I also prefer writing things down. However, the ability to quickly search and link years worth of notes is the reason I’m putting effort into org-roam ... dozens of notebooks on a shelf will never be able to do that.
I've used Keep extensively, but have been slowly migrating over to Notion as I need more structure than what tags in Keep can afford me.
The problem is probably me, I save a lot of stuff. But, Keep has become sluggish as a result. I'm not great at utilising tags, so oftentimes I'll just scroll through "everything" (sometimes narrowed by say searching for "images") and I have pretty decent visual memory so I'll readily find the thing I'm looking for just because things have the right shape (even text).
Notion is sluggish with embeds. It doesn't deal with the visual information I store very well either. This might be a Firefox thing.
Have used Evernote too, in the past. The problem with that is that it doesn't at all mirror my mental model of how things relate to one another. Granted, neither does Notion nor Keep.
For me, things start out flat (Keep) and then they nest (Notion) but I also have interrelationships, and need pointers between things. Sometimes, I just want to explore the "web" of how things connect but I've never encountered a system that affords me different "cameras" to explore my curated content.
Hmm, that's an interesting take, and I agree with all your points. Notion is decent, but it requires some learning curve to begin with. I also feel that the apps that optimize for taking notes in a structured, connected manner compromise on the UX front. There's no one size fits all.
I agree with the sentiment, but it's a crowded market that if there was an easy, elegant solution that met everyone's needs we'd already have some leaders out there. Maybe we already do. My person preference is Notion at the moment.
That's nice. I used to like taking notes on Notion. But one day, I got annoyed when I was not able to quickly search an old note as it was nested under some other note. Took a while for me to realize and make sense of that.
I learned that a while ago and settled on notepad++ to organize my daily work.
Every new tab opens and without needing to be saved is persisted even if computer restarts. That is a perfect scratchpad for ideas.
What I want to keep gets named and is then classified. For is no longer useful the tab gets closed and not saved.
Notepad++ allows for searching all documents within folders as well.
Another great option is moving lines up and down for prioritizing lists for which there is a shortcut ctrl+alt+up/down arrows.
I absolutely love notepad++; for many reaosns including but not limited to: beinglightweight, fast, quite featureful even before resorting to the many plugins, etc. The only downside is it is for windows only. For my dayjob i'm forced to use windows, so can enjoy notepad++ for everything (from dev. to basic notetaking, to journaling)...but all my personal machines run linx OS...so no notepad++. I love the choice of note-taking apps on linux - kwrite, leafpad, etc. - but i wish notepad++ would exist for linux distros. If anyone could recommend a notepad++ clone but for linux, would greatly appreciate it!
Also, yeah, I've learned so long ago that plain text - regardless of which actual app i use - is awesome (flexible, scriptable, readable far off into the future, no system lock-in, etc.).
I tried to give VSCode a decent shot...and it is not bad at all; actually pretty good. I do like its customizability, the plugins, etc...and it does check the box of being available on the major operating systems that i use (windows for work, linux for personal)...but it can get quite heavy on resources. I'm on the fence about anything electron-related: great to be able to roll out on numerous OS/platforms, but heavy on resources. Ultimately, because of the heavy overhead - in my mind - i've put vscode as only a second-best text editor to my preferred notepad++. Thank you very much, though, for the recommendation!!
p.s. - Because of some comments here, I'm actually trying Geany (seems lightweight, cross-platform, etc.)...we'll see if it can replace notepad++ for me.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by choice, but consider all of the different ways that people have recorded paper notes, and you can figure that there will be at least as much diversity in electronic notes. What we’re seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg, we’ll probably keep inventing new note taking software for as long as we have interesting computers to do so with.
I've tried many different systems, and the one I settled on is a single simple doc. It's the only method I've used for over a year.
You can do google doc or office doc, but the key for me was having one doc that I just keep prepending to.
Each day i'll add the date yyyy-mm-dd (dow) in bold and then list my work for the day... I use hyperlinks to dedicated docs or online guides for more involved projects (quick ctrl-k), and add a little check mark when it's done.
By adding days in the future, I am able to schedule work or set reminders, and with ctrl-f I can search the doc for anything I've done previously as it also acts as a journal.
I often used to get lost in the minutia of catagorization, and having list sorting help me determine priority, but I've come to realize that I already know what needs to be done, and roughly in which order. ... my bottleneck was always focus. Excessive task structure can be a procrastination in itself.
Going back to paper as op suggests seems like a step back.
It's not perfect, but it works. I do still wish I could add some sort of hierarchy to line items and also be able to zoom out to see the bigger picture, but for now that just sits in another dedicated doc that I schedule myself to look at now and again.
Hitting 18 months now on this system. Have never felt so organized.
I’ve landed on the same approach, in WorkFlowy. I’ll tag lines #todo for tasks, or a project-specific hashtag, so it’s really easy to see everything I’ve written about a subject. Only two months in but it’s great and very low-friction. Using RocketBook to merge in handwritten notes I make in the mornings and evenings sometimes.
I'm sad there's still no good offline and native clone of Workflowy/Dynalist after all these years.
I've tried many other outliner-like note-taking software, but I haven't found anything that is more comfortable to use than the outliner system in Workflowy/Dynalist. To paraphrase a quote I've heard online, "it fits my brain like a glove."
Dynalist has an offline app (which syncs with the server when online). See https://dynalist.io/download . It's the same interface as on the web (so not 'native'), though.
Markdown for notes and Taskpaper for tasks, projects and outlines. It is a format and a Mac app, that is extremely well made. Super fast keyboard navigation, customizable styles and scriptable in JavaScript. Love it.
I have been using a single text file for past 5 years. Ability to do vim regex search is a big plus. Lately I have been thinking of adding a search engine on top of mac's notes.sqlite db.
I've ended up in the same place, but I use a text file. After years of trying to use time tracking systems, TODO systems, and journaling systems, I could never get past their data-entry-inefficiency compared to just opening a text file in vim and typing.
I do need a better way to view and report my data though, so what I've done is write a read-only reporting GUI that can parse my text file, give me daily/weekly/per-task/per-client reporting on my time tracking, per-day views of any journal entries, and a TODO list. It can even export the current week's entries in a format that pastes into my invoice spreadsheet template.
This is all managed in a per-year text file, 2020.txt, that's easy to back up and could be version controlled if I needed to do that.
This is a lot like what I've been using for over 5 years now. Key points for me are:
* Plain text only, no graphics, formatting, outlining, tagging, categories, etc. These are all distractions to actually getting your point down and don't really add any value, don't get sucked into them.
* Ability to do simple text search and go to specific date. Big lifesaver for any problem that looks like "So exactly what did I do on this one specific day 3 months ago?"
Paper is nice for avoiding distracting formatting details. But losing out on free text search is too much of a drag.
It can act a journal, as you mentioned but...it's a linear overview of the things churning in your mind. And something great can come out of it but regardless, it helps you in more than one way.
I appreciate the insights and methods you use. I sometimes over-complicate solutions when all that's needed is a catch-all drawer.
I do this to create a papertrail of thought and action for work but it's a vey narrow use case. What about notes for creative thought, mind mapping etc?
I was trying and using one single app for this purpose: Simplenote.
Installed a few years ago to all my devices. Simple and works. Why should anyone waste time trying all alternatives, after a first good enough app have been found which fulfills most needs?
Shameless Plug: ThinkType[1] comes pretty close to just writing things down in a notebook. It's probably even easier, though it doesn't support formats other then text.
My theory about handwritten note-taking is that the bandwidth difference between thinking (fast) and writing (slow) is somehow extremely beneficial to the process of generating creative and evocative output. There have been so many journaling sessions which I started with the absolute conviction that I had nothing new to say, and after 4 pages of extremely creative and detailed ideas, surprising even to me, I had no choice but to exclaim, "Now where did that even come from?!". Maybe the hypnotic act of twirling the pen on paper slowly puts the mind into that sub-conscious creative state similar to what happens when one is about to fall asleep? It is honestly magical. I now use OneNote every day (because I can search through a large volume of notes easily), and I quite miss the dramatic revelations of pen on paper journaling. My notes were about programming and trading. For those who write fiction, I bet slow, old, typewriters are similarly more beneficial than the latest ergonomic keyboard and Word 365!
Have you tried using OneNote's handwriting recognition feature? I am curious if that experience would allow for the regaining of the pen-to-paper "magic".
I have, and it doesn't work. The recognition is good enough for a demo, in the store you will be really impressed how well it works. However, when really taking notes on the go you use your own abbreviations it doesn't know, use slang or scientific/technical language. Thats where it breaks down and degrades into the usual "I hate you, autocorrect" spiel.
Also, OneNote does it's recognition and replaces your handwritten text by printed text of a different size. This makes all kinds of diagrams, side-by-side-text, tables, etc impossible.
I used it way back (5+ years ago), and it was too cumbersome to train the recognition engine to recognize my writing properly...Maybe it has improved since then? Maybe the iPad ecosystem does this better Not sure, to be honest.
The writing experience was not ideal, either. I'd scroll the page by mistake, etc;
The secret here is about the input: a key stroke on the keyboard is always the same movement, more or less, while letters are each a different symbol/drawing. There's very little creativity to pressing keys on a keyboard, while handwritten text is unique to each person, in time.
Every keystroke isn’t the same if that’s how deep you’re going to get into it. You never use the exact amount of force, or fall from exactly the same angle when typing either.
It has nothing to do with that. There’s nothing inherently creative about writing. But it adds value in that it forces you to spend more time on a single thought while writing, which is not the case while typing. On a computer, you write your notes so much quicker that by the time you’re done, you barely put any thought into it.
I have so notes I don’t even remember creating, but that never happens with handwritten ones.
> You never use the exact amount of force, or fall from exactly the same angle when typing either.
None of that metadata is recorded, or could ever be revisited. But when I write with a pen, I can see the differences and sometimes it clearly relates back to the emotional experience.
Hack idea: a keyboard that records this data (speed of typing? force of key presses, maybe approximated by keyboard vibrations?) paired with an app that tweaks font settings accordingly.
Definitely way more effort than it's worth, but it might be a cool dumb thing to build.
that's why I said "more or less".
force and angle ain't really comparable to the freedom that exists in handwriting.
this is why there is calligraphy as an art-form, and no equivalent for keyboards.
about time to type, there's nothing stopping you from typing slower at all. also, if you choose to do it, it won't stop the forgetting-effect you mentioned.
not to mention how much harder it is to learn how to draw letters and words vs typing in a keyboard..
That’s my issue with the Microsoft surface stylus work- and a lesser extent Apple.
They don’t compare to written, and a decent amount is the pen tip friction.
Wacom comes close.
However the apps themselves ?
I’d like to use one note more, but PDFs don’t become copy-able text. Searchable but not copyable.
Writing on a surface device is ugh. And I had really high hopes that they would push on the tech.
Procreate -iOS- has the best redo and undo features and gestures - which may as well be a lost art since no one else seems to be copying them and saving us manhours of annoyance.
Haven't used paperlike, but I use a much cheaper matte protector from TechArmor for drawing / taking notes on my iPad Pro and it's great. Would definitely recommend getting something like it. Bare screen's always felt too 'slippery' for me.
I also use Paperlike. The version 2 of their film is really nice. It feels so much better drawing on that than the smooth glass surface. And I have no issues watching video through the film at all — it’s still bright and clear.
Similar experience here. Digital notetaking on non-touch devices fundamentally doesn't work, because non-textual expression requires too much work, digital notetaking with a stylus is better, but still doesn't work for the reasons you outlined.
Writing with a fountain pen on good paper is like meditation to me; you wouldn't want to contaminate meditation with computers, like they contaminated everything else...
iPad with a 360 keyboard shell (Amazon) and a (genuine) ApplePencil in a magnetic sleeve (Amazon) is fine. Apple makes a variety of sizes and weights and they can be heavily customized. I recommend Notability tho GoodNotes is great too. As far as meditation, just don’t use the PiP or background audio capability (or have them display your favorite zen experience).
Oxford Optik Paper (90 g/m²) is very good, but clearly a premium option (2.5 EUR per 50 page A4 pad). I use Midori MD journals, not sure if they even sell writing pads, which are excellent as well.
At university I mostly used cheap Brunnen paper for note-taking, not nearly as good as the Oxford, and you'd only want to write on it single-sided, but very cheap (a ten pack of 50 page pads costs the same as a single Oxford pad) and much better than some of the other cheap paper which basically seems to be photocopier paper glued together, which is awful to write on.
There are probably paper review forums or blogs or something like that that might help you find nice paper locally.
I always buy blank pads and usually use my own ruling backing paper, which has black and somewhat thicker lines than what comes with writing pads, which makes them easier to see in not-that-great lighting conditions.
I think you could even generalize that a bit, and say that limits tend to foster creativity.
My best software designs happen when I'm taking notes on paper, and I think it's largely what you say - I can't write as fast as I can think, which more or less forces me to think more carefully.
The founder of You Need a Budget makes a similar argument about budgeting and not spending on credit - the financial limits encourage you to manage your entire lifestyle more creatively.
It's often observed that small, scrappy, hungry companies tend to come up with more creative solutions than large, well-capitalized corporations, and even observed that formerly small and creative startups seem to lose that spark as the money rolls in.
There's that section in The Odyssey with the island of the lotus-eaters.
Speaking of poetry, I suspect that many poets would say that their creativity is enhanced by working within the limits imposed by a poetic form.
I almost feel the opposite. I've had tons of ideas and when I started writing them out they flowed out of my mind faster than I could write. But I don't have the best retention either. So I would have tons and tons of ideas and by the time I got it to paper I could remember maybe 3 things and couldn't recall the rest.
I write fiction, and I write everything in longhand for this exact reason. It can be difficult start some days but once I do it’s easier to get into that “edge of sleep” state you describe, where the creative juices start flowing more freely. My handwriting is awful, but being able to quickly scribble out ideas and add margin notes is very useful. Writing longhand allows much better harmony between my brain and the page. There are no distractions on paper either!
One downside is that I have to then type all my writing up, but I use this time as an opportunity to do a first editing pass.
I have used Apple Notes since I got my first iPhone, there's still notes from back then in there! Mainly for quick lists and things I need to remember, ideas, shopping, etc. Haven't really found any issues with it.
Yes I use Apple Notes for actual notes. It works well enough for everything I do with the only draw back (to me) being it isn't available as raw text. Although copy/paste works just fine so not a huge deal tbh.
For anything that I find lives in Apple Notes a bit too long I move it over to plain text and use iA Writer. I try to keep anything in Apple Notes as short term notes. Anything I plan to keep around as more (small) documentation I switch over to iA.
A few years ago I just got tired of trying out all these different notes apps. I figured I have iA Writer and Apple Notes and that works well enough so gave up trying every new note taking app that came out and haven't had any regrets.
Recently I tried out Notion and god it was awful. I felt I spent longer arranging things in Notion than I did working on things.
These days I find a more limited and simpler solution is better for me. I switched back to Things 3 a year or so ago as I found Todoist overwhelming after a while. Sure Things is more limited but I like that. It is basically a post-it note and I realised that is all I needed.
I write a lot when designing software, but hate paper, so I ordered reMarkable 2, which I expect to change my note-taking habits completely. I plan to write everything into it.
I have that similar feeling, I don't want a bunch of paper around, but writing on paper is just SUPERIOR to anything digital, as it's so much easier to freeform write, add sketches, etc. That's why a bought (several sizes now) a Rocketbook. Paperish, can write/draw, easy to digitize and reusable.
I gave up with the commercial and open source offerings and instead just wrote my own solution.
All notes are markdown, stored in a SQLite DB with full text search. It has a simple frontend and you can drag/drop images onto the editor and it will upload them.
To facilitate quick note taking I wrote a FUSE driver for it and have bound CMD+N to open a command line scratchpad window (I use i3wm) where I can write and edit notes using conventional *nix tooling.
> To facilitate quick note taking I wrote a FUSE driver for it
I didn't understand this part. Why can't you just write the file and then either manually/automatically trigger an import of the text into the SQLiteDB?
The fuse FS (which, fuse not at all difficult to use, there are many implementations of SQLite-backed fs) implements the trigger that automatically imports it.
Thanks for posting this! Been playing around with org-mode and org-roam but setup is definitely more challenging and it does feel like a bit of platform lock-in since the only useful org editor is emacs.
Emacs is free software, it's fun and easy to program, and it emits mostly plain text, which is trivial to integrate with other software.
Being "locked in" to a platform like that? Yes, please! It's vastly different from, say, Windows vendor lock, and it opens up possibilities instead of closing them off (especially since Emacs runs on nearly everything with a Von Neumann architecture and at least a 32-bit word size).
I've tried Evernote, Apple Notes, the Remarkable Tablet, vimwiki, and I keep going back to handwritten notes on paper.
My current workflow for notes is: I take notes on the notes app on the iPhone or my Mac if I don't have my A4 Moleskin notebook handy. And then I transcribe the notes on the Moleskin whenever I can. Another recent addition I have to this workflow is a Brother VC-500W label printer. I use it to print QRcode stickers for URLs that I stick on my notebook.
Have you considered linking notes from one notebook to another? E.g. if you named each notebook and numbered pages, you could just point to "page X in notebook Y", and wouldn't need to transcribe. Would this be something helpful to you?
I run through about two A4 192 page Moleskin notebooks in a year. Every entry is dated, and back references are essentially in the form of “On $date, I wrote ...”, so the lookup is sub-linear time.
Yes! The act of transcribing allows for reorganization and better recall. What i find amazing about plain paper/notebooks is that we remember visually where to find info.
Manually searching by flipping through the pages also further helps cement the information.
Search functionality is useful in some cases but for essential notes it is a bit overrated IMO
There is a lot of feature overlap between these note-taking apps, but I always find one or two missing critical features. It seems like most apps try to be a one-size-fits-all solution, and they fail in doing so.
My new approach uses dedicated apps for each use case. I am trying Raindrop.io (or Pinboard.in) as web clippers / persistent bookmark managers, I am using Todoist to organize (and gamify) my tasks, and I use VSCode for general note-taking. Especially VSCode, with its vast extension marketplace, seems to be a balanced solution for customizing the note-taking experience. I can pick my preferred Markdown extension with LaTeX math support and add additional comfort features like TabNine or Grammarly for a better writing experience than whatever these one-size-fits-all solutions such as Evernote or Notion can offer.
I’ve tried many, many different apps, and approaches over the years. On of my peeves is doing things twice, so here are, to my mind, the important decision making factors:
1. cross-device/platform support. Once I was entirely Apple, I settled on Drafts (post processing when necessary), and Apple Notes. If you have multiple OS’s involved, the decision is harder (Evernote). The logic is that I wanted some contextually sensitive templates for field notes, and Drafts does that with its version of ‘macros’. Having the MacOS version makes writing reports from my notes is dead easy.
If you’re less concerned with re-typing, and/or transcribing, do what you want.
There is a non-zero chance you won't always be on the same platform. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use the best app for your platform, but it's worth to think about how you migrate data out when that day comes.
I've spent roughly a decade or so on each platform I've been on, and then moved on, because either the platform lost its way, or I needed different things. I've learned the painful way that you want data liberation.
Yes, this is one of the reasons that I decided to use Joplin: it's Open Source and cross-platform. I never want my notes to be locked to one or two platforms.
A bit of CP/M. I'd say around 82-84? Way too much classic Mac. (Wrote a SCSI driver for System 6, still have nightmares ;). No BeOS, Amiga distracted me from that :)
And plenty of others, just never as the main system.
Opposite way around for me interestingly, I used dynalist (and paid for it) last year before moving to roam. The thing I really like about roam other than the graph is the auto generated daily todo pages, so you've always got somewhere to immediately start writing. And the TODO overview page, which lets you see all the todos you added across all notes. The two are really powerful, you can organically write out whatever is in your head, leaving todo's as breadcrumbs to regain context later.
Not so much tired of it as extremely indifferent. I'm simply not the type of person that uses tools like this; at all. I know plenty of people that take notes, use post its, etc. I can't even read my own handwriting and wielding a pen is physically painful for me. So not a thing in my life.
I tend to treat written notes as short lived and transient. I'll literally create a new tab in whatever editor, write or paste something there and typically never even bother to save it. Either I act on it or it's a form of documentation that ends up in a more permanent place like a README, issue report, article, code comment, etc.
Every minute I spend taking notes on something is probably better spent doing the actual thing. I have tabs open until I do the thing, then I just archive them and close them.
I believe I shared this once before. After twenty years of trying every possible note taking app from Word 95 to Notion, this is now the entirety of my note taking app:
I’ve set-up an iPhone’s Shortcuts workflow which basically replicates the shell script above. Works very well. Reading on mobile is a bit painful, but doable, and I mostly do it at a computer anyway.
I usually use a paper notebook when I'm away from my computer. But if I really want to take a digital note, I can do so. Notice that the text file is synced to Dropbox. I can open it using the Dropbox mobile app, scroll to the bottom and add a manual entry. But obviously, it's not as fast as a command line entry.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadThe problem is probably me, I save a lot of stuff. But, Keep has become sluggish as a result. I'm not great at utilising tags, so oftentimes I'll just scroll through "everything" (sometimes narrowed by say searching for "images") and I have pretty decent visual memory so I'll readily find the thing I'm looking for just because things have the right shape (even text).
Notion is sluggish with embeds. It doesn't deal with the visual information I store very well either. This might be a Firefox thing.
Have used Evernote too, in the past. The problem with that is that it doesn't at all mirror my mental model of how things relate to one another. Granted, neither does Notion nor Keep.
For me, things start out flat (Keep) and then they nest (Notion) but I also have interrelationships, and need pointers between things. Sometimes, I just want to explore the "web" of how things connect but I've never encountered a system that affords me different "cameras" to explore my curated content.
I do not have the energy to build it though.
Every year...there's a new FOTM note taking app, but this post hit the nail on the head....they are all absolutely awful and cater to serial movers.
What I want to keep gets named and is then classified. For is no longer useful the tab gets closed and not saved.
Notepad++ allows for searching all documents within folders as well.
Another great option is moving lines up and down for prioritizing lists for which there is a shortcut ctrl+alt+up/down arrows.
Also, yeah, I've learned so long ago that plain text - regardless of which actual app i use - is awesome (flexible, scriptable, readable far off into the future, no system lock-in, etc.).
p.s. - Because of some comments here, I'm actually trying Geany (seems lightweight, cross-platform, etc.)...we'll see if it can replace notepad++ for me.
You can do google doc or office doc, but the key for me was having one doc that I just keep prepending to.
Each day i'll add the date yyyy-mm-dd (dow) in bold and then list my work for the day... I use hyperlinks to dedicated docs or online guides for more involved projects (quick ctrl-k), and add a little check mark when it's done.
By adding days in the future, I am able to schedule work or set reminders, and with ctrl-f I can search the doc for anything I've done previously as it also acts as a journal.
I often used to get lost in the minutia of catagorization, and having list sorting help me determine priority, but I've come to realize that I already know what needs to be done, and roughly in which order. ... my bottleneck was always focus. Excessive task structure can be a procrastination in itself.
Going back to paper as op suggests seems like a step back.
It's not perfect, but it works. I do still wish I could add some sort of hierarchy to line items and also be able to zoom out to see the bigger picture, but for now that just sits in another dedicated doc that I schedule myself to look at now and again.
Hitting 18 months now on this system. Have never felt so organized.
You can also directly link to any node, at least in WorkFlowy.
My approach is similar to yours except it's one hierarchical entry per day.
https://workflowy.com/
https://www.taskpaper.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner
https://www.actionoutline.com/
Markdown for notes and Taskpaper for tasks, projects and outlines. It is a format and a Mac app, that is extremely well made. Super fast keyboard navigation, customizable styles and scriptable in JavaScript. Love it.
https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/
Last time I posted it on Hacker News, quite a few people told me they adopted this workflow.
I do need a better way to view and report my data though, so what I've done is write a read-only reporting GUI that can parse my text file, give me daily/weekly/per-task/per-client reporting on my time tracking, per-day views of any journal entries, and a TODO list. It can even export the current week's entries in a format that pastes into my invoice spreadsheet template.
This is all managed in a per-year text file, 2020.txt, that's easy to back up and could be version controlled if I needed to do that.
* Plain text only, no graphics, formatting, outlining, tagging, categories, etc. These are all distractions to actually getting your point down and don't really add any value, don't get sucked into them.
* Ability to do simple text search and go to specific date. Big lifesaver for any problem that looks like "So exactly what did I do on this one specific day 3 months ago?"
Paper is nice for avoiding distracting formatting details. But losing out on free text search is too much of a drag.
It can act a journal, as you mentioned but...it's a linear overview of the things churning in your mind. And something great can come out of it but regardless, it helps you in more than one way.
I appreciate the insights and methods you use. I sometimes over-complicate solutions when all that's needed is a catch-all drawer.
Installed a few years ago to all my devices. Simple and works. Why should anyone waste time trying all alternatives, after a first good enough app have been found which fulfills most needs?
[1]: https://thinktype.app
https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...
Edit: typo
Also, OneNote does it's recognition and replaces your handwritten text by printed text of a different size. This makes all kinds of diagrams, side-by-side-text, tables, etc impossible.
I have gone back to a paper notebook.
The writing experience was not ideal, either. I'd scroll the page by mistake, etc;
It has nothing to do with that. There’s nothing inherently creative about writing. But it adds value in that it forces you to spend more time on a single thought while writing, which is not the case while typing. On a computer, you write your notes so much quicker that by the time you’re done, you barely put any thought into it.
I have so notes I don’t even remember creating, but that never happens with handwritten ones.
None of that metadata is recorded, or could ever be revisited. But when I write with a pen, I can see the differences and sometimes it clearly relates back to the emotional experience.
Definitely way more effort than it's worth, but it might be a cool dumb thing to build.
about time to type, there's nothing stopping you from typing slower at all. also, if you choose to do it, it won't stop the forgetting-effect you mentioned.
not to mention how much harder it is to learn how to draw letters and words vs typing in a keyboard..
They don’t compare to written, and a decent amount is the pen tip friction.
Wacom comes close.
However the apps themselves ?
I’d like to use one note more, but PDFs don’t become copy-able text. Searchable but not copyable.
Writing on a surface device is ugh. And I had really high hopes that they would push on the tech.
Procreate -iOS- has the best redo and undo features and gestures - which may as well be a lost art since no one else seems to be copying them and saving us manhours of annoyance.
https://paperlike.com/
Now if only the surface writing experience were comparable - I like one note 2016 more than the one on the iPad.
God cmon MSFT, make this stuff just work.
During one of the surface launch events, a presenter said her entire life was on one note.
I can see that happen. But I can only see it, I can’t believe it will happen until the input modalities feel much better.
Writing with a fountain pen on good paper is like meditation to me; you wouldn't want to contaminate meditation with computers, like they contaminated everything else...
At university I mostly used cheap Brunnen paper for note-taking, not nearly as good as the Oxford, and you'd only want to write on it single-sided, but very cheap (a ten pack of 50 page pads costs the same as a single Oxford pad) and much better than some of the other cheap paper which basically seems to be photocopier paper glued together, which is awful to write on.
There are probably paper review forums or blogs or something like that that might help you find nice paper locally.
I always buy blank pads and usually use my own ruling backing paper, which has black and somewhat thicker lines than what comes with writing pads, which makes them easier to see in not-that-great lighting conditions.
My best software designs happen when I'm taking notes on paper, and I think it's largely what you say - I can't write as fast as I can think, which more or less forces me to think more carefully.
The founder of You Need a Budget makes a similar argument about budgeting and not spending on credit - the financial limits encourage you to manage your entire lifestyle more creatively.
It's often observed that small, scrappy, hungry companies tend to come up with more creative solutions than large, well-capitalized corporations, and even observed that formerly small and creative startups seem to lose that spark as the money rolls in.
There's that section in The Odyssey with the island of the lotus-eaters.
Speaking of poetry, I suspect that many poets would say that their creativity is enhanced by working within the limits imposed by a poetic form.
One downside is that I have to then type all my writing up, but I use this time as an opportunity to do a first editing pass.
For anything that I find lives in Apple Notes a bit too long I move it over to plain text and use iA Writer. I try to keep anything in Apple Notes as short term notes. Anything I plan to keep around as more (small) documentation I switch over to iA.
A few years ago I just got tired of trying out all these different notes apps. I figured I have iA Writer and Apple Notes and that works well enough so gave up trying every new note taking app that came out and haven't had any regrets.
Recently I tried out Notion and god it was awful. I felt I spent longer arranging things in Notion than I did working on things.
These days I find a more limited and simpler solution is better for me. I switched back to Things 3 a year or so ago as I found Todoist overwhelming after a while. Sure Things is more limited but I like that. It is basically a post-it note and I realised that is all I needed.
All notes are markdown, stored in a SQLite DB with full text search. It has a simple frontend and you can drag/drop images onto the editor and it will upload them.
To facilitate quick note taking I wrote a FUSE driver for it and have bound CMD+N to open a command line scratchpad window (I use i3wm) where I can write and edit notes using conventional *nix tooling.
It's not perfect, nor slick, but it works for me.
I didn't understand this part. Why can't you just write the file and then either manually/automatically trigger an import of the text into the SQLiteDB?
Could have used NFS or something to achieve what you've suggested, but this is the path I went down and seems to work ok for my needs.
What's the best way to contact you? I can't find your email on your website or Github.
Roam-like note taking app using VS Code. Still early days but has momentum.
Been using it for a week for some project docs, and so far I like it.
Being "locked in" to a platform like that? Yes, please! It's vastly different from, say, Windows vendor lock, and it opens up possibilities instead of closing them off (especially since Emacs runs on nearly everything with a Von Neumann architecture and at least a 32-bit word size).
My current workflow for notes is: I take notes on the notes app on the iPhone or my Mac if I don't have my A4 Moleskin notebook handy. And then I transcribe the notes on the Moleskin whenever I can. Another recent addition I have to this workflow is a Brother VC-500W label printer. I use it to print QRcode stickers for URLs that I stick on my notebook.
My new approach uses dedicated apps for each use case. I am trying Raindrop.io (or Pinboard.in) as web clippers / persistent bookmark managers, I am using Todoist to organize (and gamify) my tasks, and I use VSCode for general note-taking. Especially VSCode, with its vast extension marketplace, seems to be a balanced solution for customizing the note-taking experience. I can pick my preferred Markdown extension with LaTeX math support and add additional comfort features like TabNine or Grammarly for a better writing experience than whatever these one-size-fits-all solutions such as Evernote or Notion can offer.
1. cross-device/platform support. Once I was entirely Apple, I settled on Drafts (post processing when necessary), and Apple Notes. If you have multiple OS’s involved, the decision is harder (Evernote). The logic is that I wanted some contextually sensitive templates for field notes, and Drafts does that with its version of ‘macros’. Having the MacOS version makes writing reports from my notes is dead easy.
If you’re less concerned with re-typing, and/or transcribing, do what you want.
I've spent roughly a decade or so on each platform I've been on, and then moved on, because either the platform lost its way, or I needed different things. I've learned the painful way that you want data liberation.
Yes, there's overlap, and yes, I'm currently considering Windows again :)
And yes, needs/utility vary.
Any CPM, Classic Mac, or BeOS experience by chance? (Or others.)
And plenty of others, just never as the main system.
https://github.com/athensresearch/athens
I tend to treat written notes as short lived and transient. I'll literally create a new tab in whatever editor, write or paste something there and typically never even bother to save it. Either I act on it or it's a form of documentation that ends up in a more permanent place like a README, issue report, article, code comment, etc.
Every minute I spend taking notes on something is probably better spent doing the actual thing. I have tabs open until I do the thing, then I just archive them and close them.
Same goes for any to-do list.
just recently i came across the first exception to that... Joplin... https://joplinapp.org/
been using it for a little while now and am planning on sticking to it for a bit longer, i have it integrated with my personal nextcloud instance