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Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

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Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#381

Post by rovr138 »

msh wrote: post #129
bmarquez wrote: post #14

Standard Notes: https://standardnotes.org/ for plain text, encrypted notes. Everything is easily importable or exportable in .txt format. MS OneNote is great however they have stopped updating their desktop application (which allows offline notes) in favor of putting everything in the cloud (which will require a subscription to yet another cloud service if you exceed the OneDrive limits.)

I like standard notes but having only plain text with no ability to attach images makes it unsuitable for me. I often take screen shots or photos as a note.

This is why I use markdown. If I need an image, I can add a quick tag with a base64 encoded image.

To keep legibility, I always add the images at the bottom and reference them from the text.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#383

Post by colecut »

zachlatta wrote: post #53

I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years. When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment. After trying Evernote, Workflowy, Notion, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system f…

I recently switched to simple markdown files as well.

"I find myself more eager to write things down." I feel exactly the same. Something about the simplicity and lightweight approach makes it more inviting for writing.

I use QOwnNotes to manage the notes, it's open source and available on osx/linux/windows, uses a sqlLite DB to add tagging and fast searching.

https://www.qownnotes.org/

I use nextcloud for syncing the notes to a server and across devices.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#384

Post by bpizzi »

falcolas wrote: post #332
Spivak wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring distributions of Emacs which are designed to solve this problem by bundling and pre-configuring everything. Spacemacs, Prelude, and Scimacs are all good options depending on your use-case. I mean if all you want is a text editor, some SCM integration, some build tool integration, syntax highlighting, and code completion then going with a specialized tool just for that is a good choice. But the power o…

Respectfully, you're describing workflows that very few people use today. Patches over email or chat? I've only seen that use at any scale with Linux kernel development. Tricky tasks on remote servers, editing files on remote servers? Most places prefer immutable servers, which run peer reviewed remedial scripts via Ansible/Puppet/Chef/Salt. Org mode is one of the few unique bits of software available only on Emacs,…

Side note: I have been coding a large golang application for 3y now on emacs/spacemacs with the 'go' layer. Never had a single problem.

Otoh, I tried both atom and vscode for the same job, but quickly ran away because using an editor on which modal editing is not a first class citizen is not for me anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#385

Post by fernandokokocha »

I tried (in order): Evernote, OneNote, Simplenote

Although not ideal, I ended up with OneNote. Also for temporary notes, I use Trello (easily accessible from my mobile), but the notes don't live there for more than a week.

I like how many people advice to build your own system with git and markdown. Ideally, I want such a system to work quickly on non-cutting edge mobile and sync on the fly, so maybe that's an idea for a side project.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#387

Post by PeOe »

As many others, we build our own tool and by now we are named as a "Trello-killer" by Make use of. https://zenkit.com can be used to organize anything in the way you want it. You can choose between several data views and switch whenever you want. Use a lot of customization features to show your data as you need it. From a simple list view through kanban and databases, everything is possible.

It´s available for every device, without limitation. There is also a Snap for Linux.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

#389

Post by tincholio »

kungtotte wrote: post #246
TeMPOraL wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 edito…

Oh I don't doubt the usefulness of Org-Mode, but I guess the point is the one you bring up: if you want to use Org-Mode it's Emacs or the highway. With Markdown I can use any editor from a full-featured IDE all the way down to `cat` or `ed` and all I'm giving up are some quality of life features. It's the same format at the bottom, and it has the added benefit of being ubiquitous in that nearly every editor has some…

You can certainly write org in ed, if you're masochistic enough. You could also use Vim or VSCode or whatever floats your boat, and you will just be missing the more useful stuff (agenda integration, babel, etc), but if you just want to use it as a markup language, there's good support in other editors, and ease of export as well (pdf, html, docx, odt...) with pandoc. I don't get why you think that editing org is any harder than editing markdown, given editor support.
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