Ask HN: How to take notes?

[Creation date] [Subject]

So if I'm taking notes on, for example, Regex use in Python, the text file is titled:

2020-07-15 Python Regex

The notes themselves are loosely formatted with markdown, including code blocks for code.

I have about 3k of these files at this point, all in one folder and easily searchable.

I've found this is the best way to take short notes, for me at least. Even if you can't remember what you would have titled a note, it's always pretty easy to remember about how long ago you took it.

There are a variety of text editors with interfaces that designed for this style of note taking, displaying the text files in a searchable list with syntax highlighting for Markdown and the internal code blocks in the notes. Here are some (on Mac, but there are others):

- Notational Velocity (ancient and outdated)

- nvAlt (old)

- nvUltra (in eternal closed beta)

- Ulysses

Currently I use Ulysses and it works pretty well. The syntax highlighting for Markdown and internal code blocks is decent, with a great UI. It does tend to get bogged down with super long files, so you need to break those up.

Before this system I tried many alternatives over many years. But eventually every program becomes outdated, and then you are dealing with incompatible file formats etc. The good thing about this system is that in the end it's just a folder of text files, and there will probably always be good text editors.

If you're into apple ecosystem, nothing beats Apple Notes - seamless access right from the spotlight search, you can paste images or files right into notes (surprisingly few apps have that feature - it's a must for me), to-do lists that just work, cloud-sync, so on. And it all comes built-in, for free. I've tried all major alternatives and I always come back.

Paper notebook for daily plans and short-term notes. I don't expect to refer back to those notes in the distant future, so I choose to optimize for writing experience, and nothing I've tried beats paper.

A personal blog for anything worth sharing. In my case it's a bunch of markdown files in a static site generator.

- For programming, you can use org-babel to write short snippets that you can then run directly in your note (a la IPython notebook, but for pretty much any language). Super-useful if you are learning a new programming language. Alternatively, you can add an org link to specific files/functions inside a code base.

- To promote recall by generating flashcards directly from your notes, add anki-editor to sync with Anki, or org-drill. With Anki you can do reviews from your phone.

- To quickly incorporate a screenshots, use M-x org-download-screenshot (useful while taking notes off an online video or presentation)

- To refer to sources: file links (e.g., PDFs) and web links work out of the box; for academic papers, use org-ref and BibTeX files; if you are on macOS, you can also link to emails (useful to keep track of projects); I am still figuring out the synchronizations with PDF annotations.

- If you need math equations, use LaTeX snippets inside your org file and org-fragtog to automatically render them inside your notes (without having to export/compile the entire file as LaTeX).

- Use ag or pt to search through all your notes using fuzzy searching.

Notes are just text files all in the same directory, so you can use git/Dropbox/Google Drive to sync. If you use Dropbox and have an Android phone you can use Orgzly to edit your notes. The most useful feature is that from any app you can "Share" with Orgzly, and add it to one of your notes (I use it to add notes related to podcasts).

I concur with other commenters about making your note taking as frictionless as possible (I have Emacs opened all the time, so org-roam was an easy choice for me)

It's a re-usable (original version can be wiped with microwaving it) paper notebook designed to be OCRed into Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox and others.

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#!/bin/bash

## create personal log file for tracking tasks

vi logfile_$(date +%m%d%y_%j)

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This creates a logfile date stamped so I can reference what I was doing that day.