot Custom 74 fountain pen with my favourite inks on high quality paper notebooks. It makes me want to take notes due to the whole experience and does't restrict me in any way the computer does . For longer text/programming related stuff nothing beats pure text and files in common directory.

> add screenshots/images, links, etc

A printer and a url shortened would replace these

I'm a big fan of jrnl Single plain text file with simple CLI

What are people's preferred solutions for markdown + latex?

How was the market size calculated? Where was sourced from?

> helps me stay in touch with my handwriting

What does this even mean?

try out

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/

super clean and nice.

Markdown and VScode is worth a look.

The best note taking app is vim.

I love using joplinapp.org

TL;DR: I decided to write things down, because no single note-taking app convinced me so far.

Well, obvious. I use Notion (and love/hate it), and write things down a lot. What a surprise.

my vote is for standardnotes.org

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/

If anyone hates a recent change to Apple Notes that makes your first line BIG, do this:

Preferences -> New Notes Start With ___Body___

Creating a note-taking app and/or a Todo list are effectively rites of passage. There's something aspirational both in the creation of the app and the creation of a more orderly daily existence.

Looked at this way, I think we can explain both the proliferation for, and the dissatisfaction with note taking apps.

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