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Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

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Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#331

Post by achikin »

Dolores12 wrote: post #114
zachlatta wrote: post #53

I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years. When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment. After trying Evernote, Workflowy, Notion, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system f…

What is wrong with org-mode? It is plain text file. I see no major differences compared to markdown.

I use Spacemacs in my day job as a Clojure programmer but I prefer Bear Note for note taking because it starts up faster and all actions (pasting, adding images, adding todos, merging notes, exporting mardown) match simpler and I don't need to memorize new hotkeys and do any additional setup/scripting. If taking notes was my daily job I would probably spend some efforts to learn org-mode.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#332

Post by falcolas »

Spivak wrote: post #299
falcolas wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> afraid That's quite the value judgement. Emacs, when compared with Atom and Sublime Text, has a tremendous learning curve for little payback. It's extensible? So are they, and with programming languages that are useful outside the editor, no less. It's powerful? So are they. And more, they implement something resembling a common UI to the rest of the applications on your system. Sure, you can emulate that with the…

You're ignoring distributions of Emacs which are designed to solve this problem by bundling and pre-configuring everything. Spacemacs, Prelude, and Scimacs are all good options depending on your use-case. I mean if all you want is a text editor, some SCM integration, some build tool integration, syntax highlighting, and code completion then going with a specialized tool just for that is a good choice. But the power o…

Respectfully, you're describing workflows that very few people use today. Patches over email or chat? I've only seen that use at any scale with Linux kernel development. Tricky tasks on remote servers, editing files on remote servers? Most places prefer immutable servers, which run peer reviewed remedial scripts via Ansible/Puppet/Chef/Salt.

Org mode is one of the few unique bits of software available only on Emacs, but you can get 80% (if not more) of its functionality with markdown notes and regular email/calendaring software for 20% (if not less) of the learning curve.

EDIT: And I'm not ignoring Spacemacs and its kin. Yes, they are more user friendly, but they still do not follow many of the common OS UI models, and you still are interacting with a single-purpose programming language for any customization. The abstraction falls apart quickly when you try do do something more powerful (like opening the package manager).

Not to mention, the last three times I tried to do Go development in Spacemacs it would freeze in an infinite busy loop. It's unfortunate that a broken mode can completely hose the entire editor in this day.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#333

Post by craftyguy »

phirschybar wrote: post #279
craftyguy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, you can use something which saves in a format that would be trivial to make a replacement for reading/writing it. One example is jrnl[1]. Each journal (collection of entries) is written in a flat text file. You can optionally encrypt it with AES. They even give you reference code on how you could decrypt it yourself[2]. If jrnl stops being a thing, I can probably re-implement all of its functionality i…

I used jrnl.sh for about a year. I was able to extend it to parse the output so I could do some analysis on what I had written (I was using it partially to track time spent on certain tasks). However, I came to find that write long-form on the command line is just awkward. Lately I have been using checkvist.com which has been working out great.

I always use jrnl with vim, and never compose on the commandline.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#334

Post by h1d »

m3tr0s wrote: post #197
cpach wrote: post #189

I use Evernote Premium and I’m mostly content with it. It’s worth $95/year to me. There’s no device limit in the Premium edition. You also get full-text search in PDFs and other nice features. So far I haven’t found any alternative that suits me better. I really like being able to use different notebooks for different purposes and being able to tag individual notes. (This is something that e.g. Apple’s Notes is missi…

If you are using Apple devices, consider switching to Bear, it is $15 annually. Tagging is the main organizing method in the app, also much faster then Evernote.

It's sad that for something as simple as note taking app (though it seems it's hard to get it just right) to be subscription based and there aren't enough good single time pay app to take it down.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#335

Post by bane »

OneNote, it syncs automatically, you can open it on the web, and the dedicated apps are pretty great. I went from not using it at all and eyeing it with suspicion to using it daily about a year ago and haven't looked back.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#336

Post by maxkir »

Hi, you can use https://checkvist.com both for note taking and for any kind of planning. This is a hierarchical outliner with tons of features focused on work from keyboard (tags, notes, due dates and repeating tasks, Markdown with code support, file attachments, public lists, collaboration). Dark scheme if you dare :)

I'm one of the devs, so ping me if you have questions.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#337

Post by aryamaan »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #31

I’ve recently started using TiddlyWiki for my work and personal notes. It really excels at modeling complex, real world data through its tagging system. Also, it is open source and locally hosted so it is safe for work or other sensitive information.

I tried to give TiddlyWiki a serious try but eventually had to leave the boat. On multiple occasions, I lost drafted notes-- I had a couple of notes opened in the unsaved state, I was thinking I would save all of them together but lost them because of some reason.

I understand when it started but why now it has to be a single page JS powered app which comes with so many restrictions.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#338

Post by [deleted] »

b3n wrote: post #165
kissgyorgy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge difference. It's proprietary , what I mean by that is you can't really edit it with anything else than Emacs. I used it with Spacemacs, and when an upgrade broke it, I left with no notes... Very frustrating experience, I immedieately abandoned it when it happened. Never used org-mode since then.

It's not proprietary, it's still just plain text, and can be edited with anything. Emacs adds a lot of nice features on top of it to manipulate that text, but it's still just text. See http://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/ .

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#339

Post by marchenko »

marchenko wrote: post #311
jopsen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, but I'm still missing a good markdown editor on Android, since Draft went out of action.. It would also be nice with a good editor that was somewhat Dropbox aware, so I had fewer edit conflicts between my laptop and phone..

I use Jotterpad on Android to edit markdown and text files. It syncs well with Dropbox (it feels just like a frontend for a dropbox folder) and supports .txt, .md, .markdown, and .fountain files. I use Brackets and Typora to edit .md files on pc/mac/linux. I find image handling in .md files fairly simple as long as you maintain an appropriate folder structure on the backend. Typora makes this especially easy. I would…

Possibly answering my own question, I just discovered tagspaces (https://www.tagspaces.org/) for tagging files across a filesystem.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#340

Post by aryamaan »

cpach wrote: post #189

I use Evernote Premium and I’m mostly content with it. It’s worth $95/year to me. There’s no device limit in the Premium edition. You also get full-text search in PDFs and other nice features. So far I haven’t found any alternative that suits me better. I really like being able to use different notebooks for different purposes and being able to tag individual notes. (This is something that e.g. Apple’s Notes is missi…

>I really like being able to use different notebooks for different purposes and being able to tag individual notes.

If only we could tag a paragraph too.

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