Ask HN: What note taking software do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What note taking software do you use?

8 pointsjohn_the_man14 comments

What features do you think a note-taking web/phone/tablet app should have? Do you use one already, if so what do you love about it? What would you change. What would be your perfect note taking program?

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I use Simplenote on my iPod and iA Writer on my Mac, both changing the same database through Dropbox. This system works for me but I wish the Simplenote app had tighter Markdown support. I write all my notes in Markdown and it’s a pain to look at them in Simplenote on iOS (there’s a Markdown viewer on the web version, but it doesn’t always work).

tl;dr My ideal note-taking app has Markdown support across all its supported devices and apps, not just a few.

I use Evernote for all my note taking purposes. It's one central hub to dump everything I can imagine. It's generous in it's search feature as well as platform availability (there is an Evernote app for it). Even though a lot can be improved in terms of performance and in terms of usability I'm still sticking to Evernote for most of my note taking needs.

Having said that I gave SpringPad a shot lately and it's dramatically impressive. It has more feature set than Evernote but the only gripe I had was the inconvenient flow of notes and the performance of their mobile apps. Of course, since I was deep into Evernote I was a bit lazy to move all my notes into SpringPad as well. But if I have to give it a shot I'll go with SpringPad if Evernote continues to lag in terms of performance on their mobile apps.

I use Evernote for everything from notes and todo lists on my various projects to grocery lists, medical info tracking, plugins I want to try with vim, and daily task lists. I've tried it multiple times in the past and gradually stopped using it. For some reason it just clicked the most recent time. I have a default "Drafts" notebook that all new notes go into (which also serves as a rough to-do list). If the notes need to be organized (they're going to be there for a while), I will move them to specific notebooks. I've essentially stopped bookmarking sites, as I can just put the links or snip the content into notes specifically for the project I'm working on.

Oh, and their mobile apps are actually nice to work with. Keeping photos of my receipts in Evernote has saved me a few times.

First Encryption. Encryption is so important since I wouldnt want to save my financial informations into a cloud service. I know that evernote doesn't use an integrated solution for this. (You just need to encrypt your notes one by one)

Second: Encryption (again)

Third: Third way to access my files if one forgets email/password. Sometimes people might lose access to their emails. This way, If I forgot the evernote's password, then I cant get access back to evernote.

4th: Might be ligher than evernote. The software should be as light as "notepad". I can open 100 notepad windows and doesnt consume much memory. And most important notepad never crushes..

Before I switched my Tablet PC over to Linux I loved OneNote; now I use Xournal (and prefer it since it has a more minimal interface and provides more note-taking space, plus allows some other customizations that I like that aren't offered by OneNote--or at least that I couldn't figure out how to customize in OneNote).

I also like Emacs' Org-mode, but haven't figured out how to use it really effectively for my needs yet. (Everything ends up kind of jammed together and it's very difficult for me to find specific things afterwards; I am hoping that there are additional things that I simply have not figured out yet that will enable me to address this)

I've used the generic notepad, classroom, several text editors, but still go back to google docs. I know it's not an actual app, but the no need to save feature is really a bonus for me. I always tend to multi-task quite a bit on the ipad, so it becomes annoying when I get a Save or Cancel prompt everytime i switch over to another app and then back.

I realize the generic notepad does this on the ipad- but google docs offers font formatting such as bullet points and number lists which keeps me organized even if it's just for note taking.

I generally use a text file - the most important thing for me is being able to store notes quickly and hierarchically, without worrying about whether I'm logged in or how to insert an item between two other items.

I think my perfect program would be something that lets me edit notes as a plain-text document (any time, not just initially), and then automatically versions it, timestamps rows, and adds whatever markup it wants.

I guess I'd just want a gui wrapped around a VCS.

That sounds a lot like etherpad... but I'm not too sure how the offline editing would work.

On second thought, maybe dropbox and a text editor would work better...

I'm looking at EtherPad, and it doesn't seem to offer a huge benefit. I'm not really concerned with WYSIWYG features, or whole-file versioning, rather, I'd like to see when I last added or modified a line, and possibly have it auto-convert dashes to checkboxes (I use - to indicate a new item, and x to indicate a finished item).

I use a text file saved in a Dropbox folder. It's really handy and offers version control as well. As a bonus - I can view the file on my iPhone too (via the Dropbox app).

I have Evernote too, and sometimes think I really ought to use that instead, but I like my plain text files. To Evernote's credit, I use that for recording audio notes.

>> What would be your perfect note taking program?

This is something I've been working on for a long time, based on a data structure I created called an infocard (see http://www.InfoML.org). If you're working on something similar or are interested in my work, please get in touch: greggw AT infoml DOT org. Thanks.

I'm apparently the first Windows user to respond so I'll say OneNote. Love it - can't imagine a better tool. I've tried several trials/freebies for others and nothing beats OneNote. The only improvement I could make with it is online sync across multiple computers.

I'm a big fan of being able to use a stylus with my iPad. The biggest issue is that the app won't let me rest my palm on the screen when I'm writing.

Macjournal. It's alright, although I wish the hierarchical folder structure was more customizable.

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