Remarkable 2?
That's a tool that lets you combine the flexibility of paper and some of the features of digital, but just using it doesn't tell you how to write your notes, how to organize them, etc.
Note Taking in 2021
111–120 of 213 posts
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#112I like the Synology Notes app well enough (desktop and iPhone apps), and it's locally hosted on my NAS which is nice.
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#113The way I classify things is as follows: 1. Notes 2. Tasks These are not mutually exclusive. And the fact that they are not mutually exclusive is, in my opinion, one of the major obstacles in being able to develop a really good process for taking notes and then operating on those notes. I frankly don’t care much for any note software out there because the note taking part is generally easy so I just default to Apple…
I'd also want to integrate notes & TODO - but also time-tracking, i.e. the ability to "click" on any note/TODO and log time against it. Perhaps a TODO can be a note with a tag like "#todo"/"#todo-important"/etc, and time-logs can be child notes..
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#114I 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 '…
Onenote does all those things. clunkily in the case of free arrangement, but hold ALT and it will do it.
In my crazy moments, I imagine porting Onenote's files to a linux program for read/writing Onenote pre-Windows 10 local files.
Then I remember there's almost no way I'm up to finishing that task, even if the file format is open, and I never get past the quagmire of 'what IS desktop linux, is it a .deb, a .rpm, must I use C or C++ i wanna use F#, GTK or QT and strange licenses and and'...then i fire back up my Windows pc and jot down my thoughts, embedded images, files, audio and all right in one file, and decide not to start yet another software project.
Onenote is just about irreplaceable for the following use cases, but open source stuff is close.
roam and notion dont even get on my list
1. notes are stored in an offline file
notewiki and wikidpad falls short here.
4. viewable images inline
cherrytree iirc falls short here? or maybe not but it deserves to be on the list ranked better than 'cloud notes'
5. tables
it is below here where joplin falls short afaik
7. ink and touch features
it is below here where xournal++ falls short though they have a ticket open to eventually use a newer file format that would support this use case...and then i plan to switch if at all practical
2. embed files right in the same file so i only have to sync / backup one file, not any linked files all over the disk
3. image / audio embeds that display/play the media inline
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
When not near a keyboard, use paper. When near one, use plain text. For your sanity, keep metadata embedded in each file. I keep k:v pairs. One per line. e.g "topic: D3", "subject: scales", "context: Side Project" Use grep, awk (whatever). Slice, group, dice, join, merge, backup as and how you want. A bash-like shell is the only dependency. Check into git regularly. Some scripts I use ## group by topic. search for li…
What if I want to include an image in my notes?
Onenote has no markdown, no electron, not just plaintext, has images
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#116I did a lot of research on the topic when I started my university studies in microengineering. At the start of uni, there's a lot of money and time being spent by students to set up the "best note taking environment" to ensure their success, usually resulting in expensive iPad Pros with Apple Pencils or the Windows Surface equivilent. In the end I chose a simple piece of software for my 2012 Thinkpad: OneNote. Why? E…
I'm with you, Onenote has a unique niche.
My pet theory is that Onenote can be seen by some HN types as too pedestrian (therefore not worth mentioning) because it is so popular yet is looked down on because it is made by Microsoft. MS is often looked down on by linux-first-everything-is-markdown techies because of their 90s and Windows 10 sins.
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
I've been using Tiddly Wiki for years, and can very much recommend it. To start, all you need is a template HTML file. No installation, no nothing - it's self-hosted within the HTML! You save changes by clicking the "Save" button, which generates an HTML with changes . If you really want, you can install a Node.js version which saves changes automatically. But you don't need it to start. I mostly use Tiddly Wiki to k…
I started using TiddlyWiki many years ago and loved the idea, until browsers started cracking down on webpages saving files. Has that changed significantly, or do you still need some hack to work around it?
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#118I 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 '…
Onenote does all those things. clunkily in the case of free arrangement, but hold ALT and it will do it. In my crazy moments, I imagine porting Onenote's files to a linux program for read/writing Onenote pre-Windows 10 local files. Then I remember there's almost no way I'm up to finishing that task, even if the file format is open, and I never get past the quagmire of 'what IS desktop linux, is it a .deb, a .rpm, mus…
Thanks for this. I'm aware of OneNote being pretty flexible but have never really committed to using it for any length of time to really see if it's what I want or not. It seems to have similar pitfalls that Curio does, though the plus side being that Microsoft is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon and tend to be pretty good about supporting its Office suite well.
Xournal++ [1] I had never heard of. It doesn't seem like it's what I'm personally looking for but what an interesting project and definitely one worth looking at!
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#119I need help in making notes. Whenever I make some notes, the problem with my notes is that I don't revisit them because they seem to lack information on my first read. So I go back to the source and read it again. Each time I do it, I get new insight. So everytime I see these note taking posts, I don't get the point of making notes. How often do you guys revisit your notes?
I wrote my notes by topics in the form of flashcards so I revisit them randomly.
I also have a journal but it is not meant to be reviewed.
Re: Note Taking in 2021
#120I just use Google Keep + OneNote + Google Docs as an extensive, interlinked knowledge system. It is very similar to the Zettelkasten method, where Google Keep is the “slip-box”, and then once a week I organize and interlink the notes in a more extensive Google Doc system I call my “second brain”. Best part? By default I can search and retrieve everything from my spotlight search on iPhone or Google Drive. It indexes everything really well and you can interlink any part with Google Doc bookmarks and normal HTML links.