MedleyText

Props to VS Code - that, along with the excellent Markdown Enhanced Preview and (less excellent, but usable) VSVim extension is my note-taking app ... on my HP Omen laptop loaded with openSUSE Tumbleweed. Of the 7 or so people that I work directly with at the company that employs me, all of them run Linux (with most using Manjaro) and VS Code is pulled up on one of the monitors on every one of them.

Who'd have thunk that a bunch of developers running Linux would be writing the vast majority of their code using a Microsoft product built natively for Linux named after another development tool who's name is usually proceeded by a profanity when spoken by a typical *nix geek.

The problem you have with "Inkscape on a Mac" is all over the place. I cringe when I go to install an app and find out it's used some C++ GUI kit that was designed for X/linix. They all "sort of" work on Windows -- the file dialogs will be all wrong, they'll have forward instead of back-slashes sometimes, none of my pinned folders will be there, etc. The windows in the app will sort-of feel like native Windows apps but will function just screwy enough that you long to be running KDE or Gnome[0]. Even if they look good in all of those OSes, they rarely provide the same experience. Then there's the handful of Electron apps I use. Keybase looks and behaves exactly the same way in KDE and Windows, as does Visual Studio Code and draw.io (though I almost always just use this right from the site, itself). And I'm very happy with the UI of those apps. Then I decide I want to tweak the way a ligature looks in a font I rely on and make the mistake of launching FontForge on my Windows box and remember why cross-platform generally means "take the worst of every platform and use only those features". Non-electron cross-platform apps all-too-often look like Java-based GUI apps from the early 00's -- write once, suffer everywhere.

[0] I've had apps that launch in a single pane within KDE/Gnome, but in Windows launch as several separate windows and apps that launch as normal looking windows in KDE/Gnome but in Windows look like a "Window within a Window" with all of the native Windows chrome outlining the application's window chrome, akin to placing a camera in front of a television and watching that camera's feed to watch a show/movie.

While learning a new subject (almost always from a big, fat, e-book), I take notes as I skim/scan the material. I'll go from cover to cover about 4-5 times, enhancing my notes each time. I re-read my notes in-between reading the book to see what I don't understand from my notes. These notes, later, become a reference material for me.

When I come across something new idea/technique (new to me, not necessarily "revolutionary", in general), I find the relevant document in my note library and add to it.

About once a year or so, I go through most of my notes and re-organize things. Since I've been doing this for 15-odd years, re-organization is usually moving a small percentage of text around to another file -- my notes repository is very well organized and often I remember exactly where something is that I'm looking for without resorting to searching.

All of my notes are written in Markdown -- something I started doing about 2 years ago. I converted all of the existing notes that I felt were important into this format because it gave me the best of all worlds -- I get solid, pleasant (and configurable) formatting, code highlighting which can be viewed in a styled format in-browser or printed[0] and yet still end up with a plain-text document that plays nicely with git. All of my notes are stored in five different git repositories which are now all stored on Keybase's Encrypted Git. I keep separate repositories to separate out work and personal, but I have a programming-notes repository that's dedicated to generic notes I've taken on the programming languages I write in (each has its own folder with several documents, but minimally a "cheat-sheet" and "snippets" document which should be self-explanatory).

The Markdown bit is key -- I am not always in a GUI, sometimes I'm having to refer to things from the terminal and everywhere I go, I have a copy of that keybase repo. Everywhere I go I also have grep and when I can't remember something specific, but I know I took notes on it, grep finds my answer faster than evernote/onenote's search function ever could and I can read what I need right in the output of that command with an "-A/-B" of sufficient size, or just open the file in VS Code if I want to see it with formatting.

I get where you're at, though. You don't get value from taking notes until you've taken a lot of notes and it takes forming the habit of taking notes to get that value -- not being certain that you'll get any value from your notes because of the tool you chose or the format it's stored in can be a barrier to forming that habit. I started keeping programming notes outside of those I took while learning a language when I realized I was constantly googling the same thing about languages that I didn't use frequently enough to commit those things to memory. That's fine and all until you can't remember the specific incantation of search string that you used, or Google changed the ranking of things for the search term, or the site that had that great nugget of information was reformatted or changed URLs so you can't find it and your bookmarks are no good any longer ... I believe I started taking daily note-taking seriously after spending a day between Google and writing code only to throw most of it away when I finally found that library I had been looking for the next day after remembering the author's name and searching directly for him/her rather than what I thought was the name of the library[1].

[0] I use Markdown Enhanced Preview with Visual Studio Code and have written customer proposals and full-on "report-style" documents. When I had to do the first one of these at the job I took in March, I was given a Word template to work from and after swearing at Word's awful WYSIWYG interface, I went into the CSS editor for Markdown, added some rules and managed to get it to interpret my Markdown in a manner that looked identical to the Word template, complete with a full-page "Title Page", headers, footers, and a formatted Table of Contents that it generated automatically from headers (a feature of the add-on for VS Code). I've sent that CSS file over to at least 20 different coworkers via Slack.

[10] The thing is, I remember neither now, but it was a C++ library that had to do with string edit distance algorithms and I could probably find it given a few minutes with grep targeted at my C++ folder.

Given the options available for installing an application, what would you have preferred? If it had been a GitHub repository with a releases item, it would have either been a tarball'd source I have to compile (I run Linux), an RPM file that might-or-might-not work (I run openSUSE and Fedora/Redhat RPMs are more common and hit/miss on openSUSE), instructions on how to apt-get or yum install it -- no openSUSE zypper commands (though, yum instructions often work depending with the same hit/miss ratio as RPM installs).

An improvement would have been if it was code-signed in some verifiable way (I'm not sure if it was or wasn't -- I wasn't paying a lot of attention when I launched it in this virtual, TBH), but the reality is that if you want to run code, it has to be in a binary format of some kind whether you compile it yourself or it's compiled for you, and even in the case of self-compiling ... it's not like you're going to do a line-by-line audit of the code looking to ensure they're not trying to win an underhanded C contest. At least an AppImage file can be run in a sandbox, and it is a very pleasant way to get a working binary on a Linux host. It didn't require root privileges to install or execute (that would have caused raised eyebrows, here).