Ask HN: A note taking system recommendation request

8 points by grocer-eyewear ↗ HN
I believe that I have a weird note taking system requirement, so I am putting the request out here to get recommendations.

How I want to take notes A plain text file where I can keep putting items like my thoughts, ideas, ToDos (with deadline, schedule date, due date) all of these items can be tagged with $person, +project-name, #field=value kind of tagging system

How I want to see notes The application/cli tool should have a capability to answer queries as follows

Show notes for particular project Answer

Pending tasks Completed tasks Deadline tasks Recurring tasks Notes/ideas belonging to the project

Similarly if I query for Show notes for a person Answer should contain same line items as mentioned above

Requirements: plain text, cli, maybe markdown

Let me know if there is any such tool in existence. Thanks.

4 comments

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"Advanced" Outliners are better suited because you can tag the blocks (=lines of text) and then query them independently.

Look at https://logseq.com/ or Emacs https://www.orgroam.com/ (or is org-mode enough ?). you will have to familiarize yourself with properties and querying syntax.

Edit : You can think of it like this: by simply jotting down a new line, you add a new entry in a DB. It does not matter that one line is an idea and the next one is a task, because, Later on, when you query your DB, you will get them regrouped as you like. Also, no more rigid forms : you only add the tags and properties that you need "on the fly".

I know logseq also supports plaintext (Markdown/Org-mode) and Recurring tasks

I was looking to logseq but I found its recurring tasks to be unstable at times. Sometimes reindexing graphs invalidates all the dates and messes up the timeline.

Table creation using query, if it relies on properties, makes the block very ugly to work with and manage.

Child block support is not as great

And separating notes and tasks is quiet difficult without properties.

I need to look into orgroam but I will have to learn Emacs first.

Look at https://tana.inc/. It is still in early access preview (so no recurring tasks yet for exple), but it is more "elegant" in managing properties and queries.