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Tired of note-taking apps

akkshaya.blog

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Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#171

Post by linuxdaemon »

jasonv wrote: post #142
dmje wrote: post #128

Funnily enough, I don’t think there is a really good one. There’s lots that almost do it but not quite. - Evernote: no note linking - Bear: lovely but no web or android version - OneNote: appalling in the way only MS can be - SimpleNotes: too simple - Zoho: too ...urgh - Keep: too Googley - Apple notes: too Appley - Standard Notes: too buggy I’m clearly a fussy sod. But really, just a nice, oss, local files, ability…

What I really don't understand about OneNote is the default to a white-board-like free form placement mode for text blocks. If you move it a little, accidentally, it's not aligned the same as the other notes. This really put me off when I first started using it, and at a client site, it's really the only option. Otherwise, the organization system is something I've come to like/live-with, but still -- why the boxes th…

That stupid placement thing is the "feature" I hate the most about onenote. Sometimes that is a benefit and the kind of note you'd want to make. But this seems like an easy fix of having two note types and being able to pick a global option of which way to default, and giving a drop-down option of what kind of note you wish to create if you wanted a one-off different than the default . Having it always be up to the user to place text frame objects is annoying when most of the time generic text notes is what you want.

I personally don't care for the skeuomorphic organization of notebooks, tabs, and pages. But maybe that's just me :)

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#172

Post by perrohunter »

kawfey wrote: post #148
sneak wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Notes are not end to end encrypted. Thanks to programs like PRISM, US military intelligence has realtime access to the plaintext contents of much of the information you store in iCloud (including notes and photos), without a court order. That, for me, makes it a nonstarter.

You must have some very interesting notes. I think for most of us, the US government wouldn't be particularly interested in our musings, but what do you suggest?

The important question here is: What do they know? Who decides what they do with that? Who decides who decides?

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#173

Post by stu2b50 »

Lammy wrote: post #158
kawfey wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have some very interesting notes. I think for most of us, the US government wouldn't be particularly interested in our musings, but what do you suggest?

It's amazing that people can witness POTUS 44→45 and still make "well I have nothing to hide" arguments :/

They're not saying they have nothing to hide, they're saying they're not joting down quick notes of anything they have to hide.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#174

Post by ntnsndr »

flipjsio wrote: post #169

I save my notes as text files (markdown format). It is universal so its not dependent to any app. It is searchable and future-proof. I save them in Apple iCloud so it auto-syncs to my iPhone and use iA Writer app to read/write to it. I used to use GitHub and git app (Working Copy app) on my phone to sync between devices.

Same, except I use NextCloud to share across machines. And edit in Emacs. I still have trouble seeing what I am missing by using simple, universal files instead of some lock-in app. Any extra feature seems to come at the cost of losing the benefits of constraint.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#175

Post by heyoni »

gverrilla wrote: post #53
vijucat wrote: post #12

My 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…

The secret here is about the input: a key stroke on the keyboard is always the same movement, more or less, while letters are each a different symbol/drawing. There's very little creativity to pressing keys on a keyboard, while handwritten text is unique to each person, in time.

Every keystroke isn’t the same if that’s how deep you’re going to get into it. You never use the exact amount of force, or fall from exactly the same angle when typing either.

It has nothing to do with that. There’s nothing inherently creative about writing. But it adds value in that it forces you to spend more time on a single thought while writing, which is not the case while typing. On a computer, you write your notes so much quicker that by the time you’re done, you barely put any thought into it.

I have so notes I don’t even remember creating, but that never happens with handwritten ones.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#176

Post by lukebyear »

tedmiston wrote: post #25
koheripbal wrote: post #9

I've tried many different systems, and the one I settled on is a single simple doc. It's the only method I've used for over a year. You can do google doc or office doc, but the key for me was having one doc that I just keep prepending to. Each day i'll add the date yyyy-mm-dd (dow) in bold and then list my work for the day... I use hyperlinks to dedicated docs or online guides for more involved projects (quick ctrl-k…

An outliner app like WorkFlowy (YC S10) or TaskPaper is nice for adding nesting and the ability to zoom in and out. You can also directly link to any node, at least in WorkFlowy. My approach is similar to yours except it's one hierarchical entry per day. https://workflowy.com/ https://www.taskpaper.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner

I’ve landed on the same approach, in WorkFlowy. I’ll tag lines #todo for tasks, or a project-specific hashtag, so it’s really easy to see everything I’ve written about a subject. Only two months in but it’s great and very low-friction. Using RocketBook to merge in handwritten notes I make in the mornings and evenings sometimes.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#177

Post by nabilhat »

dmje wrote: post #128

Funnily enough, I don’t think there is a really good one. There’s lots that almost do it but not quite. - Evernote: no note linking - Bear: lovely but no web or android version - OneNote: appalling in the way only MS can be - SimpleNotes: too simple - Zoho: too ...urgh - Keep: too Googley - Apple notes: too Appley - Standard Notes: too buggy I’m clearly a fussy sod. But really, just a nice, oss, local files, ability…

I have the same frustration. The real split seems to be on local files / encryption. I ran into a couple that had encryption stapled on as an afterthought and handle the encryption/decryption in storage, which misses the point. Some use keepass for secure notes, also a clunky hack. The closest I found was Tiddlywiki, which can encrypt local files (but only if it's a single html file). I don't like Tiddlywiki, but that's what I'm using.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#178

Post by aftergibson »

I'm liking PARA with Notion right now. I make pretty heavy use of linked databases to keep track of things day to day and I can get a high level view of what I've got going on/completed for reviews/1:1s/when people ask what I did 2 quarters ago. I can throw a bunch of varied data formats into Notion too, which is great.

This is all only for work-life however, normal-life doesn't fit into this approach or more specifially I don't want to ruin life outside work with this approach(believe me I tried, it's a great way to feel like a constant failure). I have yet to find anything useful for non-work insights. Nothing fits, but maybe it doesn't matter?

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#179

Post by read_if_gay_ »

kostarelo wrote: post #157
hliyan wrote: post #44

I believe I shared this once before. After twenty years of trying every possible note taking app from Word 95 to Notion, this is now the entirety of my note taking app: #!/bin/bash read text _date=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d') echo -e "\n$_date: $text" >> ~/Dropbox/notes/stream.txt

So you only take notes while on your actual computer. You never take notes besides when you are on your computer.

This can also work on mobile if you SSH into a cloud VM for example.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#180

Post by ufmace »

koheripbal wrote: post #9

I've tried many different systems, and the one I settled on is a single simple doc. It's the only method I've used for over a year. You can do google doc or office doc, but the key for me was having one doc that I just keep prepending to. Each day i'll add the date yyyy-mm-dd (dow) in bold and then list my work for the day... I use hyperlinks to dedicated docs or online guides for more involved projects (quick ctrl-k…

This is a lot like what I've been using for over 5 years now. Key points for me are:

* Plain text only, no graphics, formatting, outlining, tagging, categories, etc. These are all distractions to actually getting your point down and don't really add any value, don't get sucked into them.

* Ability to do simple text search and go to specific date. Big lifesaver for any problem that looks like "So exactly what did I do on this one specific day 3 months ago?"

Paper is nice for avoiding distracting formatting details. But losing out on free text search is too much of a drag.

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