Ask HN: What is a notetaking app? What is its utility?

One of the well-known note taking apps is Evernote. You can look at their site to see what it does:

https://evernote.com

Sublime 3, Atom or even Visual Studio code are great. They offer huge amounts of features. The ones I use everyday are multi cursor for selecting/editing multiple lines and regext for patterns in words. These features can make you seem like a god to a notepad user.

An example task, say you got a huge doc filled with numbers you could regex to select all co joining numbers of a phone number length then move them to the start of the line then multi edit and add [ ] around them. To do something like that just in notepad would be a nightmare but in of the others you could do that in 10 seconds.

Invest some time in learning them as they'll make you far more productive.

Personally I also just use text files but these are some strong reasons I see:

- Some people want more than plaintext formatting (e.g. markdown lists, tables, bold, headings, etc...)

- In-lining images

- Being able to edit on mobile

  Being able to edit on mobile

I have been using OneNote over text files for a while now. Herr are my reasons.

1. Better organization. One note organizes my files into notebooks and pages. This is really important to me to prepare study notes, as I find arranging the notes just like the technical books' table of content I'm reading.

2. To easily apply Cornell(two columns of hint and description) note taking method.

3. To search easily. Once I studied a book and took my notes well, there is no better way to search and recall.

4. Sketch with my notes. This helps me represent ideas I study into my own mental model. Also great for representing my startup ideas.

5. Record myself into the note reciting the material.voice memo.

6. Doing all of the above on my computer and phone and finding everything in place.

Again, there might be work around for doing all this. But once you get into Evernote and OneNote you find it really hard to go back into text files.

A note-taking app: A note, what is a note? What is an app? Personal notes, clients, collaboration, users of the notetaking app?

At my desk I have a chair and desk and PC and screens and pieces of sticky paper, cut-up pieces of scrap paper, and coloured pens on-hand to take notes.

In the wall we have a safe to store any notes. And a document retention policy. And a bigger safe downstairs.

At the gym I have a note taking app on my phone, that doesn't include titles or anything other than body text. That works for recalling really quickly, and is not 'structured data' other than a data and preview.

I use email to send notes to myself, and this allows attaching files which might or might not be needed again (document retention policy).

I have a personal wiki that allows wiki-like harnessing of rich media, and is available-anywhere, a constantly living document, document-of-documents, not restricted to a computer or OS or platform for accessibility.

So... what is a note, the use of the note, the potential for sharing and/or collaboration and/or storing?

Is a note a note in dictation, distraction, and no note leads to better noting?

Most people have listed features here. Slightly different take:

It allows you to recall information quickly. It serves as your “exobrain”. Your info at your finger tips. Anywhere in the world. Anytime. That’s quite powerful when you think about it deeply. As you do that you will also realize what you capture (and what you don’t) is equally is directly proportional to the information’s utility

> Whenever I want to take notes, I make a textfile and edit it in my texteditor.

That is what I do as well. It is simple and does not distract me from my main task. I find that I do not really need features that many note softwares provide de facto such as tagging, WYSIWYG editor or multimedia support.

However I feel that note taking softwares add values by making it easier to categorize and retrieve the notes later. For this reason I wrote a small command line interface called Dnote (https://github.com/dnote/cli). It stores notes in 'books' and supports full text search.

My workflow is:

  $ dnote add bookName
  # launches vim. I type my note and quit  vim. The note is saved locally.

  # later...
  $ dnote find "some text"
  $ dnote view bookName`

Depends on the app for example I use Standard Notes. For me the utility is search, tagging, security and sync between devices.

You can do that with Boostnote, but while you edit markdown + a bunch of extensions (better table support, latex math, etc) the other half of the editor renders it (same as e.g github does) which makes certain things (tables, math equations, images) much, much more readable.

It stores the notes as plain text, though the file names aren't nice (it generates a GUID, because you don't have titles as such in the program).