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Note Taking in 2021

blog.dornea.nu

91–100 of 213 posts

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#92

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.…

As a person who also hates the stupid split screen, I think you will like https://bangle.io , it is WYSIWYG local note taking app.

It saves notes in markdown but provides you with a pretty interface. The goal of this project is to provide a nice interface like notion while keeping the data in users machine in a human readable format.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#93
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 using Roam and quite happy, though I'm growing kind of frustrated that it's pretty much impossible to get anything in there quickly on an iPhone other than opening Roam in Safari, waiting for the spinner to finish, then paste, and an iOS Shortcuts workflow on their site that's broken.

But other than that, it's the first notes app that really clicks for me. It's very fast (they do lots of things in the local browser, I think), plus I've never been able to work with categories or folders, everytime I try I quickly end up with such a lot of categories that they're not really useful anymore, and I find myself wasting time and energy figuring out the best category for a particular item, and then I still don't find it again. With Roam I don't have to do any of that, as it's just a graph, I just dump things in my Daily Notes, add a bunch of hashtags, and it'll show up on all the hashtag pages and in search. It can do a lot more that I haven't looked into yet (some kind of graph search I think?), but that alone is a total game changer for me.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#94
Tried Tiddlywiki based on recommendations on this page. Started nice and saved few pages, could update the settings etc. Then updated the setting to widen the wiki column size and suddenly all the links (like Home/Settings etc) stopped working with exception of Theme/Appearance and Save. Thankfully didn't put a lot of content in it. I guess I'll have to continue with dokuwiki + my plaintext markdown note setup.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#95
post #52

I grew up learning using pen and paper,I will stick to that. Younger digital native generation wants to go all digital? totally ok with me.just we have to learn to agree to disagree.

Similar here, pen and paper for almost all notes. If I want to keep it for longer I might add it on my personal wiki. But I try to keep it simple and stupid.

I feel people spend too much time focusing on how to make/digitalize notes instead of just make notes.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#96
I dumped all note-taking tools and just use Sublime. I took the idea of timestamp-based ids from Zettelkasten and simplified it even more. My setup now is:

Create text file named `YYYY-MM-DD Title of the Note.txt`. Save to a folder. Write freeform.

I think it's important to understand one concept of note-taking:

You can either spend more time organizing to spend less time retrieving information later. Or you can spend less time organizing and (slightly) more time retrieving information.

If you're starting out or don't refer to older notes that often, it's a better idea to just dump everything with as little friction as possible and use a search tool to find information.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#97
I think plain text is a pretty bad medium for note taking, at least with regards to how my brain functions. I want pictures and audio and bookmarks to websites and embed pdfs into it. I don't want to have to worry about where i'm storing the media relative to my notes files, they should just be a part of it as soon as I drop it into it. And sometimes i want to rearrange bits spatially. Dragging each part around the 'canvas' to help make sense of everything in a way so the scattered thoughts in my head can be considered and potentially organized in a way that makes sense. I know that this also falls more into "brainstorming" but that is largely what my notes are used for. Plain text just doesn't really fulfill my needs.

I think Curio [1] is probably the closest thing to what I want in my head, though one of those HUGE downsides to software like this (and why plaintext is vastly preferred by the HN crowd) is that it's not at all portable or even necessarily decipherable. If Zengobi disappears or I lose access to their software then I'm just out of luck, which has made me hesitant to even try using it and why despite my feelings about it, a great deal of notes I've written are simply in plain text.

If anyone has suggestions for solutions that are like this, I'm all ears.

[1] https://www.zengobi.com/curio/

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#98
post #75
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time for me to shine! I use 2 giant plain-text files. One for notes. The other for to-dos. I use git to sync to a private git repo using my own app https://github.com/tanin47/git-notes (work with Mac, windows, Linux) My priority is that I want my notes to live forever. Using GitHub seems to achieve that purpose. (I used many notes app before which I threw away when moving to a new app)

I am curious how many people at least tried Git/GitHub in their note keeping journey to keep their notes safe and secure and accessible.

I've been using git as my storage and sync location for a couple of years now. Use it with Obsidian on my Mac, Working Copy is pulling and pushing the repo on my iOS device. At some point I also used the Gollum Wiki to have it available on the web as well.

It's just important to have automated triggers to push and pull things to avoid conflicts. That's possible with Shortcuts on iOS and there's a git-plugin for Obsidian as well.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#99
post #70
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

e2e encryption is not trying to solve the problem you describe. If I'm going to open and view private notes on a non-private machine, no amount of encryption will help me.

The whole point of e2e encryption is to make it impossible for anyone other than the intended recipients to access the information. So conceptually, the ends of e2e are people, not devices.

I think the parent has a valid point in that terminating the encrypted channel at the device level leaves a pretty gaping hole in the not so rare event that people are forced to use employer provided devices at least some of the time.

There's a reverse issue as well though. It may well be the intention of employers (or even a legal requirement) to stop employees from syphoning off company data through some encrypted channel that IT has no control over.

So in some cases the assumption you're making that device = user may be an unavoidable compromise.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#100
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.

Just looked at it and it is promising. One question: the price is free but there seems to be in app purchases but I haven't found what they are despite actively looking for them.

Anyone knows what they are? It makes a ton of difference if it is a mandatory monthly plan that kicks in after I migrated everything, or skins or optional collaboration features etc.

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