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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?

#51
A bit unconventional, but I like taking "analog" notes via GoodNotes and an Apple Pencil. Can't search them, but much more conducive to brainstorming—and you get a cute PDF notebook of all your thoughts at the end of a project. More here: http://archagon.net/blog/2016/08/30/goodnotes-and-the-joys-o...

If it's knowledge I want to aggregate or reference later, I use OneNote.

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

#52

WorkFlowy is incredible But it’s not open source

Shameless plug for my open source alternative: https://BulletNotes.io/

Looks great but I could never use it with the warning message on the home page

Will look out for your Show HN when you launch a 1.0 :)

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

#53
post #50

Org-mode. I won’t be wasting any words at it since I think it is well known thing here. Besides that I use Apple Notes. They sync and work flawlessly between iOS and Mac devices. And lastly, pen and paper. I like writing things down.

Then I will! I've always preferred taking notes on a computer due to how much easier it is to - edit - organize (heck, you can even search!) But I'm a maths student and I never came across anything where I can efficiently write equations and formulas, before Emacs + Org-mode. I have now been using Emacs + Org-mode + Yasnippet for a year, and it's bloody amazing. When it comes to efficiently including latex-expression…

My main reason for preferring paper over keyboard is that I like to draw example graphs of everything. These don't need to be exact just give a visual idea of how a function acts.

I also heavily annotate equations (color code, add description, etc)

How do you get around this?

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

#55
OneNote: Mobile/pc/one note online

-Better organization with notebooks->pages->sub-pages->sub-sub-pages

-paste screenshots and search text inside images

-paste entire website contents with images and hyperlinks

-colorful source formatting for text/code snippets like Ms Word

-custom template styles for pages like todo, meeting list

-attach any file ( like pdf, word, conf) within page or paste the whole file as a page with source formatting

-share notebooks online with team for editing

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

#57
post #2

It depends a bit on my mood, but I generally switch between a zim[0] wiki and plain text / markdown files written in vim. [0] http://zim-wiki.org/

Zim is awesome on a local machine. For remote work, I stick to vim. All the notes are stored in a gitlab repository which makes it easy when switching across machines.

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

#58
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.

I use PlainTasks a lot. PlainNotes is another option but most of the things I write look just great in plaintext. Writing stuff in markdown helps too.

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

#59

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 used to be a long-time user of Workflowy (since 2012), but I've recently switched to Dynalist (https://dynalist.io).

It's more actively developed and deviates a bit from the extreme simplicity of Workflowy. I haven't looked back though. :)

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

#60
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I will! I've always preferred taking notes on a computer due to how much easier it is to - edit - organize (heck, you can even search!) But I'm a maths student and I never came across anything where I can efficiently write equations and formulas, before Emacs + Org-mode. I have now been using Emacs + Org-mode + Yasnippet for a year, and it's bloody amazing. When it comes to efficiently including latex-expression…

My main reason for preferring paper over keyboard is that I like to draw example graphs of everything. These don't need to be exact just give a visual idea of how a function acts. I also heavily annotate equations (color code, add description, etc) How do you get around this?

The flexibility you get with pen and paper, e.g. draw arrows between arbitrary words / equations, you can't really beat.

But for the specific use-cases you mentioned:

- Org-mode allows you to integrate code into the document, hence to draw a function you could easily write a small snippet of code outputting a plot, which will be embedded in the document.

- I actually do this sometimes too! For the color-coding, Org-mode allows you to embedd arbitrary LaTeX such as "\textcolor{red}{\alpha}". I've set up a Yasnippet which lets me type "color + [TAB]" and expands to "\textcolor{}{}" with my cursor inside the curly brackets. I type "red" and hit TAB again, and then type whatever I want to be coded in red. For descriptions, I'm unsure why you couldn't as easily do this in a document. In my documents I usually have a larger body of text deriving/explaining the equation, and then I simply put the equation into a definition-block for further reference. Then I know that I can jump to its definition, and I'll find a more thorough explanation of it.

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