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Ask HN: What is your favorite way of taking notes?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of taking notes?

#32
It depends on the kind of notes:

For information you want to retrieve easily later on: markdown files (avoid any wiki-like format that isn't widely used) + some way to sync those files (e.g. unison, synching, Dropbox etc.). The app doesn't really matter but I use vim on my workstation, notebook, phone, tablet etc.

For overviews, outlines, mind maps, notes in a meeting: a white sheet of paper. You can scan it, put keywords in the filename etc. I avoid tech in meetings.

For sketches: a small notebook (A6 format) I always carry with me. At my age, it's more natural for me to think with a pen in my hand than with a keyboard below my fingers.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of taking notes?

#33

For many years I have been taking notes in https://workflowy.com/ . The extreme simplicity of the tool coupled with the way that nesting brings structure to my thoughts is ideal for me.

I’d love some feedback from a longtime Workflowy user on my open source alternative if you would be so inclined https://BulletNotes.io/

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of taking notes?

#34
post #11
post #4

For laptop, I usually use Evernote or Sublime, depending on how I want to store them. Sublime has some nice plugins that make it really sweet for notes. For phone, I use Evernote or Jotterpad. Evernote is only when I really want to store the notes for the future. If they're disposable, I just care about how fast I can write. BTW, you should also look into being able to type quickly. I find a critical weakness in taki…

Care to expand on the Sublime plugins? I use Sublime for notes but store them as plain text files. My other favorite Sublime feature is it persists unsaved tabs through app restarts and system restarts thereby giving me the effect of holding on to my notes until I'm ready to actually save. A lot of stuff I just need temporarily.

Not the parent comment's author, but personally I'm quite content with PlainNotes (https://github.com/aziz/PlainNotes). I also rely a lot on ST temporary buffers, and only use said plugin for mid-to-long-term stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of taking notes?

#35
This is a repost of something I commented a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943853):

I always carry a pocket sized notebook and a pen with me wherever I go. It's still the fastest method to write something down, it always works and it's socially acceptable to use in all situations. Most people whom I meet, even in private, will see me take out my notebook at the beging of the meeting, taking notes occasionally while we interact. I don't think you could do that with a computer or phone and it allows me to remember important details and action points that I (and the person I'm talking to) would forget otherwise. At work I have larger, A4-sized notebooks that I use similarly.

One of the features that I appreciate most is that everything I write down is in chronological order and can be accessed very quickly. In seconds, I can go through last weeks notes and check if I forgot to do something, or even go back a year or more to revisit my thoughts on something that happened back then. Using a pen is also much more expressive, allowing me to highlight/format certain points as a discussion/meeting is ongoing and add illustrations, arrows etc. on the fly.

I've seen and tried some of the new epaper notepads and they're definitely getting closer, but for now they're still to slow, clumsy & fragile to replace paper for me.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of taking notes?

#36
With laptop or at home: Notepad++ with Auto Save plugin. Whenever you change windows, it saves all open tabs. Also makes it a good IDE - when you click on the terminal, it saves your code, so you can just reload the module.

Mobile: Dropbox text files. Also they interoperate well with the above.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of taking notes?

#37
I've been searching for a note-taking solution for years, and I was really going to start using Notion, especially after they lowered the price for personal use, but what still stops me is the inability to control where the notes are stored.

That's why I'm using nVALT, I just wish it had some better formatting options.

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