Ask HN: What software do you use to take notes? • Hacker News Board

I have a directory ~/Documents/TODO/ inside which I have single file for each feature I'm working on. These files simply contain a list of items marked as completed or not completed using a tick/cross. It's simple, non-proprietary and is easy to put under source control.

For long-term note taking I use Evernote. This is for things like obscure git commands and 'how-to's.

Re: Ask HN: What software do you use to take notes?

#48

Post by reitanqild » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 4:25 PM UTC

Happy with Asciidoc FX with gitlab as backend for now although I am sometimes looking for and might[0] be happy to pay for an even better solution.

[0]: yep. I sometimes even pay for inexpensive software just because I like the idea even if I don't end up using it.

Re: Ask HN: What software do you use to take notes?

#49

Post by artimaeis » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

I'm a pretty big fan of taking notes with pen & paper then setting time aside to transcribe them to a markdown file and saving them in a GitHub repo.

The pen & paper part means I don't have to lug my laptop around so often - I try not to use meeting times to actually do things anyways. I figure if a handful of people are in a room together it's best to focus on the reason we're all in one place and pen/paper lets me do just that.

Then the digital archival is a way to force me to review my notes and commit the better parts of them to memory. So long as I can get that done within a few hours it tends to work well. Then they're available for me and others to text search accordingly.

Re: Ask HN: What software do you use to take notes?

#50

Post by baldfat » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 4:29 PM UTC

hexmiles wrote: post #39

Onenote. For me the killer feature is the ability to put text wherever i want, and move it later, i just click where i want to write in the page and type, it really changed the way i take note, it feel more natural and more close to the "paper experience". i tried opensource solution, but all the one i found allow only for "linear" note taking, witch is ok if i need to take a quick note, but if i need to "prototype"…

As a college student I hooked up a microphone (A tiny shotgun mic) and the audio would sync with my notes. It was simply amazing. As a librarian I bought OneNote for the whole student body and taught every freshman for 1.5 hours on how to use it. Less then 2 dozen students said at the end of the year they used it. I no longer purchased OneNote.

People are strange.