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Is there any opensource things that can be a software engineering notebook or journal that is easy to use and painless?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A plain paper notebook. I’ve tried everything and nothing works as well.
This is true and somewhat infuriating. I have a $700 computer in my pocket and the best way to write a grocery list is on a post-it found in the kitchen drawer. I think it comes down to the human interface of a touch screen being slow, frustrating, and generally inefficient.
Edit: My current stack, to show good faith: paper for log and tasks, Org and Git for memoranda.
The commitment to taking good notes has been one of the best decisions of my life -- not just professionally. I use my standard text editor (Textmate 2), and have a "notes" project, with all manner of categories organized by folder. I take notes on articles I have read, take notes on any presentations I watch or educational courses I take, or books I read. Moreover, I now take much better in person notes -- I take th…
Since 2013 I started creating a text file almost every day in a directory structure of '../daily/2017/17-10-14.txt'.
I use it as a journal (I put the current time and wrote whatever it is down), a scratchpad, a temporary todo, habit tracker, etc. It's been super useful for me. I've thought about formalising it, using tags, etc. but have found myself getting along fine.
I used to use Day One (macOS/iOS) religiously but have found that this daily txt log mostly sufficient. What I would like is to expand my macros from getting the current time to getting my current location and weather.
For work, I have a 'log.txt' in which I have a section for each day and copy-forward the previous day's section. While we have our own company tracking tools, etc., this is purely for me and has helped me keep better track of everything I need/want to do without letting anything slip out.
I've found that doing each of these things takes up very little time too—partly due to not formalising it or making it fancy. I've thought about using a vimwiki which I'm a big fan of, and gave it a go once, but I stopped. It was no fault of vimwiki itself, but so far have found the text files sufficient.
For my phone (iPhone), I use https://ia.net/writer/, and I keep all these text files in Dropbox.
Another reason why I've stuck to text files is because of the fatigue of different apps and services disappearing due to whatever reasons.
These files have useful commands, todo lists, debugging notes, stack traces, useful links.
Don't overcomplicate things - just make a text file each day and dump everything in. Don't bother too much with structure or tidiness. If you need info from the previous day, just copy it across.
Once you've got enough stuff in your notebooks to be valuable do remember to get an automated backup going.
Is there any opensource things that can be a software engineering notebook or journal that is easy to use and painless?
But this setup is somehow clunky because there is no tracking if a ceratain topic/headline already exists, linking is not possible, etC
The commitment to taking good notes has been one of the best decisions of my life -- not just professionally. I use my standard text editor (Textmate 2), and have a "notes" project, with all manner of categories organized by folder. I take notes on articles I have read, take notes on any presentations I watch or educational courses I take, or books I read. Moreover, I now take much better in person notes -- I take th…
On the other hand, based on my personal experience, maintaining a constantly growing archive of things, be it notes, bookmarks, emails, etc. turns out to be not very useful. Also, it gradually becomes something that you spend more time on than on other things. I now prefer to be more spontaneous, try to minimize the number of things that drag me into the past, start things as if from scratch, "reset" myself, dismiss…
The importance of the 'reset' has helped me a lot too, and calling a lot of recorded things 'baggage' is very true. If everything I had recorded was wiped would I be disappointed? Definitely! But life would go on. :) I'd re-discover things, my tastes and personality would change so those recorded things aren't relevant, etc.
Is there any opensource things that can be a software engineering notebook or journal that is easy to use and painless?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A plain paper notebook. I’ve tried everything and nothing works as well.
This is true and somewhat infuriating. I have a $700 computer in my pocket and the best way to write a grocery list is on a post-it found in the kitchen drawer. I think it comes down to the human interface of a touch screen being slow, frustrating, and generally inefficient.