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Note Taking in 2021

blog.dornea.nu

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Re: Note Taking in 2021

#11

Post by crossroadsguy »

I am back to Simplenote after trying too many alternatives. nvAlt on Mac and Simplenote app on iPhone.

Bear would have been fine if it wasn’t subscription based and allowed me to choose a sync option like dropbox or iCloud sync and let me have local files. FSNotes has years , at this speed, ahead of it. Everything else is just sad Electron - web apps masquerading as native apps. No I don’t like Joplin interface.

Also, among Apple cloud offerings or iCloud suite Notes.app is the only one probably that doesn’t suck disgustingly. But then I don’t trust Apple to keep the sync working fine as they deprecate apps too soon on older OS versions.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#12

Post by hnrj95 »

tptacek wrote: post #6

This is going to be one of those threads where everyone rattles off their own note-taking setup, which is great and all. So: There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and…

i find org roam to be really excellent

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#15

Post by KTallguy »

I tried Obsidian, Zettlr, Standard Notes, Dendron, even tried taking notes in Scrivener.

In the end I bit the bullet and started using Emacs + Org-Mode/Org-Roam. The flexibility and customization are unparallelled. I use it for to-dos, for random scribbles, for in-depth musings. Categorizing thoughts and linking them together is so much easier than any other software I've used.

The first few months are really tough, and for someone who has never used Vim or other terminal style interfaces before learning shortcuts took a while. But after 6 months, I can't go back.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#16

Post by swozey »

nxc18 wrote: post #4

Obsidian.MD works pretty well and meets all of the stated requirements. Everything is markdown on disk, but the tool is maintaining an index for linking things. The index powers search and graphing, but otherwise everything works just as well in VS Code. It works really well for me, with the one downside being it is an electron app. Because it is all markdown based, you could use a native tool of choice (I use Ulysse…

I use Obsidian and one thing I'm not getting about peoples concerns with e2e encryption - does nobody realize once it's decrypted on the devices you use (work laptops, etc since it's your ubiquitous note taking app) that anyone with access to your laptop (IT) has full access to every single .md file downloaded to your system?

People talk about encrypting their vaults and everything else all the time. I've never seen anyone mention the fact that your entire life of notes (whatever they may be) are now completely plain-text (well, markdown) files accessible to anyone with access to your machine. And IT will be well aware that you just dumped 10000 files into a directory, although hopefully they think you're just pulling git clones and don't go further.

So, what, do I not use markdown when at work? Do I not care? Do I stifle my posts in case anyone at work reads them? It just seems like a terrible system for very personal note taking.

Does throwing the stuff in icloud mitigate this? Gdrive? Dropbox? Even encrypting a folder gives admins access to all of my files as soon as I decrypt it. If I use an online app that I have to auth to and the connection is encrypted unless they're doing DPI they're not going to see any of my notes...

This seems like a huge problem with markdown notes.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#17

Post by bachmeier »

I anticipated that "in 2021" would mean a discussion of the recent tools for taking notes that have exploded (Roam, Obsidian, backlinks, etc.) This could have just as well been "Note Taking in 2011". Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but the title is misleading.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#18

Post by jrm4 »

Gotta get in the greatest (IMHO of course.)

https://zim-wiki.org

I'm continually baffled at how the rest of the world hasn't discovered this, but it could be because I sort of live at the margins of "ultra geek" and "normie."

Local, self-hosted "wiki-like" tool. You write notes, it saves them, supports links and todos and calendars etc. Tons of plugins for math, git, etc etc.

The killer aspect, I think, though. Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately and it's very useful. But because it saves as plain-text (Markdown-ish) with links and pages equalling files and folders, it's always infinitely extensible with Bash or other scripts. For me, it's all the extensibility of org-mode without, I mean, you know.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#19

Post by tptacek »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #9
tptacek wrote: post #6

This is going to be one of those threads where everyone rattles off their own note-taking setup, which is great and all. So: There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and…

I followed the same trajectory as you from Notes to Bear, but have ended up on Craft. It might do too much for you, but I’ve honestly never used an app that is both so featureful and some beautiful.

Craft is like a macOS-native Notion, right? My notes are stored serverside?

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#20

Post by mr_o47 »

Interesting article !

Note taking is very important as it helps you retain stuff and helps you learn better in general. I am huge on taking notes whenever I'm learning something new and the strategy that worked for me best was using markdown in vim to take notes and use git to save them.

Last but not least if you are a huge note taker I would suggest using Mdbook(A project powered by Rust) as it allows you to write in markdown and uses full-text search feature which makes it easier when searching for something specific in your notes.

Anyways would love to hear from you guys what tools have worked for you guys when taking notes

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