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Note Taking in 2021

blog.dornea.nu

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Re: Note Taking in 2021

#201

Post by mark_l_watson »

jdshaffer wrote: post #198
mark_l_watson wrote: post #104

I spent years experimenting with note taking/personal knowledge bases. After moving on from Evernote, I even wrote my own clone in Clojure and Clojurescript with a Firefox plugin for web capture. I am now done with such time wasting nonsense. For several years I have been using Apple Notes (all my Apple devices except Apple Watch, and web browser version on Linux). I bought a simple app that exports all notes to a st…

Ah! Backups have always been by worry. What simple app are you using for the "save as TXT" backups?

There is a macOS app called Exporter. Search for "backup Notes" in App Store.

EDIT: I just tried running it, and nothing happened. Might be a beta macOS Monterrey problem.

EDIT 2: this just worked for me, needs an iPad, but copies Notes as markdown files that then also show up on my Mac: https://wimpostma.com/blog/how-to-export-and-backup-notes-fr...

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#202

Post by PaulRobinson »

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…

If you like Notes, but want something you can get a workflow together on, I recommend NotePlan. Hits all your buttons, and I’m a fan, in no small part that it doesn’t close things into a proprietary ecosystem or storage mechanism.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#203

Post by fluxent »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #144

I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social. In grad school I was for a year part of a small study group. We shared notes, on paper and aloud. It made each of us far, far better at the subject than we could have been on our own. And we were at most 7 people (sometimes only 3). When developing Hode[1], and when helping develop Semantic Synchrony[2], I imagined so…

I'm trying to encourage note-app-makers to (a) follow the name-as-URL pattern, and (b) render as HTML not text-in-JS, and (c) support backlinks.

These create affordances for loosely-coupled connection-making, I think.

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/DigitalGardenStandards

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#204

Post by qwerty456127 »

I would actually love to use pen and paper. The problem is I have very hard time reading the notes I have taken when it was important to write fast. I'm not a great typist either but recognizing extremely heavily misspelled (because of fast blind-typing I have never learnt to do right) words consisting of actually readable letters is much easier than deciphering the weird glyphs I produce when fast-writing.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#205

Post by lardissone »

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 hate that you need to manage your media by yourself. I mean, I cannot attach images to my note without doing some extra effort (upload to vault somewhere and link to it). I just want it to be more efficient.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#206

Post by Sophistifunk »

gofreddygo wrote: post #54
Sophistifunk wrote: post #22

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.

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…

"I want something that's not plain text"

"Just use plain text"

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#207

Post by Sophistifunk »

markus_zhang wrote: post #23
Sophistifunk wrote: post #22

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.

If not markdown then what's your recommendations?

I don't care how it's stored, as long as I can export it for backups' sake. I don't want to see markdown, I don't want to use it for formatting text, I don't want to use it as a user-interface, and I certainly don't want text jumping around and reformatting stuff as I type.

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#208

Post by romwell »

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?

I never ran into an issue of needing a hack to save a file. It works just as downloading any file would.

What was the issue that you ran into?

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#209

Post by romwell »

bachmeier wrote: post #132
gwd wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IMO you'll want to either run a local webserver or set up the Github/Gitlab saver. The other solutions are clumsy.

The other solutions don't require an install though, and are thus super portable :)

Re: Note Taking in 2021

#210

Post by romwell »

japanuspus wrote: post #121
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…

Thanks. Spent half an hour playing around with it, and must admit that it seems magical. Implementation aside, the whole idea of splitting information into minimal parts _and then displaying your whole route_ on one page is a stroke of genius. The hardest part coming from the outside is grokking where the state (/database) lives: I soon found out that you could save everything in a new .html-file, and also got github…

I started with a single .html file, and then moved to Node.js. You don't need to look much into it, since you can import data from the .html file.

The only hiccup I've had so far was that I could reference images in the same folder with an [img[relative-path-to-file.jpg]] syntax from the HTML file, but not from the Node.JS version (you need to "import" images first). Wasn't a big deal for me, since I just had to manually update an image or two. Most of my notes in that wiki were just text.

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