I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years.
When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment.
After trying Evernote, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system for notes. Plain timestamped markdown files linked together. Edited with vim and a few bash scripts, rendered with a custom deployment of Gollum. All in a git repo.
It's... wonderful. Surprisingly easy. Fast. If there's a feature I wish it had, I can write a quick bash script to implement it. If Gollum stops being maintained, I can use whatever the next best markdown renderer is. Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.
It's liberating to be in control. I find myself more eager to write things down. I'm surprised more people don't do the same.
I use a Mosh client for iOS called Blink to connect to a tmux session on my personal server. I do the same thing to edit on desktop, just from a larger screen.
Org mode in a git repo. Easy enough. Don't need a fussy rendering step. Generate a PDF or HTML from org. Regardless of how you do it -- plain text will endure and using git makes it really simple. Markdown can never "go away" and neither can org files. They are inherently readable with cat and the naked eye. If I can't legibly read it with cat / less it will eventually leave me disappointed in some way.
org-mode's format sucks, is only partially supported outside of Emacs, and is on its way out. org-mode is only any good if you're using the full power of it (tasks, agenda, etc), which is buying into a system that's soon going away.
How do you mean “on its way out”? Do you just mean that people searching for new organizational software nowadays are decreasingly likely to choose it?
I've been using pretty much the same features from org-mode now that I used when I first started using it at least 11 years ago (actually, probably using even fewer features now, in the beginning I would export things, but these days I rarely see the need). All my notes still work, and are still plain text, and still don't rely on any "ecosystem", just Emacs and git.
Emacs and org-mode will still be here (along with the armoured cockroaches) long after we're all gone. In fact, I have more faith in the longevity of emacs than I do of Android or iOS, or Evernote/OneNote for that matter.
well, without any extra information, the expected future lifetime of a thing is proportional (equal, actually) to its lifetime so far. therefore, yes, it's perfectly sensible to expect Emacs to last longer :)
It isn't the best, but it is also very simple. I like the actual hierarchy vs Markdown. I can navigate a lot of notes fast in org. Emacs packages last a long time. Emacs API is stable. I am confident it will still work in ten years.
I find this statement odd. "Figured out mobile" in what sense? The laptop solved the mobility issue for Emacs about 2 decades ago. If you mean "runs on Android or iOS", it's likely Emacs will still be around after one or both of those have been consigned to the scrap heap.
Not everyone wants to have to whip out their laptop every time they want to update their orgsniser. I mean I can get that before smartphones become a thing but we're supposed to be making things better and easier over time. Are you seriously trying to justify the lack of progress on that front by saying that a 20 year old technological innovation made things a little easier already? That's like claiming transport is OK with just horses even though the combustion engine exists.
That's more like claiming transport is OK with just tanks when we've got electric vehicles. Tanks are not that efficient and neither are they that fast, and probably will not be allowed in the city - but they can go literally anywhere. And to be fair the guy has a point (a had a point for years beforehand).
Unless you're that networking guy that just massively tries to organise a thousand meetings a day on the go - I believe that a laptop is a better way to use your organiser.
I've had a lecturer at the university who still used a console-based e-mail client. He knew all of the shortcuts by heart - and I am pretty sure it would probably take me a few years to casually learn how to use Outlook/Gmail/etc.. as efficiently (and even then - most of the UI-based applications tend to somehow forget that a keyboard exists at all).
You'll ask me: "but what about mobile?". Well - the guy _never_ replied to your e-mails outside his office hours; but when he did - he gave you a proper, short and an informal answer. And to be fair, he seemed to have a great personal life.
Excuse me - I did write a lot here, but had forgotten to make the primary point: I don't think that the availability of productivity tools on mobile is that crucial for someone using them professionally.
Besides, if you are a true power-user of these tools and had been years before - there's quite a high probability that the newer tools would require quite some time to mature in order to make them a fully-functional alternative.
This is to say that I still find Calendar apps on mobile quite tricky to use as opposed to a fast "point-and-drag" alternative on desktop. I would rather open up a laptop unless I don't have it.
Orgzly (http://www.orgzly.com/) works well enough for me. It can sync to DropBox, so I can put all my .org files into DropBox for replication/backups and have Orgzly read & update them.
It's not full org mode for sure, but it's a solid way to read and do simple changes to my .org files on my phone.
As tools like Evernote and OneNote rose to fame, I've always wondered why do people use such sophisticated note taking apps? People don't seem to be using it for to do list? Maybe because it allows things to be searched? Can someone explain what notes they take or how do they use it?
I still end up using a sophisticated note app (AnyList) for remembering spinach. Real-enough-time syncing with my non-techie significant other's phone is pretty great, the latency is low enough that we divide and conquer at the grocery store.
When I take meeting notes, I end up using OneNote or Google Docs:
- I have a tree of `Who - What` (and the counter-bikeshedding).
- Images of block diagrams sneak in, especially if it's a planning or design meeting.
- Full text search is handy, one-note especially spoiled me by doing OCR
- I like GDocs in particular for the real-enough-time collaboration. It can help quieter people not get steamrolled in conversation, especially if you have a boisterous note-taker to speak up for them :)
I am not even a regular Emacs user (sorry, on the Vim side for now), and I think Orgzly is a great note-taking app. Actually the best one I've tried so far. It's true! :)
Emacs has been with us for well over 30 years and during that time has always had folks claim it was obsolete (no graphical UI, no OOP etc). Emacs will be around for at least another 30 years.
For taking notes you don't need todos or the agenda -- it's heirarchical, fast to search through, and pleasing to the eye (at least, to a similar level to markdown). Aside from that, the syntax is at least as expressive, if not more so because of the extensibility of the language it's written in.
Yes, buying into the todo and agenda systems effectively requires using an external integration script or using emacs all the way through, so that's not all that great. I, too, have yet to figure out how to integrate it into the usual PIM stuff like next loud calendars, etc.
Being active on the Emacs and Org mode mailing lists, and other forums, I can say with confidence that this is not true.
In fact, I am seeing active development in both Emacs and Org; not just bug fixes, but frequent additions of new features.
> org-mode is only any good if you're using the full power of it (tasks, agenda, etc), which is buying into
Org markup is much more powerful than Markdown. So you can be much more productive by using Org just as markup. One example is '#+INCLUDE: "foo.py" :lines-5-10'.. This is tremendously useful if you are writing notes that export to some format or blogging.. you don't need to copy-paste code snippets, Org will fetch them for you. (I have a customization built on top of that.. instead of specifying the line numbers, I can specify the start and end regexp for the lines containing my snippet). Add org-babel to this mix, and you don't even need to run the snippets, and copy the results manually; again Org does it.
I cannot imagine myself writing (and maintaining) that post in Markdown!
On the next update of Nim version, I'll simply run org-babel over the whole file, see git diff to check if anything major has changed, and update the post accordingly.. no copy/pasting ever :)
(I have a customization built on top of that.. instead of specifying the line numbers, I can specify the start and end regexp for the lines containing my snippet).
This is awesome. Is this available anywhere? I'd like to use it.
That, I have edited as shown (except the snippet outputs). That was an example of using Org Babel. Note that the #+RESULT blocks in that file are all auto-generated; none hand-written.
That post does not have any #+INCLUDE because all the code snippets are trivial. I would use #+INCLUDE in posts where I have a code file, and I want to talk about only few lines from that.
I have different examples of #+INCLUDE in my examples file[1] for my Org to Markdown for Hugo exporter -- ox-hugo[2]. There I use the inbuilt INCLUDE feature where I choose to include only the specified Org sub-tree (using the sub-tree CUSTOM_ID). The above referenced post on Nim/Python is converted to Markdown for Hugo using the same exporter.
I tried to do this, but I missed a lot of the convenient features and flexibility of OneNote too much and made my way back to it.
OneNote is proprietary, with a proprietary file format, but at least it's "self hosted" (your notes live in concrete files you control, not in a service), and it's got a lot of nice features that make it a joy to use.
I've been curious about entering into OneNote. I liked the brief experience I had using the Android app. I've been using Google Keep, but I hit a tag limit (50 tags max) that really soured my taste for it since I write about so many different subjects I'd like arbitrary tagging. I need to learn more about the organizing structure OneNote permits.
I like OneNote and have used it for many years, but I have started running into "this section is corrupted" since I tried using the android app. The iOS app is very good, but the android app is buggy, slow, sometimes won't load pages and other times won't start. So I stopped using it, and guess what? No more corrupted pages for over a month.
Be aware that the files are also proprietary and I only know of manual ways to migrate away. I am still looking for another option.
Thank you. Are you aware of any program that exists or is under development that can import the file format or access the data stored in a notebook? I have never found one and did assume the spec was closed.
This. Got me using Quiver with Syncthing pointed at the database (json). So far I like it but the iOS app requires WebDAV if you can't use Dropbox. I might set that up soon.
I once tried to use one note for taking notes for work (1:1s, etc.) on a surface pro 4, and found that unless you go to great lengths, OneNote does everything it can to sync your notes to OneDrive. Even after turning off sync for specific books, those books ended up in OneDrive. In the end, I had to uninstall onedrive, disable syncing globally, and then login to OneDrive to delete the previously synced copies.
So users that care about privacy in their notes beware: it does take a bit of work to turn off all of the cloud functionality.
That sounds like the free version of OneNote that comes with Windows 10. The "full-fat" desktop version that comes with Office ("OneNote 2016") is much more flexible in this regard, and has a more powerful interface.
I have also used markdown files in git for quite some time. When I was running Windows 7, I added my notes folder to the Document library and was able to search my notes from the start menu - that was really great. But then Windows search got broken in Windows 8+ and I started looking for alternatives. I played with OneNote for a while, but missed VIM key bindings, markdown and easy online access to my notes (OneNote online editor is quite heavy). About two months ago I switched to a private Wordpress and till now I am really happy: full-text search works like a charm, I can tag my notes, use markdown (even with Latex expressions) and for cheat sheets (or field notes) I use pages.
For those who want a very similar setup but don't mind the risk of a vim-plugin going unmaintained, I can highly recommend vimwiki. Its a very simple markdown based wiki all within vim. A few features that I find particularly good:
- a 'diary' function that allows you to make a page per day. Vimwiki then produces an index page of all diary entries.
- you can go to your wiki anytime from within vim with a command ( <leader>ww )
- vimwiki can generate html files from yout wiki files
- the coolest thing in my opinon: since the whole thing is just markdown, I actually just use vimwiki as my personal website hosted on github pages. You just have to add some Jekyll related files and github can process everything else as is.
A small note on obselescence: I actually don't even know if vimwiki is in active development anymore. Haven't bothered updating it in maybe 4 years and it works fine. So maybe its fine to not roll your own.
+1 for vimwiki. I use it for everything, from taking notes and todo lists to writing blogposts. The wiki format just works so well with my brain.
My favourite features are nested syntax (highlighting for codeblocks in any language vim has highlighting for)
>since the whole thing is just markdown
I was going to write a complaint about how vimwiki uses its own markup language instead of Markdown, but I looked in the help file to be sure and now I you can set it to use Markdown or even Mediawiki instead (vimwiki-option-syntax). I like it even more now!
I ended up with dropbox paper for now. It has quite a few useful capabilities, markdown syntax, ... and of course dropbox integration.
On PCs you use the quite good web client and for iOS there's apps. Of all the options I found it the best for now even though it is still a compromise.
Command line isn't really necessary. I have a similar setup (gollum wiki on Dropbox) and I only need a text editor to edit files, and there's tons of mobile text editors that hook up with Dropbox.
I use Onenote a lot for handwritten notes and also web clipping, and even for typing its fine and has been around long enough that i don't really worry about it going anywhere. Since it's included in the Office365 subscription and on all major platforms, i prefer it to Evernote. It isn't perfect, but for a complex tool like this it is immensely useful.
Any chance you have a blog post referencing more of this?
I have gone the way of markdown + git + vim a few years ago but your model seems a bit more hierarchical and organized.
Self hosted Dokuwiki has been my note taking tool of choice, usable on multiple devices, easy to backup, easy to export notes but markdown sounds good.
Is it possible to share notes or make notes public?
One of the biggest use cases of Evernote for me – OCR notes with search. All my important checks, slips and papers are going there. It's seems that Laverna doesn't have this feature. So it's not an alternative for me.
This came up on Product Hunt today as well
>> Turtl lets you take notes, bookmark websites, and store documents for sensitive projects. From sharing passwords with your coworkers to tracking research on an article you're writing, Turtl keeps it all safe from everyone but you and those you share with. <
https://turtlapp.com/download/
Incidentally, I am building https://pagedash.com to clip web pages more accurately, exactly as you saw it (via a browser extension)! Hope this helps someone.
Is it similar to scrapbook on Firefox? (Scrapbook was one of the winners of the extension competions when Firefox introduces extensions IIRC. Still worked last I tried.)
Thanks for pointing this out. I'll need to check out what Scrapbook is all about :)
Edit: Okay, looks similar. Except that PageDash lives on the cloud. And hopefully with that comes multi-device support in the future. And also hopefully a much better UI.
Your sign up JS is broken - I just tried to enter my email and got a "TypeError: undefined has no properties". Looks like a cool project, though - I've wanted something like that for a while :-)
I am constantly looking for a good notes app. I have been a paying Evernote user for years and I really like it. The only problem is the formatting. I take a lot of pride in formatting my notes and like it to look a certain way depending on the content. Markdown is definitely the way I want to go which Evernote has promised in the past but still hasn't delivered. That said note of the buttons on Laverna seem to work on my Mac. Can't sign into DropBox and can't create a notebook. Oh well.
Looks really nice, but I need my notes app to run on Windows for work. That’s one reason I use Evernote. It is so close for me, but falls short with note creation.
I'm also a heavy Evernote user, but have been exasperated by their Rich Text implementation for input.
I currently use Marxico on both the Mac and PC. Yearly subscription, but it's modest. I journal everything as I develop, and it automatically syncs the output to Evernote.
I start out by adding metadata like @(notebook)[tag1,tag2] so that my notes find their way into the right part of my Evernote structure.
The editor is based on Ace I think, so Vim keys work well. I can paste in screenshots I take, and even embed animated gifs of things happening at runtime or in my IDE.
Markdown support is great, which is good because I tend to structure thoughts in nested lists a lot. This has replaced the need for mindmaps for me, and is a lot quicker to outline thoughts, plans and tasks. Inline source code blocks look great.
I struggled for a while to put up with Evernote Rich Text, and tried Spacemacs for a month or two with Org mode. Hated configuring it, mostly, although I do miss the ability to fold selected parts of my list hierarchies. Org mode did that pretty well.
Marxico is the most comfortable solution I've found so far - at least for a Vim user. The tradeoffs are the usual closed source data liberation issue ones, but I'm looking into ways of getting things out of Evernote in bulk for backup.
Using the online editor on Android with Firefox is essentially unusable. It feels almost like Laverna is trying to do autocorrect at the same time as my keyboard. Characters appear and disappear as I type which makes for a really confusing UX.
I'm working on that too. Paper is king. Unfortunately my paper king has multiple fiefdoms strewn throughout my house and office. Sadly his territory span not just space, but time. There are unsearchable notes in books that cover years. I need to move the kingdom into the digital age.
I also love paper (and notebooks and pens) but am in the same situation. The new iPad Pro + Pencil look like a real alternative. I like the idea of having all my notes stored digitally especially if I can get OCR to work reasonably well.
I found google keep to be the best for small notes without too much categorization, and google spreadsheet to be the best for larger scoped note taking due to the tabs.
yes also no history in google keep so i keep it for quick notes, it's really for quick notes and not more than that, like i'm in a meeting so i do very quick summaries there.
but permanent notes instead of any onenote, tomnote whatever I just use google spreadsheet, I find it very useful, because I like have a single spreadsheet for one big topic (like one spreadsheet for the company I work at) and then I separate for subsheets for subtopics, I find this method to be perfect!
Apart from having sync capability (via Dropbox) this in almost no way shape or form replicates the current capabilities of Evernote. A more accurate title would be "Laverna: An open source note-taking application." This of course will not generate many clicks, since there are dozens of things like this, many of them better-looking and more mature.
Simplenote would be the canonical example.
BoostNote, which I think was an earlier HN item.
QOwnNotes, if you like ownCloud.
Turtl, if you like eliding the silent 'e'
Honorable Mention
Notational Velocity (Mac-only)
I moved to Quiver from Evernote, also Mac-only. The solo dev moved to Berlin a little over a year ago, and I would describe the app as minimally supported at this point.
I've been at this a long time, and have run the gamut from Evernote to tagged text files managed in Emacs with some custom macros, long before org-mode was even a gleam in the eye of Carsten Dominik. So I've seen them all, and as noted by many other folks, the rules boil down to one - must have a portable base storage format (preferably Plain Old Text) and/or solid import and export to some such portable storage format.
If it's commercial software, pricing will get stupid and/or bug-ridden features that add bloat and that I don't want are added to justify said pricing; the product/company is sold to someone who will do the above; the product/company dies. If it's open source, more or less the same, with the additional stage of becoming closed/proprietary/commercial, which then reduces to the first case. I kind of assume at this point that I will be moving to a different platform every 4 years or so.
There are so many note taking apps and yet I still can't find one I like.
My requirements are simple:
- Markdown
- cross platform with sync
- tags
I have settled on SimpleNote for now, but I'm not completely happy. It's mac app is low quality and doesn't have markdown, It's open source but they ignore most of the issues.
Bear Notes looks cool but wasn't cross platform.
I am still looking. If this thing had phone apps (I'm on iPhone) I'd give it a go.
I will happily give money to software I like. SimpleNote is currently a compromise which I'm not completely happy with so I don't feel the need to donate. If it answered all my needs, or at least didn't ignore it's users, I'd buy it.
It does look nice, but Apple world only... I'm currently with mac and iPhone, but as a principle I insist that my note taking app will be as cross platform as possible. This is not for practical reason, but for trust reasons. I don't think that every app should be completely cross platform, but notes, at least for me, are essential for the long time, and I don't know on which ecosystem I'll be a few years from now. So picking a platform that at least tries to be cross platform today is the best thing I can do to ensure it'll work for the long run.
Try the Mac beta app. If you go to simplenote.com/blog or whatever, there's a download link. The beta Mac app is the same as Windows and Linux versions (I.e. Built with Electron) and supports markdown preview.
If you are looking for cross-platform like MacOS, iOS, Android (I am not sure about Windows) then I recommend https://ia.net/writer/
It has apps for iOS and Android and app for MacOS.
It is very fast (at least this is my experience) and supports sync with iCloud and Dropbox and Google Drive. I use only iClod and it works amazingly.
I am using it for over 3 years I think.
It just supports Markdown simple. You can choose your extension .md or .txt - depending on what you want to do next with your files.
I've been using Notion (https://www.notion.so) for a while and have nothing but good things to say.
- It's incredibly flexible. You can model Trello Task Boards in the same interface as writing or making reference notes.
- They've got a great desktop client and everything syncs offline.
- Latex Support
- Programmable Templates
- Plus there seems to be pretty neat people behind it
I switched to it 8 months ago or so and haven't really looked back.
177 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadWhen you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment.
After trying Evernote, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system for notes. Plain timestamped markdown files linked together. Edited with vim and a few bash scripts, rendered with a custom deployment of Gollum. All in a git repo.
It's... wonderful. Surprisingly easy. Fast. If there's a feature I wish it had, I can write a quick bash script to implement it. If Gollum stops being maintained, I can use whatever the next best markdown renderer is. Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.
It's liberating to be in control. I find myself more eager to write things down. I'm surprised more people don't do the same.
Edit: here's what my system looks like https://imgur.com/a/nGplj
I use a Mosh client for iOS called Blink to connect to a tmux session on my personal server. I do the same thing to edit on desktop, just from a larger screen.
It's been a decade and they still haven't figured out mobile.
Unless you're that networking guy that just massively tries to organise a thousand meetings a day on the go - I believe that a laptop is a better way to use your organiser.
I've had a lecturer at the university who still used a console-based e-mail client. He knew all of the shortcuts by heart - and I am pretty sure it would probably take me a few years to casually learn how to use Outlook/Gmail/etc.. as efficiently (and even then - most of the UI-based applications tend to somehow forget that a keyboard exists at all).
You'll ask me: "but what about mobile?". Well - the guy _never_ replied to your e-mails outside his office hours; but when he did - he gave you a proper, short and an informal answer. And to be fair, he seemed to have a great personal life.
Besides, if you are a true power-user of these tools and had been years before - there's quite a high probability that the newer tools would require quite some time to mature in order to make them a fully-functional alternative.
This is to say that I still find Calendar apps on mobile quite tricky to use as opposed to a fast "point-and-drag" alternative on desktop. I would rather open up a laptop unless I don't have it.
That may be true, but it does nothing for people who need to take notes using their phone now.
It's not full org mode for sure, but it's a solid way to read and do simple changes to my .org files on my phone.
When I take meeting notes, I end up using OneNote or Google Docs:
- I have a tree of `Who - What` (and the counter-bikeshedding).
- Images of block diagrams sneak in, especially if it's a planning or design meeting.
- Full text search is handy, one-note especially spoiled me by doing OCR
- I like GDocs in particular for the real-enough-time collaboration. It can help quieter people not get steamrolled in conversation, especially if you have a boisterous note-taker to speak up for them :)
Yes, buying into the todo and agenda systems effectively requires using an external integration script or using emacs all the way through, so that's not all that great. I, too, have yet to figure out how to integrate it into the usual PIM stuff like next loud calendars, etc.
Has anyone else managed to figure this bit out?
Being active on the Emacs and Org mode mailing lists, and other forums, I can say with confidence that this is not true.
In fact, I am seeing active development in both Emacs and Org; not just bug fixes, but frequent additions of new features.
> org-mode is only any good if you're using the full power of it (tasks, agenda, etc), which is buying into
Org markup is much more powerful than Markdown. So you can be much more productive by using Org just as markup. One example is '#+INCLUDE: "foo.py" :lines-5-10'.. This is tremendously useful if you are writing notes that export to some format or blogging.. you don't need to copy-paste code snippets, Org will fetch them for you. (I have a customization built on top of that.. instead of specifying the line numbers, I can specify the start and end regexp for the lines containing my snippet). Add org-babel to this mix, and you don't even need to run the snippets, and copy the results manually; again Org does it.
I recently blogged about comparing string related functions between Python and Nim: https://scripter.co/notes/string-functions-nim-vs-python/
I cannot imagine myself writing (and maintaining) that post in Markdown!
On the next update of Nim version, I'll simply run org-babel over the whole file, see git diff to check if anything major has changed, and update the post accordingly.. no copy/pasting ever :)
> a system that's soon going away.
Again, really? What made you think that?
This is awesome. Is this available anywhere? I'd like to use it.
Convincing!
I am curious about the org-source you used for that article, is it public?
- source of that specific post in raw org [1] - site source [2]
[1]: https://gitlab.com/kaushalmodi/kaushalmodi.gitlab.io/raw/mas...
[2]: https://gitlab.com/kaushalmodi/kaushalmodi.gitlab.io
(I wish HN supported some markup :P)
That post does not have any #+INCLUDE because all the code snippets are trivial. I would use #+INCLUDE in posts where I have a code file, and I want to talk about only few lines from that.
I have different examples of #+INCLUDE in my examples file[1] for my Org to Markdown for Hugo exporter -- ox-hugo[2]. There I use the inbuilt INCLUDE feature where I choose to include only the specified Org sub-tree (using the sub-tree CUSTOM_ID). The above referenced post on Nim/Python is converted to Markdown for Hugo using the same exporter.
[1]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/master... [2]: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo
I don't think i could ever go back to a notes-as-a-service system again.
OneNote is proprietary, with a proprietary file format, but at least it's "self hosted" (your notes live in concrete files you control, not in a service), and it's got a lot of nice features that make it a joy to use.
Be aware that the files are also proprietary and I only know of manual ways to migrate away. I am still looking for another option.
Actually the file format specification for OneNote [MS-ONE] is open: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.1...
So users that care about privacy in their notes beware: it does take a bit of work to turn off all of the cloud functionality.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-s-the-differen...
That said, the OneDrive integration is something I like about it; my notes aren't very useful to me unless they're cloud-synced.
[0] https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
- a 'diary' function that allows you to make a page per day. Vimwiki then produces an index page of all diary entries.
- you can go to your wiki anytime from within vim with a command ( <leader>ww )
- vimwiki can generate html files from yout wiki files
- the coolest thing in my opinon: since the whole thing is just markdown, I actually just use vimwiki as my personal website hosted on github pages. You just have to add some Jekyll related files and github can process everything else as is.
A small note on obselescence: I actually don't even know if vimwiki is in active development anymore. Haven't bothered updating it in maybe 4 years and it works fine. So maybe its fine to not roll your own.
My favourite features are nested syntax (highlighting for codeblocks in any language vim has highlighting for)
>since the whole thing is just markdown
I was going to write a complaint about how vimwiki uses its own markup language instead of Markdown, but I looked in the help file to be sure and now I you can set it to use Markdown or even Mediawiki instead (vimwiki-option-syntax). I like it even more now!
I also use it in conjunction with gollum, which works nicely (gives search, live editing, etc).
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/notebooks-all-your-documents...
Just wanted to say that the nodes app in nextcloud is very handy too!
Actually, if Nextcloud could embed this Laverna somehow... that would be awesome.
Self hosted Dokuwiki has been my note taking tool of choice, usable on multiple devices, easy to backup, easy to export notes but markdown sounds good.
Is it possible to share notes or make notes public?
OneNote is the only one that I think that has this as well.
I've lost so much data from Evernote's atrocious conflict resolution that it's my central concern. I don't see any mention of that here.
Use case: edit notes on a plane on laptop, edit notes on phone after landing, sometime later use laptop again and zap.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gzmd36qe58h0wnw/Screenshot%202017-...
Incidentally, I am building https://pagedash.com to clip web pages more accurately, exactly as you saw it (via a browser extension)! Hope this helps someone.
Edit: Okay, looks similar. Except that PageDash lives on the cloud. And hopefully with that comes multi-device support in the future. And also hopefully a much better UI.
(oh, and I'm using FF 55 on Linux)
Update: Fixed the FF bug. Many thanks for taking the time to report! :)
I currently use Marxico on both the Mac and PC. Yearly subscription, but it's modest. I journal everything as I develop, and it automatically syncs the output to Evernote.
I start out by adding metadata like @(notebook)[tag1,tag2] so that my notes find their way into the right part of my Evernote structure.
The editor is based on Ace I think, so Vim keys work well. I can paste in screenshots I take, and even embed animated gifs of things happening at runtime or in my IDE.
Markdown support is great, which is good because I tend to structure thoughts in nested lists a lot. This has replaced the need for mindmaps for me, and is a lot quicker to outline thoughts, plans and tasks. Inline source code blocks look great.
I struggled for a while to put up with Evernote Rich Text, and tried Spacemacs for a month or two with Org mode. Hated configuring it, mostly, although I do miss the ability to fold selected parts of my list hierarchies. Org mode did that pretty well.
Marxico is the most comfortable solution I've found so far - at least for a Vim user. The tradeoffs are the usual closed source data liberation issue ones, but I'm looking into ways of getting things out of Evernote in bulk for backup.
Screenshot: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5549677/29492466-0...
but permanent notes instead of any onenote, tomnote whatever I just use google spreadsheet, I find it very useful, because I like have a single spreadsheet for one big topic (like one spreadsheet for the company I work at) and then I separate for subsheets for subtopics, I find this method to be perfect!
subsheets could be:
1. useful urls 2. useful commands 3. administration 4. high level overview
etc.
Honorable Mention Notational Velocity (Mac-only)
I moved to Quiver from Evernote, also Mac-only. The solo dev moved to Berlin a little over a year ago, and I would describe the app as minimally supported at this point.
I've been at this a long time, and have run the gamut from Evernote to tagged text files managed in Emacs with some custom macros, long before org-mode was even a gleam in the eye of Carsten Dominik. So I've seen them all, and as noted by many other folks, the rules boil down to one - must have a portable base storage format (preferably Plain Old Text) and/or solid import and export to some such portable storage format.
If it's commercial software, pricing will get stupid and/or bug-ridden features that add bloat and that I don't want are added to justify said pricing; the product/company is sold to someone who will do the above; the product/company dies. If it's open source, more or less the same, with the additional stage of becoming closed/proprietary/commercial, which then reduces to the first case. I kind of assume at this point that I will be moving to a different platform every 4 years or so.
- Markdown - cross platform with sync - tags
I have settled on SimpleNote for now, but I'm not completely happy. It's mac app is low quality and doesn't have markdown, It's open source but they ignore most of the issues. Bear Notes looks cool but wasn't cross platform.
I am still looking. If this thing had phone apps (I'm on iPhone) I'd give it a go.
Unfortunately the client is proprietary, but the note format is open. 3rd party clients also exist, like an Android app.
[1] http://happenapps.com/
I am using it for over 3 years I think. It just supports Markdown simple. You can choose your extension .md or .txt - depending on what you want to do next with your files.
- It's incredibly flexible. You can model Trello Task Boards in the same interface as writing or making reference notes. - They've got a great desktop client and everything syncs offline. - Latex Support - Programmable Templates - Plus there seems to be pretty neat people behind it
I switched to it 8 months ago or so and haven't really looked back.
I'd probably start using it right now if it was already available for Android.