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Ask HN: Where do you keep your messy stack of Markdown notes?

7 points by hiAndrewQuinn ↗ HN
We all have 'em, sometimes they're version controlled nicely in a Git repo, other times they're just on a USB drive you keep on your keychain, still other times they're in Dropbox or Simplenotes or something.

Where do you keep them, and do you wish they were better organized, or do you get something out of the chaos?

14 comments

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mech422
I keep mine in Obsidian - I have a 'rough' organization of notes, but search means I don't have to worry about it much.
ZeroGravitas
Yes and, for those not familiar with it, Obsidian is in fact designed for this use case of semi structured notes in Markdown, hence the website being: Obsidian.md
bizzleDawg
Another vote for obsidian. Aspirationally my notes are structured as per "Building a second brain" by T. Forte, but in reality things have gotten messy!

I pay for Obsidian sync having found it a lot more straight forward to keep things synced between 3 computers and a smartphone than the git sync client (occasionally would get git sync errors)

leed25d
I use Joplin and I use Joplin Cloud for synch.
johncoltrane
They are mostly plain text, with dashes for the occasional list and a lot of deliberate indenting, so they are not "Markdown", which would slow down the note taking process too much.

I've had them in Notational Velocity, first as .txt files, then in the program's DB, since 2006, stored as .txt files in a "Notes" folder before that, and as a pile of "stickies" before that (not sure about the exact name but my default color was always light grey).

I don't synchronize them between machines because I only use one. I don't have them under version control because version control is not backup. I don't have them on a USB drive because they are not relevant when I don't use my computer. I don't use a hierarchy because it doesn't work well with informal notes. I only use tagging very lightly because the effort is not as rewarding as those old Lifehackers posts made you believe. And I back them up like the rest, though not as seriously as I should.

NV's search and general UX are awesome so whatever information I want to get out of those decades of notes is always a few keystrokes away.

(FWIW, the latest release of Notational Velocity was 13 years ago and still works like a charm after 11 major OS releases.)

hiAndrewQuinn
>[T]he latest release of Notational Velocity was 13 years ago and still works like a charm after 11 major OS releases.

Jesus, that's impressive.

johncoltrane
Simple, complete, stable, built on solid foundations. That's the kind of software I like.
jauntywundrkind
Logseq is great. Decent plugin ecosystem (but I confess being written in clojure is a major difficulty in the local ecosystem, even when most plugins aren't clojure).

I'm working to get the git-auto-commit program I wrote a couple years ago working again, to version control the history. There's now a git auto-commit built-in too, which I only noticed! Hopefully works well enough or is improvable enough for me!!

rzzzwilson
Everything that doesn't need to be secure is in gitlab.com. When I used github.com I started a repository that I called "etudes" which were code and explanatory notes that went into a separate wiki repository. I used etudes for notes to myself and larger multipart explanations for others. After switching to gitlab.com, which doesn't really do wikis, I amalgamated code and notes into one repository and that works better.

For more secure information that I want to be more portable I use tiddlywiki on a USB stick.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
In KeyPass. They are safe there, backed up, and searchable.
ai_what
I wanted to like Joplin but it's not very fast. It takes like 5 seconds just to start.

So now I use: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

bencelaszlo
I could live with the slowness of Joplin if there would be a web app for it. I want to access my notes even if I only have access to a browser.