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Ask HN: How do you organize notes?

8 points by papercutter ↗ HN
Hi!

I'm interested in knowing how you organize/store your notes (quotes/code snippets/random notes/todo etc)

I take a lot of notes myself, and I currently store them as text files in the dropbox folder and sync them across my computers and iphone. (iphone notes can't be edited :( ) I think it is the best way as it is simple, easily accessible and open (text files).

Earlier I used OneNote and then Evernote but found out that though they've lots of features, they're pretty slow when it comes to accessing the notes. SimpleNote is tempting but I didnt want to register with yet another service.

So, how do you store your notes?

11 comments

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tsally
Spatially, with post-it notes. It's gonna be a long time before software can replicate that kind of experience. ;)
papercutter
Haha! true, but you can't sync them! ;)
michael_dorfman
I use OneNote, and have my notebooks in my Dropbox folder. I've just downloaded the MobileNoter app for the iPhone, but haven't used it yet, so I don't know how well that will work-- but I haven't had any problem with the OneNote/Dropbox combination yet, and I certainly haven't found it slow to access my notes.
rasikjain
I use TreePad Lite. You can organize notes in one single file and creating multiple nodes. Using it for more than 3 years.
chipsy
Zim ( http://zim-wiki.org ) + Dropbox. It's available on all three major desktop OSes, it starts quickly, it has the hierarchical outlines that I like, and it doesn't flake on me.
adulau
I'm using text files stored by days (notes/2010/09/19) in a git repository. The git repository is replicated between my work and my home system. I have a quick-and-dirty(tm) script that generate automatically the daily file especially with the date and some recursive ASCII art I'm using like [ ] ( ) or TODO/tag list. The script is also adding a template for those "bloody" meetings that you are forced to go to.

For searching back, I'm using git-grep.

I'm sometime using todo.txt (especially for some large projects @work), I described the process some years ago: http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/2008-05-24_My_Git_To-Do_Pr...

I'm still missing a nice/simple way to add the photography of the whiteboard notes into my text notes.

JBerlinsky
I don't go anywhere without my Moleskine.
owg
use what douglas adams used, james fallows uses, and dan brown would use: www.brainstormsw.com