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Note Taking in 2021

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Re: Note Taking in 2021

#151

Post by jpindar »

jrm4 wrote: 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…

> Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately

Is this necessary? Would it be acceptable to say "Any hypothetical can open it up and use it immediately"?

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#152

Post by okprod »

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've used everything from Evernote to Emacs (primarily for text manipulation and org-mode project/task tracking), Bear to Apple Notes, Workflowy to OmniOutliner, etc. I had been keeping a lot in Apple Notes but then I must have synced incorrectly somehow because text I had written on my desktop disappeared after I wrote text in the same note on my phone, and I couldn't find a way to get it back. I've been using Obsidian (offline) and I really enjoy it.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#153

Post by [deleted] »

gwd wrote: post #117
romwell wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#154

Post by sylens »

petersellers wrote: post #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.

I just wish it had an ability to do Markdown or at least let me drop a code block into my notes

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#155

Post by yinyang_in »

Couldn't find much about notion.so, is there specific reason people here avoid it ?

Is there any similar tool for managing notes via Dropbox/self-hosted, I mean with some control over your notes, but similar interface.

Notion I hate is you don't have any control over your data.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#156

Post by ubermonkey »

0xCMP wrote: post #29
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…

+1 for Notes, but I use Notes as like my scratch/dumping area and then move things into Notion. I make an Inbox note in both to just dump stuff and then move it around. In my Notion I have a "Knowledge Garden" page which is like this hyper linked super wiki page of all my knowledge and as you dig in to the links it gets deeper. (e.g. a toggle for "computers" with bunch of paragraphs talking about [Cloud] and [AWS (Cl…

I can't help myself when it comes to trying new notepads/notetaking tools, so obviously I just signed up for Notion, but:

My own setup is pen & paper first, and then into emacs orgmode. The trouble with this is that, well, it's not GREAT on mobile. The bonus with this is that it's the only tool I've yet seen that can give me a corpus of notes that can ALSO contain intermingled complex TODO items.

It seems super dumb that OneNote doesn't do this. You CAN mark something as a ToDo in OneNote, but it's just decoration; it has no semantic meaning. If OneNote had the ability to show a "ToDos" tab that was generated automatically based on the todo-tags in the notebook, it would be a much more powerful tool.

I mean, there are reasons to avoid it (MSFT, proprietary files), but it's a really powerful and well-distributed tool. Lots of folks in corporate jobs probably can't get access to arbitrary things, but OneNote is part of Office.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#157

Post by least »

Siira wrote: post #149
least wrote: post #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 '…

The problem isn’t with plaintext, but with lazy development and lock-in dark patterns. If you look at org-mode, it can do a lot of these things (perhaps even all of them on the GUI emacs), while keeping it plain-text. It, of course, needs the necessary elisp to properly display such a rich plain-text file, but things are still pretty accessible in a normal text editor. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to se…

No matter how badly I want org-mode to be the solution here (and it admittedly covers a lot of people’s needs) there is nothing about plain text files that will enable me to move objects and rich media around in 2D space. Of course in org-mode you could handle metadata of blobs of data and include things like coordinates but plain text doesn’t really have any concept of 2D space. Any sort of rich media you want to embed other than images require a different view like web view or pdf tools but doesn’t naturally embed inside of the text file. Would it be impossible to do? Probably not, it’s emacs. But org-mode as it is right now certainly doesn’t cover most of these requirements.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#158

Post by twobitshifter »

ntaso wrote: post #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 spen…

This is basically org journal. With a quick search you can find everything you need. I agree the tagging aspect and organization is overkill for many purposes, but the benefits is that it might help you remember related topics that a search would not have turned up.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#159

Post by notslow »

milkers wrote: post #75
tanin wrote: 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 use Notable[1] and SparkleShare[2] to automatically sync notes with git. [1] https://notable.app [2] https://www.sparkleshare.org

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#160

Post by ubermonkey »

jpindar wrote: post #151
jrm4 wrote: 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…

> Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately Is this necessary? Would it be acceptable to say "Any hypothetical can open it up and use it immediately"?

No, it wouldn't be, but that's because it's literally an entirely different idea.

You're looking for offense or problematic language where none exists.

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