Ask HN: What is your favorite way of taking notes?

It works well on every device, supports simple text notes or fancy formatting, good sharing options, good live multiuser editing, inline comment threads, free to use, works offline, keyboard shortcuts, etc...

Sublime Text - I use it to take notes when I can type on the laptop. Usually I write a lot of text (for example during a meeting). It's just text, no markdown or something like that, and no plugins.

Google Keep - For when I don't have the laptop with me. Since the data goes to the cloud, I often copy these notes over to a text file on the laptop, especially when I want to add more details.

Screenshots - I have noticed that for many things, like watching online courses, I take a screenshot of the part I want to take notes about, and then just organize the screenshots into folders. Works quite well because it saves a lot of time, and I don't have to watch out for typos.

- edit

- organize (heck, you can even search!)

But I'm a maths student and I never came across anything where I can efficiently write equations and formulas, before Emacs + Org-mode.

I have now been using Emacs + Org-mode + Yasnippet for a year, and it's bloody amazing. When it comes to efficiently including latex-expressions in my org-notes, Yasnippet is an absolute must.

And because this is Org-mode, I can export all my notes to HTML, PDF, etc. Adding a bit of customization, you get something like this http://www.retiredparkingguard.com/notes/. If you go to one of the note-pages with a bit of maths on it, e.g. mathematics/geometry.html, you should see a bar on the right displaying the notation used in each section. This requires javascript.

I also make heavy use of customized named blocks in my note-taking, e.g.

#+name: def:schrodinger-equation

#+begin_definition

...

#+end_definition

And then, using org-ref, I can do a `M-x org-ref-insert-ref-link` anywhere in the document and I can search through all these definitions, theorems, etc.

These blocks, when exported to HTML, are also given CSS classes, hence you can easily give these styling, making the reading experience into whatever you want.

Finally, I would also suggest org-ref by John Kitchin (https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref); it makes organizing papers and the corresponding notes so incredibly easy.

All together this makes note-taking such a breeze and lowers the barrier for me to re-read and edit my notes significantly, compared to handwritten notes.