Ask HN: What do you use to take notes?
I use Notational Velocity for my notes and I love the ease of use but I'd like something that will allow me to share a note with a client and also has code highlighting. And image uploads. I want to be able to upload screenshots. I looked around but can't find anything that's a mix of Evernote, Wunderlist and GitHub Gists. What do you HN people recommend?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadFor the rest I use Google Keep which I've found to be quite handy. Nice UI and it's available everywhere. I've already sold my soul to Google so why not let them get my notes as well.
I've thought about maybe a Surface would be nice for that, but haven't really tried it.
I think you'll have best luck with multiple tools like you're doing now.
That said,, if I must take notes (for action items during a meeting, etc.) I'll use notion
You can't make this shit up, it's to good.
Surface / pen only had the edge in that you can mark up a doc and send it to someone a lot faster than printing, marking and scanning
However, I'm often faster at writing with a keyboard, and I use onenote in text only mode every day
My process is a good notebook and fountain pen for deep thinking, and org mode for planning and research.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Boogie-Board-9-7-Inch-eWriter-ST10200...
Git + Vimwiki setup:
https://jarvistmoorefrost.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/snippet-c...
Long term notes? Evernote - though I'm not happy with them. Just haven't found a replacement yet.
I still use Evernote for quick storage and access of images, pdfs and long-form notes as the search is great. However, their tag/notebook organisation system has annoying redundencies and is clunky in places. I would love to bin it but can't find a suitable alternative. Bear is promising but not quite there. Apple notes doesn't allow linking between notes.
It's "Workflowy that hasn't stalled out"
It makes it really easy to tag, organize, share and with the archive feature you can get todo list functionality.
In the worst case scenario you could export all of your notes to an easy to read format and start importing it to a new system.
I know it shouldn't affect me know as I could probably transfer notes then, but it still bothers me..
So in the end I wrote my own static wiki generator (QuickWiki: https://github.com/VictorBjelkholm/quickwiki). It basically takes a folder full of markdown files, automatic links to other pages and generates a static website (that looks something like this: https://victorbjelkholm.github.io/quickwiki/home/ )
Evernote it is not: The sharing story is pretty BYOB, in that what you get out is an HTML (or whatever other format) document, and sharing it, whether readonly or not, is on you. There's document publishing functionality, but it requires some setup and an upstream host that can take files via FTP/SFTP/etc. Same goes for syncing, if that's something you want; Dropbox works for me, and there are many alternatives.
Your use case sounds like it would require some tooling around org-mode to achieve. If you want something that does what you need straight out of the box, it probably won't make you happy. But you asked what we use to take notes, and for me that's org-mode; the things it does well are many, some of them unique in my experience, and that makes it worth my while to invest effort in adding the occasional capability I want which doesn't exist by default.
(And for meetings where people are touchy about laptops, or realtime capture on a call, I have a clipboard and a paper tablet. But it's ephemeral; anything needing kept goes straight into an org file at the earliest opportunity.)
Long term Org mode needs a rethink to more fully realized programming + writing.
Short term it needs some work on document sharing, mobile editing, all that.
I use Org mode for large docs, google docs for quick notes, google sheets for TODOs, pad/pen google photos for quick notes and recording of those notes.
This is a mess really.
It's both, and not limited to Python. What mix of capabilities you use in a given document is up to you.
I don't think you'll find a notes application that has code highlighting, but perhaps I'm wrong...
- simple to do lists
- create notes with the phone's camera (I usually do this when taking a photo of a whiteboard)
- audio recording and transcribing: I can just say my note and Google Keep will make a text out of it with an attached audio recording
- sharing: this makes my life sooo much easier. I have one note taking app I can use for business, for sharing shopping lists with my wife, house chores with my kids, etc. When Google Keep came out first it was way too simple, but I can hardly imagine my life these days without it.
ZW is speedy, portable, and extendable.
I've tried for very long to find a good electronic solution. Up to and including writing my own wiki with various extensions customised to my diting style, and hunting around for every note taking app under the sun.
The problem, I find, is that nothing beats the flexibility of being able to take out multiple sheets of paper and move them around, annotate them, put them back in. It creates a flexibility in workflow no tool I've tried have managed to match.
The physical presence of the paper also makes it much easier to avoid forgetting a page exists.
I'm not happy with it, but I keep coming back to it after each desperate attempt at making something else work better.
The next slide after the 43 folders is "sync to paper", that's the bit I recall
Pens are an addicting technology. Top 5 list of various pens. https://www.penaddict.com/top-5-pens/ I also buy a cool pencil case (http://www.jetpens.com/Kokuyo-Pencil-Cases/ct/2929)
My only difference is when I was in graduate student I used OneNote with 2003 Tablet PC (Hand writing with the pen) and a external microphone. The was the single greatest tool ever created for a student. The audio was synced with your hand written notes or typed notes. I then had the college purchase a license for every student at my University I worked at OneNote and take a 1 hour class with me and a had microphones available at the Book Store. No one ever used the microphone. I got the highest review marks from students for all our Freshmen prep classes and a ton of interaction and people stopping at my office to get help but they all dropped it for one reason or another. If only computers built in a classroom position microphone in the lid of a laptop.
http://www.jetpens.com/Maruman-Mnemosyne-N163-Memo-Notepad-W...
I also found that A5 grid paper on Amazon for a little cheaper[1]. But I'm curious how well the binding holds up. Because if it holds well it'd be a great switch for me.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Midori-MD-Notebook-Grid-Paper/dp/B009...
More ephemeral things like todo lists, I only scan if I have a reason to want to keept it.
I don't think I'm doing a good job of explaining this, I'll see if I can find an example of this online and link it.
Edit: I did a quick google search and found an example that's similar to what I'm doing. This works well for me: http://lifehacker.com/mark-page-line-edges-to-organize-your-...
It's an infinite blank space of text in 2D. Also see the beta: https://beta.walloftext.co
Day-to-day sketches and TODO's and little note lists: I keep a spiral note book next to my keyboard. I'm a leftie so it's upside down. I use the blue Pilot Drawing pens in various thicknesses. They dry instantly, so no ink smudges. Nice.
In addition to these I keep a day-to-day diary in .txt documents on my computer, I just open them in Sublime text or vim and make a new one every month. I try to just write four or five lines about what I've done every day as well as what I need to do tomorrow.
You can't beat computers for quick searching and Onenote is both "GUI" enough to be friendly to people I have to share with and also does all those other things you mention. (Plus a lot of other cool stuff.)
I also use Sublime/vim in a similar way you mention, although I tend to use that as "RAM" in the sense that I don't save my snippets -- if they're not important enough to document elsewhere then if something really bad were to happen where (at least in Sublime) if a non-saved tab didn't show up at start automatically "oh well". (I've never had that happen though.)
Where I'm failing lately is any kind of physical pen/paper note taking since just the feel of that is great so I've added that into my TODO's of 2017. :)
Bullet journal is also worth checking,however I don't feel like we love each other.
I love the idea of having different notebooks, being able to easily merge text, code, mathematics and images into one note, and make 'cookbooks' out of them.
Someone make it for Windows please.
Did have a native app (Snippets?) but I wasn't happy with it.
http://www.gistboxapp.com/
I might at some point, in which case I'll look up your comment, but the main reason I'm holding off is that it's quite a bit of work in a market that strikes me as rather oversaturated...
Then again sometimes the best reason to start a project is to scratch an itch, and always thinking in terms of 'useful' is a surefire way to suck all the fun out of life. Hmm...
We're a different kind of digital nomad: someone who never settles on one device, OS, or even form factor.