What are people's preferred solutions for markdown + latex?
Tired of note-taking apps
71–80 of 481 posts
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#72The best note app I found is a journal app. I’ve been using Day One for more than a year now, and it’s holding Evernote’s promise of remembering everything. I do use Apple Notes too beside Day One for temp notes (email drafting, edit texts, links to check & trash, etc), but it’s on my journals where my knowledge-notes reside. What people like from real notebooks is that you don’t have to think about organization, you…
Totally agree. Having to think about how I need to organise my thoughts as the same time as coming up with the thoughts themselves always seems like a burden!
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#73I think the reason writing things down is stickier than the apps is because they have a dedicated “always on” quality. I wonder if you could get part of the way there by having an iPad or remarkable tablet that is just always on and charged ready to take notes.
Digital notes are too limiting in my opinion.
All digital note apps have the problem of making me work very hard to fit my thought into their "organization" of things: hyperlinks, a list of some arbitrary order, a tree, synchronization quirks, and whatever.
It's very painful to work outside their envisioned use cases.
For instance, most open-source solutions focus on a plain text, and if I do use plain text, they are reasonably good. They problem is I need more than that. I need diagrams and tables. Tables written with ascii characters are really hard to maintain.
In the end, I went back to a notebook, and occasionally a stack of sticky memos when I need to clean up some disorganized thoughts. The benefit of the physical world is the freedom of doing whatever I want to the medium: ordering, clustering, rotating, clipping, pasting, etc.
I guess that the digital user experience just isn't there yet.
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#74My theory about handwritten note-taking is that the bandwidth difference between thinking (fast) and writing (slow) is somehow extremely beneficial to the process of generating creative and evocative output. There have been so many journaling sessions which I started with the absolute conviction that I had nothing new to say, and after 4 pages of extremely creative and detailed ideas, surprising even to me , I had no…
Similar experience here. Digital notetaking on non-touch devices fundamentally doesn't work, because non-textual expression requires too much work, digital notetaking with a stylus is better, but still doesn't work for the reasons you outlined.
Writing with a fountain pen on good paper is like meditation to me; you wouldn't want to contaminate meditation with computers, like they contaminated everything else...
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#75I like using Notability with the Apple Pencil on the iPad. Hoping the text recognition in iOS 14 works with it.
GoodNotes is also nice. These pdf’s were created with it.
https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/tree/master/s...
I also use Bear for my Markdown notes. Having everything on my iPhone and easily searchable is important for fast retrieval.
Apple Notes doesn’t let you limit search to a folder/tag.
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#76The best note app I found is a journal app. I’ve been using Day One for more than a year now, and it’s holding Evernote’s promise of remembering everything. I do use Apple Notes too beside Day One for temp notes (email drafting, edit texts, links to check & trash, etc), but it’s on my journals where my knowledge-notes reside. What people like from real notebooks is that you don’t have to think about organization, you…
What i like about real notebooks is the 'flicking through'search function.
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#77Against my better judgement, I switched from apple notes to notion for half of my note taking. I'm using Notion to document the things I am learning, but not for anything personal. As most of my learning includes a lot of URLs, the workflow I setup in Notion is easy and speedy.
Overall though, I hate the idea of putting my thoughts on the cloud (someone else's computer) and worry about the future when tool "B" comes along and I want to move my data. I see a lot of cut n paste in my future :(
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#78The biggest issue I have with note taking is not the medium or app, it’s the fact that I would often write something and never look at the note again. This essentially made the act of note writing, at least for me, futile since I rarely remember my notes as I’m writing them.
The best solution for this, I’ve found, is to still take notes on the bigger picture but then to add the smaller details, definitions, concepts to Anki [1], which literally forces me to review those smaller details again and again until they “stick”. Doing so then makes me want to revisit the notes to get the full picture. As a result, my memorization of all kinds of things has greatly improved, which makes future research and documentation all the more better. It’s a very good positive reinforcing learning method and I recommend it to anyone who may have similar issues.
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#79I’ve tried nearly every major app/service and always end up on Standard Notes. It strikes the perfect balance for me between privacy, ease of use, and functionality.
Prior to settling on SN I was a big fan of Simplenote and nvALT, but the lack of even basic MFA for Simplenote drove me away.
Evernote, OneNote, etc just seem to be way too much for what I need. And Apple Notes, while it has gotten a lot better, does not make it easy to get your data back out.
Re: Tired of note-taking apps
#80In fact original EverNote implementation (EverNote 2.0) used physical notebook metaphor.
Notes appeared as an "endless tape":
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Two-thirds-of-app-users-in-U...
I think we (initial EverNote dev team [1]) were first who came up with reasonable virtual list implementation for notes.
The metaphor of notes tape (a.k.a. "writing notes down") was quite natural for most of people, that's why EverNote got so many users initially. The key point was to add powerful search tools (including OCR and image recognition) and categorization (tags) on top of that tape.
Just in case: Sciter's SDK contains sample implementation[2] of such virtual tape: https://quark.sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/vtape.pn...
[1] https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...
[2] https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/tree/master/samples/%2...