Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

Yes, perhaps. I'd think moving my stuff to Git/Github would also be beneficial, but there hasn't been a real need yet.

What's your goal by writing these ideas down? How do you plan to process them later?

Evernote has a global shortcut to active: Cmd-Ctrl-E (like Evernote), which will bring the Evernote app into the foreground and positions you into the search field.

Then you can either create a new note with Cmd-N (like New), or you can start typing the words you a re looking for.

Are you sure something like that doesn't work for you?

Disclaimer: I don't use Evernote for note taking but for capturing what I read on the web and taking photos of documents and receipts. It's supposed to be like an external brain to me.

I also share this "capture log" publicly, so I can search it without a login from anywhere: https://www.evernote.com/pub/onetom/links

Search sucks in it though; often I end up just googling instead at the end.

I would also rather use something https://typora.io/ or https://caret.io/ for actual note authoring...

And I also agree that Evernote is a bit of a bloatware, but it's good enough, so I even pay for it yearly, since it can OCR the receipts I scan (and it also supposed to work offline too, though I haven't figured out how)

As a hobbyist musican, I use voice memos on iOS. Once I have an idea I’ve developed on whatever guitar I happen to be playing, I can just whip it out and record a new memo. I also use it for recording story ideas, practice speeches, etc. Since it’s shared accross devices, I can review my ideas later on my macbook and even import them to GarageBand or Logic. The iOS notes app is also very good because it’s shared across devices in the same way. I an also an app developer and often have creative ideas, in which case the notes app is a perfect solution. If you don’t have Apple devices, I am sure you can use similar Android apps.

> Evernote alike: never works for me. I hate the constant changing features/UI and the overhead of simply opening it

> (My pick) use instant IM to send messages to myself: the IM tool really doesn't matter. It could be mail app,

Agreed with this, I actually do both. I use OneNote, but I don't want to waste time opening the app. So I simply open my google inbox app, and send an email to "me@onenote.com". It creates a note with the subject of the email being the note title, and the content of the email is the note content. [1] I've commented in the past about that feature, I think they should advertise it more.

(One extra feature I enjoy with this is if sending URLs it also creates a snapshot of the webpage in the note , which can be pretty handy, especially since images are text-searchable.)

Another thing I'd do is save the thought as a Inbox reminder, but I switched to me@onenote.com, since it saves it both in my OneNote notebook, and in my "Sent" folder in my gmail account, the redundancy can be useful.

[1] https://www.onenote.com/EmailToOneNote

My ideas I find most valuable are product ideas. I stand my iPhone in front of the whiteboard and explain the idea in one video.