Note Taking in 2021 (blog.dornea.nu)

People talk about encrypting their vaults and everything else all the time. I've never seen anyone mention the fact that your entire life of notes (whatever they may be) are now completely plain-text (well, markdown) files accessible to anyone with access to your machine. And IT will be well aware that you just dumped 10000 files into a directory, although hopefully they think you're just pulling git clones and don't go further.

So, what, do I not use markdown when at work? Do I not care? Do I stifle my posts in case anyone at work reads them? It just seems like a terrible system for very personal note taking.

Does throwing the stuff in icloud mitigate this? Gdrive? Dropbox? Even encrypting a folder gives admins access to all of my files as soon as I decrypt it. If I use an online app that I have to auth to and the connection is encrypted unless they're doing DPI they're not going to see any of my notes...

This seems like a huge problem with markdown notes.

I'm currently using iA Writer on Android. Notes are automaticaly saved as markdown to a Dropbox folder which I can open on my other devices fairly easily.

I use 2 giant plain-text files.

One for notes. The other for to-dos.

I use git to sync to a private git repo using my own app https://github.com/tanin47/git-notes (work with Mac, windows, Linux)

My priority is that I want my notes to live forever. Using GitHub seems to achieve that purpose. (I used many notes app before which I threw away when moving to a new app)

That's why I use Google Keep --- which is pretty terrible... except it's free, it's everywhere there's a browser, there's an app for it on every phone/tablet, and it works offline when I sometimes don't have internet connection.

Works ok since I write notes in plain text, with some markdown notation (but without actual Markdown support in Keep).

In the past, I've used Notational Velocity and other fancy things, but I find plain text is best. And now I need sync on all devices, so went with Keep.

I make an Inbox note in both to just dump stuff and then move it around. In my Notion I have a "Knowledge Garden" page which is like this hyper linked super wiki page of all my knowledge and as you dig in to the links it gets deeper. (e.g. a toggle for "computers" with bunch of paragraphs talking about [Cloud] and [AWS (Cloud > AWS)] and etc. links)

I should probably just use Obsidian or Roam but things working well on Mobile is important to me and the Notes and Notion apps work exceptionally.

To be honest: if Notes would just let me make non-share links to use to navigate between notes (without all the hacks you can do) I wouldn't really need Notion.

I basically needed something with great search, easy formatting, and inline image support. And I found it with Ulysses. I thought it was only for people writing long-form works, but it works fantastically for my use case. It ended up being the thing that replaced Evernote for me after 12 years.

WRT note taking, nothing beats a bunch of markdown files that are kept in sync with syncthing. Depending on the OS, I use different tools to edit the markdown files. It doesn't matter which app you use with almost plain text files.

A lot of the newer hotness like Craft, Notion, Obsidian, etc. have a bazillion features but are anything but lean, fast, targeted apps that I want in a notes solution. The Bear folks get tons of pressure to feature it up. While they do need to evolve it (the appearance of stagnation isn't great for an annual subscription app), I hope they keep Bear Bear.

I wanted to try Bear after reading your comment. But, I don’t need yet another subscription software. If it was a one time paid app, I would have thought of it, but subscription just kills it for me. It boggles my mind why I should pay subscription for a note-taking app. Just let me pay for the current set of features and let me use it as is however long I want. If I want to upgrade, I’ll choose to pay then. :-( may be I am getting old.

But other than that, it's the first notes app that really clicks for me. It's very fast (they do lots of things in the local browser, I think), plus I've never been able to work with categories or folders, everytime I try I quickly end up with such a lot of categories that they're not really useful anymore, and I find myself wasting time and energy figuring out the best category for a particular item, and then I still don't find it again. With Roam I don't have to do any of that, as it's just a graph, I just dump things in my Daily Notes, add a bunch of hashtags, and it'll show up on all the hashtag pages and in search. It can do a lot more that I haven't looked into yet (some kind of graph search I think?), but that alone is a total game changer for me.

So I'm using VS Code with the Journal plugin, Markdown notes, and ripgrep for searching. Works fine for me. For more fancy stuff I use DevonThink.

(And I too have never got into org mode, despite several tries)

Instead I'd like to share a little what I've learnt from building a note-taking startup for the past three years with my co-founder – it's easily the hardest thing we've both done.

Much of what you've said is concurrent with the majority of our users. Ubiquity and having your knowledge accessible at any time, on all of your devices is super important – but also the most challenging to create. Build a web app, then all of your users want a faster native desktop app. Build a desktop app, and then users want a fluid accessible web experience... Developing this as a team of two is very difficult; but then hearing how some users use your app every day for a year and can't live without it is hugely rewarding [2]

Note-taking is very personal and so everyone has different expectations on what they'd like. There are so many apps for different personalities and workflows – there's never 'one solution fits all'. Even though Notion has kinda done this, very successfully, one could argue that it is a 'Jack of all trades, master of none' app. That's why it's super important that every note-taking / productivity app has an API, so users can easily build the workflow with the apps that work best for them.

[1]: https://supernotes.app [2]: https://supernotes.app/blog/posts/engineer-rock-climber-note...

It adds a bit of friction for note-taking, the need to appropriately tag or locate the note, but I find that doesn't hold me back. If I don't assign a new note in a notebook, it goes into my default, where it sticks out and will quickly get reclassified.

I use org-mode with standard unix search solutions, such as the interactive ugrep. On mobile, I use WorkingCopy (a git frontend), or my web front end (https://notes.lilf.ir/), both of which offer search. I can also use emacs via SSH, but I haven’t done that.

Org-mode is, in the end, just a better markdown with a lot of elisp extensions available. You don’t need to know everything about it to start using it. Worst case scenario, write your intended text in some format pandoc understands (e.g., markdown, html), and see how it is converted to org-mode. The IRC channel #org-mode and https://org-roam.discourse.group/ are also helpful.

It is possible to move from org to Markdown and then do better for pdf, eg via pandoc or some other emacs mode. I've used that in the past, because Markdown mode was even more confusing to me as a non-native emacs user.

That vi never got an org mode before the great uplift to vim says a lot to me. Emacs had more modes than there are things in heaven, Horatio. (than are dreamt of in your philosophy of editors)

Currently not using the actual Simplenote app, instead it is Byword on iOS, nvpy on Linux, ResophNotes on Windows and nvAlt on OS X (and syncing via Dropbox). For many years I used a small app called "notesy" on iOS, but that disapeared completely at some point -- never found out who made it.

Have been thinking about joplin, but I never even tried it since I have a lot of toolchain set up around scripted edits to files (e.g. my timesheet it built by scanning notes, and I clock in and out of projects with a small script triggered from Launchy).

I wouldn't worry about Apple deprecating Notes or its sync -- both have been part of the iOS ecosystem since day one, haven't they?

I am intrigued by the concept and thinking about trying it out, so any input on picking one or the other would be great.

[0]: https://tiddlywiki.com/

I wish it had a mobile version and a better markdown editor like https://typora.io/

Is this necessary? Would it be acceptable to say "Any hypothetical <person of a certain ethnicity> can open it up and use it immediately"?

It seems like it fulfills a completely different purpose than what's being talked about here.

I find the side-by-side panes of some just a hilariously stupid waste of space. And the editors that at least do live “previews” feel so janky when editing; watching pound signs appear and disappear as you move off a line, or having text shift around as bold and italics markers come and go.

No, I don’t need all the formatting capabilities of a word processor. But there’s a reason why MD is often pretty-fied: it’s damn ugly and noisy as hell.

I get that people want a “pure” text format for longevity’s sake; but just demand a text export-in MD if you like. But working in MD is crazy making; it’s ugly, distracting, and worst of all, the “raw” form is nothing like documents and formatting we’re all used to, so even if you get used to it, all of the other documents in the world you interact with will still be using real bold, italics, and headers of increasing size.

For your sanity, keep metadata embedded in each file. I keep k:v pairs. One per line. e.g "topic: D3", "subject: scales", "context: Side Project"

Use grep, awk (whatever). Slice, group, dice, join, merge, backup as and how you want. A bash-like shell is the only dependency. Check into git regularly.

Some scripts I use

  ## group by topic. search for lines that start with "topic". print topic and the file name
  grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort

  ## find all files containing the "topic" tag 
  grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort 

  ## find all files NOT containing "topic". useful for cleaning up 
  grep -iL "^topic" *.txt

  ## find first 10 files not containing "topic" and open each in vi sequentially
  for f in $(grep -ilL "^topic" *.txt | head); do vi $f; done

One of the key things that kills it for me is that I really need my notetaking tool to be smart. I tag lines as "to-do", and my tool of choice can assemble an agenda of items i need to accomplish in a metadocument, even if they're spanned across multiple files.

OneNote, frustratingly, HAS a way to tag something as a Todo, but it's just decoration. There's no provision for showing you all the Todos in a document in a summarized view or whatever, or at least none I could find.

I'm willing to admit that my need here to comingle todo items and notes is perhaps idiosyncratic, but fortunately it's not TOO niche because it's basically the foundational idea of Orgmode.

(....and that's the story of how Ubermonkey became an emacs user.)

I feel people spend too much time focusing on how to make/digitalize notes instead of just make notes.

I grew up with pen and paper too, but now I couldn't live without the synchronization and easy sharing enabled by digital. Also I suck at organizing with paper while digitally I can neatly organize everything in folder.

However I do think digital note taking is more painful than hand writing if you want to go beyond plain text, and digital devices can be distracting when I should be focusing so I recently ordered an e-ink tablet that I'm waiting to be delivered. My hope is that it brings flexibility of paper with the organization and sync/sharing functionalities of digital.

I would like to point out that this is temporary, for people who don't want to pay at all for note taking https://discuss.logseq.com/t/what-is-logseqs-business-model/...

(And yes, Logseq is great, couldn't agree more)