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Comment by SpaghettiX | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't think writing text is useful now that we have keyboards. It's probably useful for math equations, diagrams/sketches (excalidraw), but I'm tempted to practice typing math equations (e.g. mathjax) and drawing with excalidraw. But reMarkable is black and white, so it doesn't suit this either.

For a few years I used OneNote + Surface Pro to take handwritten notes, equations and drawings. It was a great writing experience. Then I wanted to share them with others. Or migrate them from One Note into something else. Or just export to PDF. I'll summarize that nothing worked well. I tried other apps too. An app that constraints your drawing to paper (A4) works better since it can export to PDF nicely. But the text is not searchable and so most people won't find it. That's why we don't see many hand written notes shared online?

Im curious, what domain or job would you find this useful?

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My experience is that handwriting is qualitatively different experience from typing, and has different cognitive effects (I think there is actually a fair bit of research corroborating this idea). I can type as fast as someone can speak, so I can create a perfect record of e.g. a meeting, but as I do so I'm on "autopilot" -- basically acting as a passive scribe, transmitting from voice to text without thinking about it at all. With handwriting, the limitations of the medium (speed, etc.) force one into an active synthesis of the material, which helps a lot with retention. A handwritten note becomes something I remember, and often don't even need as a note, because I remember it so well; something I jot down in my text editor becomes fodder for searches later on. It's just a different beast.

I find handwriting a lot better than keyboards. The physical act of writing helps me remember stuff better than typing it, so it's especially useful during notetaking sessions. I also like reading pdfs on my Quaderno (another eink reader, A4 size so bigger than a remarkable), and it also allows me to easily annotate them as well. It's much better than an ereader for pdf due to size, and much less harsh on the eyes than, say, an iPad. And everything can be transferred via usb with their app.

But, I just disagree with the first premise and that's why I find mine useful, though still not as useful as actual paper which is easier to flip through, etc.

Scribbling, doodling, mind mapping, organising your tasks, brainstorming ideas, taking study notes. It's lighter than a laptop and feels more like a paper notepad than a tablet. The paper format gives more freedom, is less structured than an app.

I used to handwrite my game design journal (should probably get back into that again, I got out of the habit), in part because I could illustrate game concepts with diagrams wherever it made sense and include them write there as I was writing the journal. It took a lot longer to write it by hand, and was a pain to transcribe it after the fact to digital notes, though (I still haven't fully transcribed all 200k+ words I wrote during that several year time period), but the handwritten journals feel like they have more personality to them than my transcriptions.

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