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Note Taking in 2021

blog.dornea.nu

41–50 of 213 posts

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#41
Whenever one of these threads pops up I'm always surprised at the lack of responses for OneNote.

For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices, supports the iPad pencil, supports OCR and text searching in images, has native apps, and it's free.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#43
Yet another opinion :)

I tried emacs and org mode but my vim muscle memory was too strong. I ended up mostly sticking with vim-wiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki I have a very small script that syncs my local wiki(s) with a private GitHub repo. I set them all up to be in markdown.

I use Google Keep for just random stuff I have to jot down but don't really care about organizing.

Honestly though, even plain markdown doesn't work for a lot of types of notes I take. For personal stuff I find myself using Notion a lot. The LaTeX support is pretty great.

At work I've actually kind of fallen in love with Confluence. Even though the editor can be a little cumbersome, the search functionality is great the pages just look really nice. Confluence mobile viewing/editing also works really nice. Now that I'm saying (er, typing) all of this out loud, I almost want to switch to Confluence for personal notes instead of Notion haha.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#44

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…

Think we are in the same boat, although I never really made it away from Simplenote.

Currently not using the actual Simplenote app, instead it is Byword on iOS, nvpy on Linux, ResophNotes on Windows and nvAlt on OS X (and syncing via Dropbox). For many years I used a small app called "notesy" on iOS, but that disapeared completely at some point -- never found out who made it.

Have been thinking about joplin, but I never even tried it since I have a lot of toolchain set up around scripted edits to files (e.g. my timesheet it built by scanning notes, and I clock in and out of projects with a small script triggered from Launchy).

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#45

I just want something that's not an Electron app, not plain text, and not bloody markdown. I hate markdown, and I hate that it's taken over everything.

Having been making a go at several of the suggested applications, which all use MD, I’m also starting to like it less and less.

I find the side-by-side panes of some just a hilariously stupid waste of space. And the editors that at least do live “previews” feel so janky when editing; watching pound signs appear and disappear as you move off a line, or having text shift around as bold and italics markers come and go.

No, I don’t need all the formatting capabilities of a word processor. But there’s a reason why MD is often pretty-fied: it’s damn ugly and noisy as hell.

I get that people want a “pure” text format for longevity’s sake; but just demand a text export-in MD if you like. But working in MD is crazy making; it’s ugly, distracting, and worst of all, the “raw” form is nothing like documents and formatting we’re all used to, so even if you get used to it, all of the other documents in the world you interact with will still be using real bold, italics, and headers of increasing size.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#46
post #18

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 h…

Have you tried TiddlyWiki [0] which is running the brainfck.org Zettelkasten mentioned in the article. Seems like a very similar concept.

I am intrigued by the concept and thinking about trying it out, so any input on picking one or the other would be great.

[0]: https://tiddlywiki.com/

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#47
post #30
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…

Joplin is one I highly recommend: https://joplinapp.org/ Cross platform, open source, and offers encryption.

Thanks for posting this. I have somehow completely missed joplin.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#48
The article mentions Org mode a lot. If you want to try it, but are no Emacs user or also want to use it on mobile (iOS or Android), there is a FOSS solution called organice which I use daily for everything from notes to private and professional project management: https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#49
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'm just hoping that Bear 2.0 (or whatever the big next version they've been working on for a long time is called) doesn't undo Bear. While Bear isn't perfect and there are a few features that are sorely missing (searching within a note on mobile being probably tops for me), it is overall very very good. It is elegant, syncs seamlessly, feels like the native app that it is, and has just been a staple for me for years.

A lot of the newer hotness like Craft, Notion, Obsidian, etc. have a bazillion features but are anything but lean, fast, targeted apps that I want in a notes solution. The Bear folks get tons of pressure to feature it up. While they do need to evolve it (the appearance of stagnation isn't great for an annual subscription app), I hope they keep Bear Bear.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#50

Whenever one of these threads pops up I'm always surprised at the lack of responses for OneNote. For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices, supports the iPad pencil, supports OCR and text searching in images, has native apps, and it's free.

I used OneNote for a long time. It's not bad, but it has some quirks that I wasn't fond of: why are notes in these weird draggable boxes? When I decided to export my notes to a different format it was a huge pain. I ended up creating a keyboard macro script and cycling through each note one by one. Once I exported all my notes to word documents, I was able to convert them to markdown/org from there.
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