Note Taking in 2021
blog.dornea.nu
blog.dornea.nu
There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and (2) sync --- I need my notes mirrored onto my phone.
For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good, in fact, because it doesn't feel much better to use than does TextEdit. Both search and sync work fine. I don't have to think about what I'm writing or how it fits into the scheme of things because I'm guaranteed to be able to find things with search. I can drag screenshots of lecture videos in and write short sentences about them.
I had Bear.app for awhile and was initially skeptical of it, but it has now replaced Notes.app for me; it's a better writing environment, it has sticky notes (pinned to the top of the note list) which turn out to be really valuable, does native Markdown, and search and sync work reliably on my laptop and phone.
So, Notes and Bear.app are my two recommendations.
I'm interested to see if anybody comes up with something macOS-supported that outdoes Bear.
I'm an Emacs person, I've written a couple thousand lines of elisp, and I have never, ever been able to get into org mode.
I'm currently using iA Writer on Android. Notes are automaticaly saved as markdown to a Dropbox folder which I can open on my other devices fairly easily.
The default storage location is their web service, but you do have the option of storing all files locally. You do lose some collaboration features if you do that.
At first I was a little concerned when I saw Notions "block concept" and it doesn't feel as snappy as Bear because of that, but the way you can start a new related document super easily from each block is just really good. The Search is amazing, changes are insta-synced between devices (like... live as you type) spending a little time on cards makes your doc look pretty good (if you care) and the share-options are all I ever wanted.
I also like the separation of "daily notes" and your regular documents. With Bear the sidebar always feels a little messy (despite pinning), but if daily docs are moved to a separate area that is ordered by time, it cleans up the "stage" for my more important, long-enduring notes.
I just spent about an hour testing the waters with Craft, but this is love at first sight so far!
I’m something of an unpaid evangelist for it - it’s pretty close to life changing software for me, as it’s completely changed how I think and write. Glad you love it!
They have an extremely active Slack community that’s well-staffed, and their extremely responsive to feature requests. Their pace of development over the first year of their launch is incredible.
Anyone knows what they are? It makes a ton of difference if it is a mandatory monthly plan that kicks in after I migrated everything, or skins or optional collaboration features etc.
I use 2 giant plain-text files.
One for notes. The other for to-dos.
I use git to sync to a private git repo using my own app https://github.com/tanin47/git-notes (work with Mac, windows, Linux)
My priority is that I want my notes to live forever. Using GitHub seems to achieve that purpose. (I used many notes app before which I threw away when moving to a new app)
It's just important to have automated triggers to push and pull things to avoid conflicts. That's possible with Shortcuts on iOS and there's a git-plugin for Obsidian as well.
Using text files for notes is meh. I've just been pointed at Bear app, and using tags to manage grouping specific notes has been really nice.
It's all stored as markdown, so you can go in and edit the page. nb also syncs automatically every time a note is edited.
Images, pdfs, docs, etc. can all be dumped into nb.
On mobile, I use gitjournal, and point it to the same gitlab repository, so the same notes are synced on mobile.
The notational-fzf vim plugin (https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim) is excellent for searching notes and just works if you point it to your .nb root directory.
The next best thing is notable (https://notable.app/), which provides a much better interface, but doesn't do the download url thing. Gitjournal and notational-fzf also work with notable.
Its a 10 LOC bash script on each OS, it allows me to keep all my notes in markdown format, and use whatever markdown editor I want.
It allows me to sync any kind of content, not only notes, but also images, jupyter notebooks, whatever I want.
As a MD editor i tend to use Typora, but I might use VS Code, emacs, etc. depending on what i am doing.
I use about ~3 machines in total for work and personal time, and this works seamlessly across all of them. It allows me to keep my work notes separate from my personal notes, and e.g. keep them in our work's git servers.
That's why I use Google Keep --- which is pretty terrible... except it's free, it's everywhere there's a browser, there's an app for it on every phone/tablet, and it works offline when I sometimes don't have internet connection.
Works ok since I write notes in plain text, with some markdown notation (but without actual Markdown support in Keep).
In the past, I've used Notational Velocity and other fancy things, but I find plain text is best. And now I need sync on all devices, so went with Keep.
I use iA writer a lot, but would be happy with any iOS text editor, as I like keeping notes in plain text, and then iCloud Drive does my sync natively. On Mac I use TextEdit or vim.
I make an Inbox note in both to just dump stuff and then move it around. In my Notion I have a "Knowledge Garden" page which is like this hyper linked super wiki page of all my knowledge and as you dig in to the links it gets deeper. (e.g. a toggle for "computers" with bunch of paragraphs talking about [Cloud] and [AWS (Cloud > AWS)] and etc. links)
I should probably just use Obsidian or Roam but things working well on Mobile is important to me and the Notes and Notion apps work exceptionally.
To be honest: if Notes would just let me make non-share links to use to navigate between notes (without all the hacks you can do) I wouldn't really need Notion.
My own setup is pen & paper first, and then into emacs orgmode. The trouble with this is that, well, it's not GREAT on mobile. The bonus with this is that it's the only tool I've yet seen that can give me a corpus of notes that can ALSO contain intermingled complex TODO items.
It seems super dumb that OneNote doesn't do this. You CAN mark something as a ToDo in OneNote, but it's just decoration; it has no semantic meaning. If OneNote had the ability to show a "ToDos" tab that was generated automatically based on the todo-tags in the notebook, it would be a much more powerful tool.
I mean, there are reasons to avoid it (MSFT, proprietary files), but it's a really powerful and well-distributed tool. Lots of folks in corporate jobs probably can't get access to arbitrary things, but OneNote is part of Office.
I basically needed something with great search, easy formatting, and inline image support. And I found it with Ulysses. I thought it was only for people writing long-form works, but it works fantastically for my use case. It ended up being the thing that replaced Evernote for me after 12 years.
It's kind of a bummer for me. I kind of wish about five years ago they would have tapered off all new feature development and switched 100% into maintenance mode with a headcount of less than 40 people.
It got so file-like that I realized I could get almost everything I liked about how it cataloged, say, PDFs by just putting the PDFs in a folder and using regular file system search. Plus the lack of mobile was a problem at the time. Have they fixed that?
WRT note taking, nothing beats a bunch of markdown files that are kept in sync with syncthing. Depending on the OS, I use different tools to edit the markdown files. It doesn't matter which app you use with almost plain text files.
A lot of the newer hotness like Craft, Notion, Obsidian, etc. have a bazillion features but are anything but lean, fast, targeted apps that I want in a notes solution. The Bear folks get tons of pressure to feature it up. While they do need to evolve it (the appearance of stagnation isn't great for an annual subscription app), I hope they keep Bear Bear.
I wanted to try Bear after reading your comment. But, I don’t need yet another subscription software. If it was a one time paid app, I would have thought of it, but subscription just kills it for me. It boggles my mind why I should pay subscription for a note-taking app. Just let me pay for the current set of features and let me use it as is however long I want. If I want to upgrade, I’ll choose to pay then. :-( may be I am getting old.
I frequently use my Linux workstation and access my Apple Notes via the web interface for iCloud. Do you know if there is a web interface for upnote? for all those Linux users?
Bear is priced appropriately. Can't wait for the new version (some anticipate 2030, but I'm optimistic based on the new Panda editor beta).
But other than that, it's the first notes app that really clicks for me. It's very fast (they do lots of things in the local browser, I think), plus I've never been able to work with categories or folders, everytime I try I quickly end up with such a lot of categories that they're not really useful anymore, and I find myself wasting time and energy figuring out the best category for a particular item, and then I still don't find it again. With Roam I don't have to do any of that, as it's just a graph, I just dump things in my Daily Notes, add a bunch of hashtags, and it'll show up on all the hashtag pages and in search. It can do a lot more that I haven't looked into yet (some kind of graph search I think?), but that alone is a total game changer for me.
So I'm using VS Code with the Journal plugin, Markdown notes, and ripgrep for searching. Works fine for me. For more fancy stuff I use DevonThink.
(And I too have never got into org mode, despite several tries)
Instead I'd like to share a little what I've learnt from building a note-taking startup for the past three years with my co-founder – it's easily the hardest thing we've both done.
Much of what you've said is concurrent with the majority of our users. Ubiquity and having your knowledge accessible at any time, on all of your devices is super important – but also the most challenging to create. Build a web app, then all of your users want a faster native desktop app. Build a desktop app, and then users want a fluid accessible web experience... Developing this as a team of two is very difficult; but then hearing how some users use your app every day for a year and can't live without it is hugely rewarding [2]
Note-taking is very personal and so everyone has different expectations on what they'd like. There are so many apps for different personalities and workflows – there's never 'one solution fits all'. Even though Notion has kinda done this, very successfully, one could argue that it is a 'Jack of all trades, master of none' app. That's why it's super important that every note-taking / productivity app has an API, so users can easily build the workflow with the apps that work best for them.
[1]: https://supernotes.app [2]: https://supernotes.app/blog/posts/engineer-rock-climber-note...
As a user, we are all trained to be vigilant about locking ourselves into services/companies because of circumstances. In this IT landscape, users are not just limited to Windows or Mac or iPhone. The base set of expectations have gone up, particularly when there are passable alternatives that are farther than the incumbent in features.
For a note-taking app,
MacOS App Windows App iPhone App Android App web interface (for all others including Linux users)
ought to cover it. I realise how much of work that is. But, that is the playing field when competing against apps that do different subset of the above list.
Staying away from resource hungry electron app will make me happily pay for it (just my opinion).
It adds a bit of friction for note-taking, the need to appropriately tag or locate the note, but I find that doesn't hold me back. If I don't assign a new note in a notebook, it goes into my default, where it sticks out and will quickly get reclassified.
I use org-mode with standard unix search solutions, such as the interactive ugrep. On mobile, I use WorkingCopy (a git frontend), or my web front end (https://notes.lilf.ir/), both of which offer search. I can also use emacs via SSH, but I haven’t done that.
Org-mode is, in the end, just a better markdown with a lot of elisp extensions available. You don’t need to know everything about it to start using it. Worst case scenario, write your intended text in some format pandoc understands (e.g., markdown, html), and see how it is converted to org-mode. The IRC channel #org-mode and https://org-roam.discourse.group/ are also helpful.
It is possible to move from org to Markdown and then do better for pdf, eg via pandoc or some other emacs mode. I've used that in the past, because Markdown mode was even more confusing to me as a non-native emacs user.
That vi never got an org mode before the great uplift to vim says a lot to me. Emacs had more modes than there are things in heaven, Horatio. (than are dreamt of in your philosophy of editors)
I'm continually baffled at how the rest of the world hasn't discovered this, but it could be because I sort of live at the margins of "ultra geek" and "normie."
Local, self-hosted "wiki-like" tool. You write notes, it saves them, supports links and todos and calendars etc. Tons of plugins for math, git, etc etc.
The killer aspect, I think, though. Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately and it's very useful. But because it saves as plain-text (Markdown-ish) with links and pages equalling files and folders, it's always infinitely extensible with Bash or other scripts. For me, it's all the extensibility of org-mode without, I mean, you know.
I am intrigued by the concept and thinking about trying it out, so any input on picking one or the other would be great.
To start, all you need is a template HTML file. No installation, no nothing - it's self-hosted within the HTML! You save changes by clicking the "Save" button, which generates an HTML with changes.
If you really want, you can install a Node.js version which saves changes automatically. But you don't need it to start.
I mostly use Tiddly Wiki to keep notes at work, but I also built this with it: http://romankogan.net/adhd/
What was the issue that you ran into?
Implementation aside, the whole idea of splitting information into minimal parts _and then displaying your whole route_ on one page is a stroke of genius.
The hardest part coming from the outside is grokking where the state (/database) lives: I soon found out that you could save everything in a new .html-file, and also got github sync to work, but I missed the option to use a local node-install. This is something I need to look into before comitting, as much of my workflow is centered around scripts modifying notes.
The only hiccup I've had so far was that I could reference images in the same folder with an [img[relative-path-to-file.jpg]] syntax from the HTML file, but not from the Node.JS version (you need to "import" images first). Wasn't a big deal for me, since I just had to manually update an image or two. Most of my notes in that wiki were just text.
I wish it had a mobile version and a better markdown editor like https://typora.io/
Is this necessary? Would it be acceptable to say "Any hypothetical <person of a certain ethnicity> can open it up and use it immediately"?
You're looking for offense or problematic language where none exists.
People talk about encrypting their vaults and everything else all the time. I've never seen anyone mention the fact that your entire life of notes (whatever they may be) are now completely plain-text (well, markdown) files accessible to anyone with access to your machine. And IT will be well aware that you just dumped 10000 files into a directory, although hopefully they think you're just pulling git clones and don't go further.
So, what, do I not use markdown when at work? Do I not care? Do I stifle my posts in case anyone at work reads them? It just seems like a terrible system for very personal note taking.
Does throwing the stuff in icloud mitigate this? Gdrive? Dropbox? Even encrypting a folder gives admins access to all of my files as soon as I decrypt it. If I use an online app that I have to auth to and the connection is encrypted unless they're doing DPI they're not going to see any of my notes...
This seems like a huge problem with markdown notes.
I think the parent has a valid point in that terminating the encrypted channel at the device level leaves a pretty gaping hole in the not so rare event that people are forced to use employer provided devices at least some of the time.
There's a reverse issue as well though. It may well be the intention of employers (or even a legal requirement) to stop employees from syphoning off company data through some encrypted channel that IT has no control over.
So in some cases the assumption you're making that device = user may be an unavoidable compromise.
Some local note apps store them in dbs that would require auth, etc.
I just think this is a huge pitfall of using markdown notes.
Bear would have been fine if it wasn’t subscription based and allowed me to choose a sync option like dropbox or iCloud sync and let me have local files. FSNotes has years , at this speed, ahead of it. Everything else is just sad Electron - web apps masquerading as native apps. No I don’t like Joplin interface.
Also, among Apple cloud offerings or iCloud suite Notes.app is the only one probably that doesn’t suck disgustingly. But then I don’t trust Apple to keep the sync working fine as they deprecate apps too soon on older OS versions.
Currently not using the actual Simplenote app, instead it is Byword on iOS, nvpy on Linux, ResophNotes on Windows and nvAlt on OS X (and syncing via Dropbox). For many years I used a small app called "notesy" on iOS, but that disapeared completely at some point -- never found out who made it.
Have been thinking about joplin, but I never even tried it since I have a lot of toolchain set up around scripted edits to files (e.g. my timesheet it built by scanning notes, and I clock in and out of projects with a small script triggered from Launchy).
I wouldn't worry about Apple deprecating Notes or its sync -- both have been part of the iOS ecosystem since day one, haven't they?
They made entire iCloud suite and related apps on the two incompatible.
As for emacs/vim I have given up by now :) Not my cup of tea.
In the end I bit the bullet and started using Emacs + Org-Mode/Org-Roam. The flexibility and customization are unparallelled. I use it for to-dos, for random scribbles, for in-depth musings. Categorizing thoughts and linking them together is so much easier than any other software I've used.
The first few months are really tough, and for someone who has never used Vim or other terminal style interfaces before learning shortcuts took a while. But after 6 months, I can't go back.
For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices, supports the iPad pencil, supports OCR and text searching in images, has native apps, and it's free.
One of the key things that kills it for me is that I really need my notetaking tool to be smart. I tag lines as "to-do", and my tool of choice can assemble an agenda of items i need to accomplish in a metadocument, even if they're spanned across multiple files.
OneNote, frustratingly, HAS a way to tag something as a Todo, but it's just decoration. There's no provision for showing you all the Todos in a document in a summarized view or whatever, or at least none I could find.
I'm willing to admit that my need here to comingle todo items and notes is perhaps idiosyncratic, but fortunately it's not TOO niche because it's basically the foundational idea of Orgmode.
(....and that's the story of how Ubermonkey became an emacs user.)
The main advantage is that you can "migrate" all unfinished todos to a new page/day and thus get a clean start each day. This idea comes from bullet journalling.
To get it done I had to dig a bit into ncurses, which turned out more interesting than I thought. For instance, Windows Terminal just gained support for bracketed paste a couple of months ago and my tool supports it.
Long term I would like to add generated views (for instance: last year this time one of your highlights was...) and support recurring tasks to be inserted into the daily log.
[1] https://github.com/coezbek/rodo
Stack: Ruby, Curses, Markdown
I tried emacs and org mode but my vim muscle memory was too strong. I ended up mostly sticking with vim-wiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki I have a very small script that syncs my local wiki(s) with a private GitHub repo. I set them all up to be in markdown.
I use Google Keep for just random stuff I have to jot down but don't really care about organizing.
Honestly though, even plain markdown doesn't work for a lot of types of notes I take. For personal stuff I find myself using Notion a lot. The LaTeX support is pretty great.
At work I've actually kind of fallen in love with Confluence. Even though the editor can be a little cumbersome, the search functionality is great the pages just look really nice. Confluence mobile viewing/editing also works really nice. Now that I'm saying (er, typing) all of this out loud, I almost want to switch to Confluence for personal notes instead of Notion haha.
I think Curio [1] is probably the closest thing to what I want in my head, though one of those HUGE downsides to software like this (and why plaintext is vastly preferred by the HN crowd) is that it's not at all portable or even necessarily decipherable. If Zengobi disappears or I lose access to their software then I'm just out of luck, which has made me hesitant to even try using it and why despite my feelings about it, a great deal of notes I've written are simply in plain text.
If anyone has suggestions for solutions that are like this, I'm all ears.
In my crazy moments, I imagine porting Onenote's files to a linux program for read/writing Onenote pre-Windows 10 local files.
Then I remember there's almost no way I'm up to finishing that task, even if the file format is open, and I never get past the quagmire of 'what IS desktop linux, is it a .deb, a .rpm, must I use C or C++ i wanna use F#, GTK or QT and strange licenses and and'...then i fire back up my Windows pc and jot down my thoughts, embedded images, files, audio and all right in one file, and decide not to start yet another software project.
Onenote is just about irreplaceable for the following use cases, but open source stuff is close.
roam and notion dont even get on my list
1. notes are stored in an offline file
notewiki and wikidpad falls short here.
4. viewable images inline
cherrytree iirc falls short here? or maybe not but it deserves to be on the list ranked better than 'cloud notes'
5. tables
it is below here where joplin falls short afaik
7. ink and touch features
it is below here where xournal++ falls short though they have a ticket open to eventually use a newer file format that would support this use case...and then i plan to switch if at all practical
2. embed files right in the same file so i only have to sync / backup one file, not any linked files all over the disk
3. image / audio embeds that display/play the media inline
Xournal++ [1] I had never heard of. It doesn't seem like it's what I'm personally looking for but what an interesting project and definitely one worth looking at!
If you look at org-mode, it can do a lot of these things (perhaps even all of them on the GUI emacs), while keeping it plain-text. It, of course, needs the necessary elisp to properly display such a rich plain-text file, but things are still pretty accessible in a normal text editor.
Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see org-babel, which is more powerful than jupyter notebooks, but still uses plain text (as opposed to JSON). Databases (as the source of truth) are not a prerequisite to rich, multimedia files.
I would like to point out that this is temporary, for people who don't want to pay at all for note taking https://discuss.logseq.com/t/what-is-logseqs-business-model/...
(And yes, Logseq is great, couldn't agree more)
One reason is for sure is the wide number of requirements that everyone has. But another one seems to be the lack of big money flowing into that area and the low effort in researching it as a result. It's basically all just personal preference and randomness spreading.
It's a little like project management: there is no right or no wrong way to do it, just things that work for some people (or teams) and others that work better for different people (or teams).
Additionally, the frontier between "note taking" and "personal project management", or "todo list" is blurry as they're usually done with same tools.
The main difference is that notetaking being personal, there is no reason to converge and all use the same techniques. By contrast in project management, you have to work more or less the same way with the rest of your team or organization.
I mean it's unsolved in the sense that there is not dominating solution that works as a foundantion for a broader set of features and exchangable workflows. Everyone is constantly reinventing the same solutions, building the same low effort apps. It's all many many little isolated silos.
> It's a little like project management: there is no right or no wrong way to do it
There is many standardization in project-managment, from low to high levels. Though, it's true that on lowest levels there is also similar widespread of silos, because people avoid the complex solutions or simly don't know them.
IIRC, author of the (now closed) Taking Note blog [1] once said that you're actually lucky if you haven't yet decided for a "final" note taking technique by your 40s or even 50s. Unfortunately I can't find the exact quote.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021201608/https://takingnot...
I like Tiago Forte's approach for his PARA system. The system stands alone and may be adapted to any of your tools. This includes note taking, project management, calendar, etc.
The tools for note taking are basically view layers for me.
If you've got any questions, feel free to ask them anytime!
But I've been thinking a lot about tags rather than specific tools lately. I've been hoping to find prior art on how to approach tagging in a clean way. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I'm seen Johnny Decimal[0] and I guess the itch I'm trying to scratch in my brain is to find a description of a way to approach tagging things which addresses the ways they can be hierarchical, and the ways they can be relational. A meta-tagging approach.
It's surprisingly difficult to find.
[0]: johnnydecimal.com
Create text file named `YYYY-MM-DD Title of the Note.txt`. Save to a folder. Write freeform.
I think it's important to understand one concept of note-taking:
You can either spend more time organizing to spend less time retrieving information later. Or you can spend less time organizing and (slightly) more time retrieving information.
If you're starting out or don't refer to older notes that often, it's a better idea to just dump everything with as little friction as possible and use a search tool to find information.
1. Notes
2. Tasks
These are not mutually exclusive. And the fact that they are not mutually exclusive is, in my opinion, one of the major obstacles in being able to develop a really good process for taking notes and then operating on those notes. I frankly don’t care much for any note software out there because the note taking part is generally easy so I just default to Apple notes for jotting down “external brain hard drive” stuff.
I’m actually working on a solution that integrates the notes and the tasks. See, I’m in meetings all the time so I write things like:
1. Client’s main priority is look and feel of website. (This is just a note)
2. Client needs to be done with project Dec 1 (also just a note)
*3. Ryan (me) to set up meeting with Joe and Jane. (This a note but I have to do something here and track it)
I can’t stand taking notes and separately having a todo list. They need to be integrated. You need to be able to take notes and quickly see all the todos that came out of it. You also need to be able to prioritize those todos and filter them as part of your day and executing on those todos. This is what I’m working on and I think it is the silver bullet for me.
If anyone wants to come along my journey or wants to see the prototype, email me (ryeguy_24 at yahoo).
* project
** DONE investigation
...
** TODO implementation [2/3]
DEADLINE: <2021-06-21 Mon>
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 13:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 16:03] => 2:33
CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 10:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 13:04] => 2:34
:END:
do X and Y, be careful about Z
- [X] part 1
- [X] part 2
- [ ] part 3
#+BEGIN: clocktable :scope subtree :maxlevel 2
#+CAPTION: Clock summary at [2021-06-17 Thu 16:06]
| Headline | Time | |
|--------------------------+--------+------|
| *Total time* | *7:40* | |
|--------------------------+--------+------|
| project | 7:40 | |
| \_ investigation | | 2:33 |
| \_ implementation [2/3] | | 5:07 |
#+END:
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Clocking-Work-Time.htmlI haven't seen this functionality satisfactorily implemented anywhere else.
I also have a journal but it is not meant to be reviewed.
Mine is called MindPalace and its special feature is that it is focused on spaced repetition and remembering the notes after they were written.
For me, whenever I would take notes, they would become stale and forgotten. Despite Emerson's quote “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”, I felt that there is a lot more to be gained from remembering them.
For instance, I can remember meetings past and insights gained by following up on meeting notes, or insights I got from reading books. I have almost a 1000 notes in my personal notebook.
BTW, the app is self-hosted and avilable here if anyone is interested: https://github.com/msipos/mind-palace
I'd be curious if anyone else does "spaced repetition note taking" and if anyone can share cool tools for that (my tool is not particularly good)
CLI and local web plain text note‑taking, bookmarking, and archiving with linking, tagging, filtering, search, Git versioning & syncing, Pandoc conversion, + more in a single portable script.
Ecco Pro only has one level of undo but it just does just what is needed and I've never had it loose any data on me. It was last compiled in 1997 but there are ways to tweak it out for modern OS's.
I have automated scripts to convert Ecco outlines into Markdown also have time invoicing outputs etc. As Ecco does not have any rich text or any intrinsic special formatting coding, its easy to use Ecco as your own personal note taking DSL. For Example: .: <title_block> :. [.] - todo (open) [x] - todo (done) [~] - todo (in progress) etc...
IMHO, if you want to do digital note taking in 2021, your best tools are on iPadOS, Android and Windows, where such tools allows handwritten notes and optionally allow to convert those into plain text via OCR.
This or using one of those recent expensive last generation e-ink devices.
It wasn't my intention to have such a big thread. I couldn't anticipate that "2021" in the title would trigger so many people to share their personal thoughts about apps and note taking techniques.
While the article's main focus was about note taking itself, I didn't want to compare existing solutions or even have some ranking. I also didn't have the time to try everything out (like Roam, Obsidian etc.). It's just that I have a strong preference for Tiddlywiki since I've been using it for years (not only for a Zettelkasten and note taking but also as a great UI for visualizing links between objects).
Nevertheless I'll definitely have a look at your recommendations.
It supports hierarchical or tag based notes + to-do lists, in plaintext/markdown/wysiwyg. It supports syncing to several providers, and I sync with my personal webdav server. It has vi/emacs keybindings and supports external editors. It also has a mobile app.
So I use that for digital notes, and a nice leuchtterm grid journal for physical notes. I generally do language studies in the physical journal and use the digital notes more for references.
I am now done with such time wasting nonsense. For several years I have been using Apple Notes (all my Apple devices except Apple Watch, and web browser version on Linux). I bought a simple app that exports all notes to a standard text file format for periodic backups.
EDIT: I just tried running it, and nothing happened. Might be a beta macOS Monterrey problem.
EDIT 2: this just worked for me, needs an iPad, but copies Notes as markdown files that then also show up on my Mac: https://wimpostma.com/blog/how-to-export-and-backup-notes-fr...
Younger digital native generation wants to go all digital? totally ok with me.just we have to learn to agree to disagree.
I feel people spend too much time focusing on how to make/digitalize notes instead of just make notes.
I grew up with pen and paper too, but now I couldn't live without the synchronization and easy sharing enabled by digital. Also I suck at organizing with paper while digitally I can neatly organize everything in folder.
However I do think digital note taking is more painful than hand writing if you want to go beyond plain text, and digital devices can be distracting when I should be focusing so I recently ordered an e-ink tablet that I'm waiting to be delivered. My hope is that it brings flexibility of paper with the organization and sync/sharing functionalities of digital.
I find the side-by-side panes of some just a hilariously stupid waste of space. And the editors that at least do live “previews” feel so janky when editing; watching pound signs appear and disappear as you move off a line, or having text shift around as bold and italics markers come and go.
No, I don’t need all the formatting capabilities of a word processor. But there’s a reason why MD is often pretty-fied: it’s damn ugly and noisy as hell.
I get that people want a “pure” text format for longevity’s sake; but just demand a text export-in MD if you like. But working in MD is crazy making; it’s ugly, distracting, and worst of all, the “raw” form is nothing like documents and formatting we’re all used to, so even if you get used to it, all of the other documents in the world you interact with will still be using real bold, italics, and headers of increasing size.
It saves notes in markdown but provides you with a pretty interface. The goal of this project is to provide a nice interface like notion while keeping the data in users machine in a human readable format.
For your sanity, keep metadata embedded in each file. I keep k:v pairs. One per line. e.g "topic: D3", "subject: scales", "context: Side Project"
Use grep, awk (whatever). Slice, group, dice, join, merge, backup as and how you want. A bash-like shell is the only dependency. Check into git regularly.
Some scripts I use
## group by topic. search for lines that start with "topic". print topic and the file name
grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort
## find all files containing the "topic" tag
grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort
## find all files NOT containing "topic". useful for cleaning up
grep -iL "^topic" *.txt
## find first 10 files not containing "topic" and open each in vi sequentially
for f in $(grep -ilL "^topic" *.txt | head); do vi $f; doneExcept being functional on my locked down work devices and VPN network.
image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WLA_metmuseum_Venus_and_Adonis_by_Peter_Paul_Rubens.jpg
image: screenshot.png"Just use plain text"
Any good offline solution anyone would recommend?
Dynalist for organised notes that work well in list/tree structures
Standard Notes for unorganised, random brain dumps
And good old fashioned pen and paper everywhere else.
The miMind app from the article looks like it may be useful.
Note taking is very important as it helps you retain stuff and helps you learn better in general. I am huge on taking notes whenever I'm learning something new and the strategy that worked for me best was using markdown in vim to take notes and use git to save them.
Last but not least if you are a huge note taker I would suggest using Mdbook(A project powered by Rust) as it allows you to write in markdown and uses full-text search feature which makes it easier when searching for something specific in your notes.
Anyways would love to hear from you guys what tools have worked for you guys when taking notes
It seems like it fulfills a completely different purpose than what's being talked about here.
Most importantly, I could store the Docx file next to my other project resources, and when I am done, I could archive the whole folder away.
In grad school I was for a year part of a small study group. We shared notes, on paper and aloud. It made each of us far, far better at the subject than we could have been on our own. And we were at most 7 people (sometimes only 3).
When developing Hode[1], and when helping develop Semantic Synchrony[2], I imagined some kind of mind-meld utopia where superbeings would not just frolic in but also tend each others' knowledge gardens. (Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ... which I can't remember ...)
Reading nonlinearly is a faster way to accumulate knowledge than reading linearly. That's is why people who really care prefer newspapers to watching the news on TV. And a format that lets lots of people contribute their input can potentially convey more than a format that locks you into reading a single author. Alas, the potential for noise is higher too -- but still, this is why Wikipedia has been so wildly successful.
One might ask, "We've already got Wikipedia; what possible improvement on that do you see?" The thing about Wikipedia is it presents what the author(s) consider(s) settled knowledge. It is a place for record, not a place for debate. A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable.
In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos. I once frolicked for an afternoon through Andy Matuschak's[4], which was quite enjoyable. But it was mostly about ... can you guess? ... how to build a knowledge base.
If someone finds a scheme that scales, I believe it could be much more powerful than what we currently call AI.
[1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode
[2] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/
[3] https://twitter.com/brandontoner
[4] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Knowledge_work_should_accret...
Is it #digitalgarden?
> I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social.
AFAIK note taking apps often have a feature to share notes, if that counts, e.g., Obsidian (view-only), Roam (view and edit), Notion (view, edit, and comment), and so on. With sharing and comments enabled, you can even use Google Docs as your PKB (some people actually do this), given that you don't need fancy features like bi-directional links.
Just like regular blogs, some gardeners also implement a social protocol called Webmention [1]. It's more like a pingback in WordPress than a collaboration tool though.
> A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable.
I would love to see this implemented in existing apps. The current solutions I know either involve 3rd party plugins (e.g., hypothes.is), or you have to self-hosted it yourself (e.g., cactus.chat, based on Matrix protocol).
Another alternative, which I learned from visiting other gardeners [2], is that you can link the edit button in your note to a GitHub PR. It's not friendly to non-developers who visit your garden, but this is better than nothing IMO.
> In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos.
5 months ago there is a Show HN about a decentralized knowledge graph called Agora [3]. The cool thing is, everyone is part of one large knowledge graph, which means nodes (notes) from multiple users can be aggregated around [[topic]]. I hope the project is still alive..
ps. I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.. I only started researching on this topic recently to create my own PKB (I literally published my first note couple days ago [4]).
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
[2] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
These create affordances for loosely-coupled connection-making, I think.
- Mostly Obsidian, with each vault (two right now) indexed within DevonThink.
- Blog posts in iAWriter
- Paper and pen for brainstorming etc
Is there any similar tool for managing notes via Dropbox/self-hosted, I mean with some control over your notes, but similar interface.
Notion I hate is you don't have any control over your data.
Not found everything in a single app yet, please enlighten me if possible to something that fits that I've missed.
It's free. I wouldn't mind paying for something, but this gives you peace of mind that it will stay yours without restrictions, like Google Docs/Sheets/etc. Secondly, it's fast. It's an optimized Windows app that starts in the blink of an eye and uses few system resources. It's visually simple, doens't distract you and has nice smooth animations, it's easier to read/write formatted text with equations than muck around with Markdown/LaTeX. Instant sync, in fact, real-time like Google Docs between devices. The equation support is great once you learn it, it's almost as good as LaTeX. It has pretty decent spell check (although I wish I could set a preferred writing language and not have it deduce from my active keyboard). Good organisation into books, sections and pages. Students get unlimited storage with OneDrive, so no problem there, and trust me, it will be a while until you exhaust your free storage with note taking. Paste images/screen captures, tables. I've never used the pen mode because I don't have any device with a stylus, but I prefer text anyway for it's searchability and typing speed. It takes a little while to really understand the formatting engine, but once you get a feel for the markdown-like underlying invisible structure, it makes it easier to format and move things around. You create your own style and organisation that you can understand and navigate quickly.
It's one of the things keeping me on Windows, sadly. Encryption is absolutely not important for me for lecture note-taking, anything remotly important I'll stick in 1password or on a locally encrypted drive. The day I want to migrate, I'll export it as PDF and archive it in the fairly unlikely event I will want to refer back to something. Over time I've learnt that what's in your head is more important than having a perfectly organised personal wiki of knowledge. I would reconsider it for the long-term, but it's fantastic to use something that feels polished and backed by a large company, like GMail vs settings up your own VPS/email software and client. I'm not a fan of big-tech endorsed products, but I can't seem to keep myself away from this one.
My pet theory is that Onenote can be seen by some HN types as too pedestrian (therefore not worth mentioning) because it is so popular yet is looked down on because it is made by Microsoft. MS is often looked down on by linux-first-everything-is-markdown techies because of their 90s and Windows 10 sins.
The pen mode is pretty good because it does OCR on your writing and indexes it the same as plain text. What I don't like is that it happens asynchronously. When I was testing it, I could search and find notes from yesterday, but not today.