Just want to throw out that I've started using my Galaxy Note 5. This has been indispensable for me. I use it to take notes in meetings and such. The only thing that stinks about it is screen size. I am thinking about getting a Surface for the pen capabilities.
Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
41–50 of 88 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#42iPad pro + magic pencil.
Honest question, but do you like the iPad Pro? I've eyed it, but that's a lot of money to spend for the addition of a pen. I assume you do design or something else that makes that more worth it for you?
Is there going to be an iPad Air 3 at some point, or is the only 9,7" model the iPad Pro going forward, I wonder?
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#43I use Zim and Google Keep
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#44I used to use OneNote a lot (partly because my high school used it a lot). It was alright, but the free version on the Windows Store is horrible and I don't have enough use for it to pay for the full version. I've tried using the notes app on my iPhone but it's just not quick enough to write things down in - although that might be because I have a 5s with a smaller screen than newer phones. I've used it when I have b…
Onenote (native) is free. I use it on windows 10. Are you sure you're downloading it from the right place? Try spoofing your windows version.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#45My ideal notes app would be a rich-text offline hierarchical organizer like CherryTree ( http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree ) with a mobile version and synchronization thru Dropbox or similar (like KeePass). Cloud solutions are nice, and I've tried several, but it always feels more like a convenience for the provider rather than the consumer.
You can configure org-mode to be a two pane organizer. There is a mobile version in Orgzly or Mobile Org. I keep some of my org files in dropbox and edit them on the go with Orgzly. That said, orgzly doesn't support encryption, which is a bummer.
Neither of them are rich text, either, though you can use markdown.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#46Instanote and OneNote. The latter when I'm in full on note taking mode and the former in meetings where I have to record the last one minute of the conversation.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#47This past semester I used a Markdown editor and .md files for most textual notes. It's not difficult to format the text or insert media, plus you can very easily "back them up" using a Git repo or some other versioning system. For example I had a private Github repo for those notes and I could view them whenever I needed to pretty much.
I prefer to stick to handwriting when it comes to math classes purely for the flexibility of being able to sketch/scratch out stuff with relative ease.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#48> there is no app that allows me to quickly mix together text, math formulas, code, images, sketches, graphs, and other kinds of media
This is why, try as I might, I just can't ditch Microsoft OneNote. groans from the audience I'm telling you the OneNote team has their shit together.
I take most of my notes on my iPhone 6+ in meetings, when I need the WPM boost I switch to my Mac. I'm going to get an iPad Pro soon so I can use the pencil to draw on my notes but for now I use the excellent whiteboard photo taking feature to snap pictures of paper notes and whiteboards. It does a great job of running filters over the photo so it looks like I drew right in the app.
I'm also working on a book in OneNote and while I wish it had more features like Scrivener I find that I'm getting by just fine.
I hope this helps.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#49I keep notes in text files in sublime. If I want to search, I just do a text search. I generally have many, many tabs (don't the old folks call them text buffers?) open, and when I go through a weekly cleanup of these I find that they fall into two categories: Stuff that was just, say, a couple of lines of code or urls, short todo lists that have been todone, long lists of credentials, research. I delete the stuff I…
I sometimes have a yearning for a text program like emacs or sublime that can handle images, formulas or other graphical material as easily as paper or onenote. That way I could keep these things together. Not enough that I can't just dump that stuff into a folder, but enough that I find occasional friction. And though I've never gotten a distracting email on paper, I find it quite easy to do distracting things like…
Since you mentioned emacs, org-mode has the ability to attach files and show image files within the buffer, and it handles previewing latex formulas too.
The problem with these kind of system is that you always need the emacs open, because opening emacs and find the org file you want is too much a friction comparing to opening up a note book and start writing/doodling.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes other than using paper?
#50I use the Atom editor and create markdown files (the markdown plugin is pre-installed). Shift-Ctrl-M to view markdown. I previously used OneNote (which I loved).
Atom search is good enough. The only thing missing is markdown print, but the view is beautiful.
I do wish there was a way to automatically upload my files to a cloud share (google drive, onedrive...). There seem to be ways to upload to github (including private gist's), but cloud drive would be better.