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How to Take Smart Notes

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Re: How to Take Smart Notes

#91

Post by tannercollin »

mttyng wrote: post #46
asterisk_ wrote: post #33

Note-taking seems to have gained popularity on HackerNews over the past few weeks (or my attention has been biased towards these submissions, at least). I've long been interested in the domain of "personal knowledge engineering" and this clearly seems a common thread within our community. As a brief overview of the "SOTA:" * Emacs and Vim users skew towards Org-mode or Vim wiki. * Roam Research is sort of a recent we…

Yeah, note taking posts have been ramping up in the last few days/weeks. I’ve noticed that as well. I’m enjoying it, to be honest. I’m always looking to make my process (which, currently, is rather hodgepodge) more streamlined. I wish I had the link, but last week someone linked to something called `bash_log` which was someone’s bash function that created time stamped md files for simple journaling. Nothing groundbre…

> If anyone has any suggestions in the context of what I’ve posted, I’m all ears.

I wrote this tool for accessing Standard Notes on the command line:

https://github.com/tannercollin/standardnotes-fs

I imagine it would integrate with bash_log quite well.

Back your data up first, and I'm guessing you could just `cd` into your notes folder then use bash_log straight from there. You could also set LOG_DIRECTORY in your .bashrc to be where ever you mount Standard Notes.

Re: How to Take Smart Notes

#92

Post by urlwolf »

I'm sold on the zettelkasten method. I've tried zim, cherrynotes, trilium...

I've found two things that matter most for me: 1/ you need an editor where typing latency is low. Below 10ms. Otherwise you will get in a bad mood and make more mistakes. Electron apps need not apply

2/ creating, linking, and finding notes must be fast

On top of that, it must be future proof.

I've found the ideal solution in howl (howl.io). This is a text editor, built in moonscript and with sane default. Typing latency is 6ms, faster than anything else I could find (on linux, non compositing window manager)

The trick for liking (in markdown) is autocompletion. It will autocomplete based on all buffers open. My trick is to run :exec ls (list of files in the project directory) and leave this buffer open. Then ctrl space will autocomplete filenames. The rest is trivial.

Oh God, Howl deserves so much praise. I hope it gets picked up on HN one day. It's only missing a tiny push, having a community around it would be amazing.

Re: How to Take Smart Notes

#93

Post by urlwolf »

thunderbong wrote: post #85
100721 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you found anything like a hybrid between OneNote for its drawing/handwriting-with-stylus support + Roam or TiddlyWiki for the graph-like organization?

What about Trillium? ( https://github.com/zadam/trilium )

I used to love it, but I realized typing latency kills it (being electron). Also, export doesn't help as note links are internal references. So it's not future proof, it's a no for me. It has a great developer though. And the graph visualization is second to none.

Re: How to Take Smart Notes

#94

Post by AlphaWeaver »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #84
AlphaWeaver wrote: post #74

In the realm of note taking and personal knowledge management apps, I've been shopping around recently. Notion is very popular, and Roam Research [0] has been the popular scrappy upstart that people have been looking at, but I've been unhappy with these since neither has an API (and neither are open source.) I would _strongly_ urge HN readers to take a look at Tiddlywiki [1]. It's popped up on Hacker News before, and…

Is the TiddlyWiki experience at all like their website? I found it immensely confusing. Rather than navigate between pages (which is how a wiki is supposed to work?) every link I clicked on that page opened a new sub-window right below, which both messed up the existing page structure and also made the current page URL useless for bookmarking.

Yes, their website is actually implemented as a TiddlyWiki itself.

I think their UX takes a little bit of getting used to and can be improved. This project in particular wouldn't be incredibly difficult to modify, so it didn't worry me too much.

Regarding permalinks, there's actually options you can configure both to show a button to copy a permalink to a tiddler as well as to display the correct permalink in the URL bar.

Re: How to Take Smart Notes

#95

Post by AlphaWeaver »

100721 wrote: post #77
AlphaWeaver wrote: post #74

In the realm of note taking and personal knowledge management apps, I've been shopping around recently. Notion is very popular, and Roam Research [0] has been the popular scrappy upstart that people have been looking at, but I've been unhappy with these since neither has an API (and neither are open source.) I would _strongly_ urge HN readers to take a look at Tiddlywiki [1]. It's popped up on Hacker News before, and…

Have you found anything like a hybrid between OneNote for its drawing/handwriting-with-stylus support + Roam or TiddlyWiki for the graph-like organization?

When I first looked into digital note taking about 8 years ago, I was in love with OneNote and the idea of using my computer to take written notes with a stylus. Unfortunately, I don't think there are good serviceable solutions for this, even today. As I've gotten more and more serious about note taking, I've found that my desire for digital handwritten notes has shifted.

My current setup:

- I use an Onyx Boox Note 2 to take handwritten / drawn notes when I feel a strong need to do it digitally. It has an ePaper screen that's super smooth. The notes stay on device and are backed up (but not synced to my Tiddlywiki)

- I keep a tiny paper notebook with me at all times for jotting down ideas and thoughts that appear in my head during the day

- I copy abridged versions of my paper notes into Tiddlywiki at the end of the day or the week to reflect on them and to have them be indexed and searchable.

This solves the awkward problem of handwriting recognition being utterly unserviceable for my handwritten notes, ensuring everything that matters is searchable since I copied it manually. It isn't too much work.

Re: How to Take Smart Notes

#96

Post by asterisk_ »

localhost wrote: post #72
asterisk_ wrote: post #33

Note-taking seems to have gained popularity on HackerNews over the past few weeks (or my attention has been biased towards these submissions, at least). I've long been interested in the domain of "personal knowledge engineering" and this clearly seems a common thread within our community. As a brief overview of the "SOTA:" * Emacs and Vim users skew towards Org-mode or Vim wiki. * Roam Research is sort of a recent we…

There's also the category of "infinite outliner apps". The OG of these is Workflowy[1] which is a minimalist's take on the idea. Personally, I use Dynalist[2] which is Workflowy with more features. My current problem with these tools is that I tend to treat them as mostly a "write-only" medium. i.e., I don't really refer back to them that often. What I'm really looking for is a tool that will let me _serendipitously_…

Interesting, I haven't heard of (1) and (2) but as I've mentioned Roam Research also seems a good take on this idea. From my (recent) experience it appears their app is not yet stable enough to use as a daily driver, though. Notion [0] seems like a more mature version based around similar principles.

As for idea rediscovery I'm personally happy with the setup I devised for myself so I can only suggest trying to emulate something similar. If you're interested, some guiding principles I follow:

1. My note-taking app (Vim, but could also be the browser or anything else) is constantly open in the background, and I have a keyboard shortcut to show/hide.

2. I maintain an index document of sorts (with TODOs, recent thoughts, outward links). This is frequently updated and I don't think too much about categorization.

3. Either Markdown `#` headers or `*` are mapped to Vim folds, which allows me to use `zm` and `zr` to quickly expand and collapse document outlines.

4. Treat tags as a "brain-dump". Just quickly come up with some keywords before starting to write the note. If you do that, I find even simple tools such as ctags and grep immensely help with future rediscovery.

5. Backups are on GitHub so I have the double convenience of both tracking document history, as well as being able to access all notes from mobile.

It's served me well thus far; most commercial note-taking apps will handle (4) and (5), while (1) is easy to resolve (e.g. AutoHotkey on Windows) so there's probably no need to make drastic changes to your setup if you wish to try it out.

[0] https://www.notion.so/

Re: How to Take Smart Notes

#97

Post by jolmg »

nextos wrote: post #43
asterisk_ wrote: post #33

Note-taking seems to have gained popularity on HackerNews over the past few weeks (or my attention has been biased towards these submissions, at least). I've long been interested in the domain of "personal knowledge engineering" and this clearly seems a common thread within our community. As a brief overview of the "SOTA:" * Emacs and Vim users skew towards Org-mode or Vim wiki. * Roam Research is sort of a recent we…

I use a small subset of Org Mode myself. But I think people focus too much on tools vs method. Plain text plus ripgrep can work great. Lühmann used pen and paper, and he built some hugely successful Zettelkastens. Many users at Zettelkasten.de write super simple notes in Markdown. Actually, I'd never move away from plain text or a plain text format like Org, Markdown or similar as it is really future proof. Will Roam…

> I'd recommend you to use your favorite text editor plus Markdown. If your favorite text editor is Emacs, then consider Org.

My favorite editor is Vim, but a big part of why I learned to use Emacs was to try org-mode. Now, org-mode is pretty much the only thing I use Emacs for (email too, but not as often).

Re: How to Take Smart Notes

#98

Post by The_Colonel »

urlwolf wrote: post #93
thunderbong wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Trillium? ( https://github.com/zadam/trilium )

I used to love it, but I realized typing latency kills it (being electron). Also, export doesn't help as note links are internal references. So it's not future proof, it's a no for me. It has a great developer though. And the graph visualization is second to none.

> Also, export doesn't help as note links are internal references.

During export Trilium fixes the internal references to standard HTML links so they reference pages in the structure like "./sub-folder/my-topic.html" (but yeah, it was not always like that).

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