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Ask HN: What tools do you use to take learning notes and organise them?

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Ask HN: What tools do you use to take learning notes and organise them?

#1

Post by iltaiuti »

I would be interested to hear what software stack you use for learning and related note-taking. Some example questions that might help: what note-taking software do you use? How do you search and organise your notes for revision and reference? What are the pros and cons of your choices? Do you wish there was a software that solves a particular pain?

Context: I have noticed that I always struggle to keep consistent track of notes I make as I learn new topics. I have tried OneNote, Evernote, and some more open-source ones, but each lack of something that makes it complete. For example, I find Anki really useful and use it every day, but its interface is stuck in the 90s and it doesn't easily synch with my other, more expansive notes.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to take learning notes and organise them?

#2

Post by hitsurume »

I use Evernote, and I love it. I write notes and its searchable and editable and that's pretty much all I need.

I'm curious to what sort of process you're using for notes that isn't solved in the most basic way? Meaning, you write notes, you edit notes, and you can search through them or tag them?

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to take learning notes and organise them?

#4

Post by Multicomp »

Mempad - It is a tree-style text outliner that I use to hold my text-only notes, the same kinds of ones that used to be in the sticky note app or the 'random notes.txt' file.

OneNote is great for multimedia and freeform stuff, but not always reliable - I once 'lost' a notebook that had my draft novel in it and had to go pull off a (thankfully recently) cached copy of it from a computer that had just been decommissioned and stuck in storage.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to take learning notes and organise them?

#6

Post by gt_ »

conception wrote: post #5

Can you go into detail on what OneNote, EverNote, etc are missing? That said - Workflowy is amazing and changed my life.

I have been stashing in Evernote for about a decade but have come to really love using Markdown for learning notes so I am looking elsewhere. For now, I have started using a git repo for learning notes.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to take learning notes and organise them?

#9

Post by SnowingXIV »

Legal pad. I've tried tons of different software options but never used them and never reacted in the way I needed to. Plus any cloud based solutions of logging into things just adds more cognitive overheard. Often times I'm jotting notes down or like to draw little diagrams or use some other reasoning for emphasis. I feel by writing things down I remember it better. There is also something very special about hand-writing the date everyday (well, work day at least).

If I need it to be multiple places and accessed by a computer I'll use the basic notes app from apple that I can open up on my phone as well.

For a more complete answer I really like using gitbooks to write my own version of tutorials or documentation. It's a nice bit of software to organizes pages and markdown is fun.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to take learning notes and organise them?

#10

Post by ajarmst »

(OT: Suggestion to not use software...) I'm aware that this is answering only the implied question, but many recent studies have indicated that handwriting is still the best tool for learning. I use a good-quality bound journal in quadruled or dot format. It's organized by date, so all my notes are in one book, but I add indexing notes and topic references. I use a variant on the bullet journal (bulletjournal.com) for integrating my notes with task information. I've been in IT for thirty-five years, and have spent a substantial portion of that in classrooms as a student and as an instructor. I have yet to find a digital replacement remotely as powerful, and I've tried most of them.

NB: I do sometimes photgraph and ocr important pages that need to be archived or machine searched. It turns out that I don't need that nearly as often as I thought I might. It also turns out that, if you were the one to write it, you can actually find the page you're looking for in even a large and full journal extremely quickly because of the way your memory works with physical objects.

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