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Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

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Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#212

Post by stevage »

numbol wrote: post #188

Warning: Early stage of development Thinking Notebook & Markdown IDE MindForger is human mind inspired knowledge management tool which aims to connect the tradition of outline editors with emerging technologies. Its mission is to help you in organization of your knowledge and associated local, web and real world resources in a way that enables quick navigation, concise representation, automatic interconnections, asso…

Warning: buzzwords

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#213

Post by Walkman »

xfer wrote: post #172
kissgyorgy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge difference. It's proprietary , what I mean by that is you can't really edit it with anything else than Emacs. I used it with Spacemacs, and when an upgrade broke it, I left with no notes... Very frustrating experience, I immedieately abandoned it when it happened. Never used org-mode since then.

In that sense markdown is also proprietary, since you need some editor making things easy for you to manipulate and navigate the text document(that's all emacs does; even github renders org docs).

The big difference is that Markdown is way simpler, you can read it reasonably easy with Notepad even, and this is why every reasonable editor can Render it preview it, export it. Even browsers or small apps can show a HTML rendered markdown. There are even standalone Markdown editors, but there is no standalone org-mode editor.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#214

Post by evertheylen »

I see lots of people's answers include markdown or another plain text format. I have long held the opinion that note taking is the single most applicable situation for a WYSIWYG experience. On top of that, I find the ability to draw in my notes essential. For these reasons, my favorite software would be MS OneNote. However I run Linux and don't always have pen input available so I go with pen and paper instead.

So, how do you all deal with plain text notes? If you had a good WYSIWYG editor that fits in your workflow, would you switch?

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#215

Post by TeMPOraL »

kungtotte wrote: post #195
xfer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that sense markdown is also proprietary, since you need some editor making things easy for you to manipulate and navigate the text document(that's all emacs does; even github renders org docs).

Except Markdown looks like text with some special characters to embellish it a little. It's perfectly readable and legible in any text editor. Navigation is the only thing lacking, but manipulation is as easy as manipulating text is in your editor of choice. Note: I don't know what raw orgmode files look like, maybe they're similar to Markdown.

They are. Org format is kind of a better and more powerful Markdown. As plaintext, it looks cleaner to me.

The thing is, Org format is defined by the way Org-mode in Emacs handles it. Beyond Markdown-like features (which are rather easy to parse out; the format is similar), you get things in the data format that to date are handled only by Emacs. Think of Emacs + org mode as a better Jupyter notebooks than just editor for static text documents.

Consider this note I have in my org file for work tasks.

  ** DONE [#A] Testing prior to syncup meeting       :CUSTOMER_development:
     CLOSED: [2018-07-13 Fri 14:04]
     :LOGBOOK:
     CLOCK: [2018-07-13 Fri 12:14]--[2018-07-13 Fri 14:04] =>  1:50
     :END:
 
     - [X] Baseline test for REDACTED
       - REDACTED NOTE
     - [X] Baseline test for SOMETHING ELSE
If you rendered this as a static document (e.g. export to HTML), you'd see the headline "Testing prior to syncup meeting", and the bullet-point list at the bottom. The remaining things are metadata, nicely formatted by Emacs (and partially hidden; e.g. :LOGBOOK: / :END: block starts folded by default). The metadata shown are part of Org-mode's task management aspect - the todo state (DONE), date of task's finalization, time clocking (CLOCK: entries), tags (CUSTOMER_development). Together, they enable me to very efficiently mange tasks, track spent time, and autogenerate invoice data.

In this sense, org format is both a nice Markdown alternative, and - when coupled with Emacs - enables very powerful interactive documents that can handle task management, time clocking, literate programming, spreadsheeting, and other tasks.

I suspect Org will never be as popular as Markdown simply because, if you wanted to go beyond Markdown feature parity, you'd have to reimplement half of Emacs to handle those "advanced" aspects.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#216

Post by TeMPOraL »

Walkman wrote: post #213
xfer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that sense markdown is also proprietary, since you need some editor making things easy for you to manipulate and navigate the text document(that's all emacs does; even github renders org docs).

The big difference is that Markdown is way simpler, you can read it reasonably easy with Notepad even, and this is why every reasonable editor can Render it preview it, export it. Even browsers or small apps can show a HTML rendered markdown. There are even standalone Markdown editors, but there is no standalone org-mode editor.

You can render a subset of Org mode just as easily as Markdown - they mostly differ with syntax. The problem is, Org format is not just a format for static documents - it also accounts for things you'd like to achieve with plaintext notes, and most of those "extra features" are defined in terms of their Emacs/Org-mode implementation. Which is something very hard to clone.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#217

Post by cpach »

m3tr0s wrote: post #197
cpach wrote: post #189

I use Evernote Premium and I’m mostly content with it. It’s worth $95/year to me. There’s no device limit in the Premium edition. You also get full-text search in PDFs and other nice features. So far I haven’t found any alternative that suits me better. I really like being able to use different notebooks for different purposes and being able to tag individual notes. (This is something that e.g. Apple’s Notes is missi…

If you are using Apple devices, consider switching to Bear, it is $15 annually. Tagging is the main organizing method in the app, also much faster then Evernote.

Thank you for the recommendation. Does Bear have a web version? For me, that’s one of Evernote’s killer features. It’s very convenient not having to install Evernote on my Windows computer at work.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#219

Post by cpach »

confounded wrote: post #143
greyman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> plain text files and your favorite editor I tried this solution as well, but I missed one core feature of Evernote, that you can search by tags or keywords, and it instantly list all related notes.

... grep?

Grep works fine on a desktop OS but not so well on a smartphone or tablet.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#220

Post by iamcreasy »

kungtotte wrote: post #202
iamcreasy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are taking a very narrow look at these software.

Why not be conscious about these things? I have a lot more than 128GB on my system, but I still don't want to install dozens of 100+MB apps to solve just one problem each. Eventually you will run out of disk space with that approach. Why install a single-purpose Markdown editor when you already have VSCode installed that is an excellent Markdown editor plus a lightweight IDE for nearly every language ever? One tool,…

Yes, sure - We should. But Dolores12 was claiming notepad's superiority over a feature rich editor using only one parameter.
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