Ask HN: How do you organize your ideas?

5 points by nisuni ↗ HN
As per title, I would like to get rid of the plain text files that I use to keep track of project ideas, plans, etc...

I’ve tried org-mode, but I don’t think I am an Emacs person... I’d like some Wiki-like software, but most of them need a web server to run, I’d prefer something which has a native Mac application.

I’ve been using Evernote for a while, but still I am not really impressed.

What do you use for organizing your ideas?

6 comments

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Zim Wiki is great for this. Even has a web server built in if you want to go that route.

QOwnNotes is good, as well as many editors like Notable or Joplin.

If you want to use a wiki like dokuwiki or pmwiki, you can run a webserver on localhost like this: php -S localhost:8001

You don't need a web server like Apache if you want to run a wiki on your local machine. All the options I've listed above store your data as plain text files and you can therefore use version control.

> If you want to use a wiki like dokuwiki or pmwiki, you can run a webserver on localhost like this: php -S localhost:8001

That's a really nifty idea!

(Also second dokuwiki, it is probably the most useful and least annoying wiki I know of.)

OneNote (and structured in bullet journal way).
I use notion.so (in the past I used evernote and simplenote via nv mac client).

Notion is better because it's hierarchical (as opposed to "a bundle of independent documents" model of evernote/simplenote and pretty much everything else. And it has many unique features, like simple spreadsheets, trello-like boards, todo lists, dates and reminders and all of it presented in a cohesive UI.

You can see example of my notes at https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/9a07ca64c0c14dc09e8bd134...

They are published on my website but the content is stored in notion (9a07ca64c0c14dc09e8bd134b348678d is the id of a page in notion).

In fact, all of my website is re-published from content stored in Notion. I also keep private notes there but ability to publish non-private notes on the web is a nice bonus.

To do that I wrote a Go library to access data from notion (https://github.com/kjk/notionapi) and wrote a Go program to convert it to HTML and publish on Netlify (https://github.com/kjk/blog).

Notion would be a great note-taking, organizational tool even without my custom hacks.

I use an iPad app called Stretchpaper. Basically an infinite-zoom drawing surface. Disclosure I'm the dev. There's no Mac app though. http://stretchpaper.com