Ask HN: How do you electronically store your notes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you electronically store your notes?

5 pointsnsomaru12 comments

Hi HN,

I am about to embark on a project entering text from handwritten class notes into the computer.

The data is structured around verses of scriptural literature which vary in format but generally forming hierarchical structures down to the atomic 'mantra/verse'.

I would like this project to remain flexible but I have a somewhat vision of annotating (and linking, wiki style) text to shown relevance with other sources of culture (like excerpts from a book).

Right now, a focus on data entry is important. What choices can be made now to maintain flexibility later? Latex? XML? SQL database?

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If you want to "just start, already" but have an open format, somebody somewhere recently mentioned the locally installed wiki-ish note database and editor Zim. As I recall, they do/did tech support and started using is as a simple, local way to maintain a personal database of references and notes-to-self.

I was curious and put it on one old machine I've been using a fair amount, recently. So far, I like it, although I haven't gone very deep into its features (not that the feature set is necessarily that deep, anyway).

http://zim-wiki.org/

P.S. Just saw your "already invested in Vim" comment reply, so maybe you are looking for something a bit more technical and less "integrated" than this.

org-mode in emacs. It can do hyperlinks, tables, structure, export to various formats, etc. Its very own little kitchen sink within the kitchen sink :-)

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I've invested myself in vim as it stands, but will research along the lines of your recommendation.

Look up evil-mode. It puts vim keybindings into emacs, and it works nicely alongside org-mode. You can edit and navigate vim-style but you still get all the org-mode commands (collapse/uncollapse headers with TAB, put in timestamps with C-u C-c . RETURN, etc.)

Then perhaps VimWiki https://code.google.com/p/vimwiki/

Private GitHub gists are pretty handy. Version controlled, your choice of language, use them as datastores (write your own client) or something more like markdown interlinked documents, etc...

An actual repo would have even more features, like: https://github.com/blog/1601-see-your-csvs

Thanks, this seems like a good integration.

Any suggestions regarding a specific choice of data format? Latex? Markdown? Etc.

I use a combo of Evernote and OneNote (Windows). I'd think either would be fine in your case. Both have folders/hierarchies that allow for quick nav/search.

Hi,

I am running Linux mint at the moment so this is unfortunately not really an option. Besides, these programs don't really lend for data malleability, if you will.

A gollum wiki. https://github.com/gollum/gollum/wiki

You're on Linux, so with your given parameters, it sounds like a local install of MediaWiki or similar software would be your best bet.

I use Trello, great API, free plan, mobile iOS and Android clients that work, multiple users.

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