Ask HN: What do you use to take notes?

Tried many different ways, usually falling back to using pen and paper. However, it limited me in the way that I couldn't search and sometimes I forgot my notebook, leading to me not finding what I wanted.

So in the end I wrote my own static wiki generator (QuickWiki: https://github.com/VictorBjelkholm/quickwiki). It basically takes a folder full of markdown files, automatic links to other pages and generates a static website (that looks something like this: https://victorbjelkholm.github.io/quickwiki/home/ )

Somebody's going to mention org-mode and it may as well be me. HTML export with syntax highlighting is a nice thing to have, and images linked to the document work like they should. Having code blocks be executable is a bonus, especially for showing technically minded clients or higher-ups exactly how their intentions were translated into reality.

Evernote it is not: The sharing story is pretty BYOB, in that what you get out is an HTML (or whatever other format) document, and sharing it, whether readonly or not, is on you. There's document publishing functionality, but it requires some setup and an upstream host that can take files via FTP/SFTP/etc. Same goes for syncing, if that's something you want; Dropbox works for me, and there are many alternatives.

Your use case sounds like it would require some tooling around org-mode to achieve. If you want something that does what you need straight out of the box, it probably won't make you happy. But you asked what we use to take notes, and for me that's org-mode; the things it does well are many, some of them unique in my experience, and that makes it worth my while to invest effort in adding the occasional capability I want which doesn't exist by default.

(And for meetings where people are touchy about laptops, or realtime capture on a call, I have a clipboard and a paper tablet. But it's ephemeral; anything needing kept goes straight into an org file at the earliest opportunity.)

Google's nasty habit of dropping projects that are not core keeps me from trying and using a lot of their stuff.

Paper in big binder.

I've tried for very long to find a good electronic solution. Up to and including writing my own wiki with various extensions customised to my diting style, and hunting around for every note taking app under the sun.

The problem, I find, is that nothing beats the flexibility of being able to take out multiple sheets of paper and move them around, annotate them, put them back in. It creates a flexibility in workflow no tool I've tried have managed to match.

The physical presence of the paper also makes it much easier to avoid forgetting a page exists.

I'm not happy with it, but I keep coming back to it after each desperate attempt at making something else work better.

I love Google Keep but I'm really scared that they're going to kill it in 1-2 years. Don't think it's something a lot of people (in Google scale) use.

I know it shouldn't affect me know as I could probably transfer notes then, but it still bothers me..