Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them?

For all the time I've spent studying computational science, I'm actually very content to be without technology. For instance: I have my most valuable code on github, and as long as I know it's there I know there's no problem if I lose my physical machine. The IP is worth more than the hardware.

However, I can't say the same about notes. I don't keep my notes or writings anywhere on the "cloud." I don't think there's a solution that exists yet that is up-to-snuff for me, but someone did post a site that was made to be notes-for-long-into-the-future recently, perhaps someone with better remembering can find it.

Currently, it's vaguely structured using the emacs org-mode

And indeed, no database, nothing beats the speed and convenience of search with any random editor search function (let alone emacs occurs command or regexp search).

I have a directory called notes that has a bunch of separate text files. Now I've been slowly adding Word files because often I want to include an annotated screenshot.

I've often wished I could paste images into my source code. My editor would generate something like:

  /*IMG: BASE64 (or some other image encoding) of the image */

[1] https://app.classeur.io

The stickies poke out a bit, which is where I put a little label to aid searching.

edit: more info

Don't ask how I kept notes on the implementation process.

I use Markdown for pretty much everything I write on my laptop, including notes, so printing them is no issue when I need to so.

I usually go down the "one topic, one file" path, and add a table of content on top (I have a command line tool that does that).

I push a portion of my notes to a public GitHub repo, and all of them in a private Git repo. Random example of me learning Ruby syntax: https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/notes/blob/master/21...

Besides my daily lab journal (one org file per month), I have project-specific org files also. This whole notes directory hierarchy is synced everywhere, also to my Android phone where I sometimes use emacs with termux to access these notes.

Searching is done using helm-projectile-ag, which is bound to `C-c p s s`

I then add it to to the main research (https://my.mindnode.com/83qmKgoATj8TyKzprzsPfoirxa2g9WmFGx3x...) mind map.

It's actually really easy to keep it up to date and it is very rewarding knowing that I can share my knowledge with other people.

I also wrote about my approach about mind mapping here (https://medium.com/@NikitaVoloboev/mind-map-everything-d2767...).

http://glenware.wordpress.com

EDIT: There's one exception where I write notes from time to time: design notes for hypothetical software. I still have a few text files from a few years back somewhere in a Git repo, where I hypothesized about how my own programming language might look. Rust has stolen most of my ideas, though. :) (There was actually something vaguely similar to the borrow checker in there.)

I've tried solutions like org-mode but I just find thinking on a keyboard to be entirely inadequate for some reason. I end up doing a lot of free-form notes so that might be one reason why.

I use a command-line tool to fill my local couchDB with notes and then just use the gh-pages hosted site to view them / search them.

https://github.com/DictumMortuum/dictum

Example output pdf for sharing:

http://docdro.id/QPKoLBh

You can also style the notes by simply dropping a <style> some css element { some css thing: some number } <style> at the top of the note, which can make for decent good looking documents (on par with word etc if you are a css wizard). Also it has built in spaced repetition studying thing, which (the code is there, but I'm in the slow process of debugging it since I messed it up when I moved the state to redux, so it will be back in the next few commits).

You can copy/paste images to there, and write with markdown / latex, which is why I wrote it, since I couldn't find anything that did all those things conveniently.