9 ms·

How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

217 points by hachibu 6y ago

herodoturtle 6y ago
I've built a similar system from scratch - also using this Dropbox daily notes file technique - except my script generates folders and sub folders for each year (YYYY) and each month within each year (YYY-MM) whenever I instantiate a file on a certain day. Makes long term management much easier than having thousands of files in one folder. Same grep principles apply (and I use hashtags within my notes to track keywords).
- hachibu 6y ago
  That's a very good idea. I might use that for my script. Thanks!
- asdff 6y ago
  Why even break it down? If you are using grep and presumably editors that can go to a pattern anyway you might as well write to a single file.
  - herodoturtle 6y ago
    I also manage my notes on the go by opening the Dropbox app on my phone and editing the txt files from there. Having subfolders helps with navigation on the Dropbox app.
  - hiq 6y ago
    In case of infrequent synchronizations you reduce the number of conflicts by having separate files rather than a single big one.
- jdshaffer 6y ago
  I'm terrible at scripting, but I'm curious how you handled that. Do you mind sharing the script you created?
  - herodoturtle 6y ago
    Sure thing. It's a script called "d" (for diary) that I keep in my home folder. I try minimise mouse usage, so I've got a keyboard shortcut for opening a terminal, and then in the terminal I run ./d === start of script === #!/bin/bash y=`date +%Y`; ym=`date +%Y-%m`; ymd=`date +%Y-%m-%d`; if [ ! -d "Dropbox/diary/$y" ]; then mkdir Dropbox/diary/$y fi if [ ! -d "Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym" ]; then mkdir Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym fi vim Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym/$ymd.txt === end script === I could probably refactor the hell out of this. But I'm an old beard that prefers explicit readability. For example I don't need to use YYYY-MM for the month sub-folders (I could just use MM), and similarly I don't need the full YYYY-MM-DD.txt for the day files (I could just use DD.txt) - so your preference may vary. And yeah I use .txt files because I can edit those natively in the Dropbox app on my phone too. Don't need any special apps installed to manage my notes on the go. In terms of the contents of the files, I've kept the searchability really simple by using hashtags, example: === Dropbox/diary/2020/12/04.txt === ## #keyword1 #keyword2 Here be notes on keyword1 and keyword2. ## #keyword3 Here be notes captured later on the same day on keyword3. These can span multiple lines if I want. ## #keyword4 Here be notes on keyword4 captured even later in the day. === I use the single hashtag keyword system for quick grepping (and future indexing if I want to build a searchable database out of this one day), and the double hashtag ## at the start of each note snippet so that I can parse individual snippets more easily. Hope that helps! :)
    - jdshaffer 6y ago
      Thank you so much! I really appreciate it! (And sorry for the way delayed response... I went to bed shortly after posting.)
    - aGHz 6y ago
      Quick tip, you could replace the ifs with mkdir -p Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym
      - herodoturtle 6y ago
        Neat, thanks!
- nickjj 6y ago
  This is what I do too. I have 20 years of notes saved like this. I also open sourced a zero dependency Bash script that handles this at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes https://github.com/nickjj/notes It supports adding notes in 3 different ways: notes hello world appends the text to the YYYY-MM.txt dated file echo cool | notes same as above except you can pipe in text notes opens the YYYY-MM.txt file in your configured $EDITOR I use all 3 methods of input on a regular basis depending on what I want to jot down.
aidos 6y ago
Local text files of notes are the best. For me, I go even simpler. I have a single file in my Dropbox folder that I’ve been using for over a decade. To open it, I just use Alfred (and before that, quicksilver). I pop new stuff at the top. Every now and again I search for something way back when. Works really well for me.
Groxx 6y ago
Similar tactic here, has been working extremely well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22279802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22279802 I also set it up to auto-create/open my daily-doc in the background when I open a new terminal session, since days that I do that are days that I most want to take notes. It serves as a very good, very minor reminder to actually write something down. And if I don't write anything, I can just delete empty files later with a trivial `find`.
znpy 6y ago
I just use rednotebook on Linux and it's very good. I have daily notes, a small calendar to navigate to dates in the past/future, a tag cloud populated with words I've written the most, and a search bar that I don't know how it works but usually finds what I'm looking for. It's no fancy system but it's immediate, no dumb nerding and dumb wheel reinvention needed.
harrisonjackson 6y ago
For a long time I had a Zapier setup that did something similar. v1 created a templated note in evernote which I eventually enhanced to a more custom solution. v2 used google cloud print to create a pdf from html and add to my google drive then move it into the Notability folder so I could access it and write on it from the Notability app on my ipad. I loved this because I could also pull in weather, horoscope, daily calvin and hobbes, news headlines, top gitlab issues for my projects and add them to the html template/pdf. Frequently I'd end up physically printing it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
psibi 6y ago
For the past couple of months I have been using org-roam [0] for this and I find it quite effective. Just found out that I have 87 different notes lying around: $ ls *org | wc -l 87 [0] https://www.orgroam.com/ https://www.orgroam.com/
- JohnL4 6y ago
  I just use plain org-mode (orgzly on my phone), storing files on Dropbox (personal) or One Drive (work). AutoHotKey to emacs, then org-capture. (Evernote if I find web content that's good.)
inatreecrown2 6y ago
Very nice! i installed it and will give it a shot. Thanks for sharing!
Brajeshwar 6y ago
I'm still figuring out my own ways. Right now, lots of text/markdown files. I really like "My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file"[1]. 1. https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/ https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/
bravura 6y ago
Yet-another-note-taking-system that doesn't solve my core problem: I want to browse my notes in chronological order AND in thematic order. i.e. I want to do semantic search and automatic topic grouping. [edit: The use-case I have in mind is you are learning about a topic, and your chronological "research notebook" is also an automatic zettlekasten.]
- bayindirh 6y ago
  Zim Wiki?
- zaplin 6y ago
  zettelkasten ? edit: you proposed zettelkasten-like solution just when I posted
- asdff 6y ago
  you can do this all in bash. you could set up a function that takes the text of your note as input along with your metadata and makes a timestamp. then you just index your notes however you'd like.
- blackbear_ 6y ago
  That's easily done in Org mode for Emacs https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/
  - DougBTX 6y ago
    Org mode is something that I've always thought I should look at, but never quite have. One thing I like to do with my notes is to keep a short "todo" list at the top, listed in the order that I'm planning to work on them. Something like: Todo ==== - Fix Widget - Extend Screen - Profit Then if I need to re-prioritise, I re-order: Todo ==== - Profit - Fix Widget - Extend Screen and mark tasks as completed: Todo ==== + Profit - Fix Widget - Extend Screen Once there are too many completed tasks at the top, I move them down into a "Done" section. Is there a way to manage that in Org mode (linking tasks to further notes would be great to have) while keeping items in relative priority order without explicitly setting due dates or priority "scores"?
asdff 6y ago
I prefer keeping it all in one file, less messy since you are using grep anyway: alias note='(date; cat; echo) >> ~/notes.txt'
nicbou 6y ago
I use paper. Digital notes are great if you need them to be available everywhere, or edit them time and time again, but paper is still significantly better for me. I keep my recipes in Keep and on my personal website, because I often amend them. However I discovered that printed recipes are much more pleasant to use. Likewise, I'd much rather have a dirty notebook to sketch and write on when I'm working in the garage, or anywhere that's not my desk
- bayindirh 6y ago
  Pen and paper is frowned upon by people but, they're indispensable for me too. Allows you to concentrate better, the result is much more refined and as an added bonus, fountain pens are nice.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- aidos 6y ago
  Sorry to be “that guy”, but I’ve switched to Remarkable recently and I love it. It’s for people like us who work best on paper.
  - lukaszkups 6y ago
    was about to say something similar, but using OneNote while working on Surface Book 2, taking handwritten notes with Surface Pen. Totally recommends it.
  - cjameskeller 6y ago
    Just got mine a couple weeks back and it's great! The software could use some additional features, but thanks to the open platform, it is getting them from some dedicated users. I've even seen a user run offline OCR on it, and we may soon be able to integrate with metadata to make those notes searchable. Credit to https://github.com/utopiah https://github.com/utopiah , post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jj5yt2/offline_ocr_on_device_no_cloud_no_ssh_on_rm2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jj5yt2/of...
- 6y ago
sharken 6y ago
A nice solution for those that can get by with text-only notes. For storing images I use Microsoft OneNote as more often than not, there is a need to document something with text and images. And search is excellent.
- asdff 6y ago
  One way to work images in text-only notes is to bake in the path names to the image files on your local drive rather than paste an image into the note. If I'm in terminal I can copy that text with the path, hit cmd n "open" cmd v enter and view the image with the system viewer (preview in this case). If I'm looking at the text file in textedit on mac os, I can actually do this from the right click menu under services after highlighting the path name. Could be a good solution if you are tired of onenote's bloat.
tomlockwood 6y ago
I wrote something similar that got a bit of traction on here yonks ago - a bit less elegant than this though. https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn
- syas 6y ago
  Seems useful for daily stand ups (we do dark stand ups at the end of the day). I might give this a go
ekianjo 6y ago
I guess the author has never heard of vim-wiki? > The way it works is that every time I run the script, it opens the note for that day in my editor of choice vimwiki's diary function does that for you under the hood.
- tasuki 6y ago
  Yes, it sounds like they reimplemented 1% of vimwiki...
- w0m 6y ago
  my workflow for stream of conscious notes: \ww I add tags as relevant if I think about it, and for projects/tasks spanning multiple days i'll create a root item. I created a local git repo I try and keep everything checked into; I might push it up to a private github/bitbucket repo eventually, but I haven't been careful with scrubbing credentials from shell snippets so leerly on pushing anywhere remote.
- npsimons 6y ago
  > I guess the author has never heard of vim-wiki? The author, as well as most everyone in the comments here, have apparently never heard of org-mode. Yeah, I can understand that for some people emacs is a non-starter, but trust me, if you want to do it, I can just about guarantee it's possible in org-mode. It's just that flexible, and everyone's org-mode setup is different, customized to their needs.
jareware 6y ago
I feel like Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/) should also get mentioned: storing notes in plain Markdown files, optionally synced via e.g. Dropbox. Bonus points for also having mobile apps that sync with the same backend.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I looked for many alternatives to taking notes and Joplin ended up being what I went with, it's fantastic. I wrote a small script to export my notes to a static website because I figured someone could use the knowledge, even if it's just a brain dump: https://notes.stavros.io/ https://notes.stavros.io/ I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it.
  - hardwaresofton 6y ago
    That is really awesome, this kind of functionality would be a really awesome plugin to Joplin itself somehow. > I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it. Alongside this idea, would you use a browser plugin that shares your bookmarks as a stream? Almost like a cross of the github "X starred Y" stream and Twitter (with none of the social-y features). I favorite a lot of things from day to day and would love to know what others are favoriting/finding as well. Also, somewhat unrelated to that, would you pay for encrypted offsite joplin sync target/backups? I'd love to make it possible to also share-from-joplin for single notes but that feature isn't there yet. The only way to make it happen otherwise would be synchronizing somewhere unencrypted (!) and then asking that somewhere to "publish" your notes. Unfortunately, since joplin doesn't have multiple "profiles" or any way to separate encryption keys or which notes are and aren't encrypted... it's hard to do that as well..
octoberfranklin 6y ago
vim with folding Still the best tree editor I've found. I left emacs for it!
- blackbear_ 6y ago
  Emacs has folding too, so that cannot be the only reason..?
  - octoberfranklin 6y ago
    Yeah emacs has like eleventeen different folding modes. That's the problem. Vim has folding as a basic feature of the editor binary, not some aftermarket script. So editing operations on folded regions always do what you expect.
pitterpatter 6y ago
I tend to have a notes.txt in different folders. One for each project, one for each bug investigation, etc. I'll admit I need to work on a better backup story
srich36 6y ago
For the past few months I’ve been taking markdown notes which are then transformed into HTML and pushed to an s3 bucket for public viewing. Probably not the best solution within this thread but it costs approximately nothing is a great way to get access to a web-based version of your notes anywhere. This allows you to throw extra features in the HTML like searching for files and randomly selecting a note for viewing at your leisure.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I made a comment here with the same idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300423 I love the idea that I have a place to publish random stuff that I don't have to spend lots of time writing, I can just drop a sentence and maybe someone else will find it useful. The big problem is that Google will basically never give you that page in a result, no matter how relevant it may be to your query, because it prefers SEO-rich content farms like Wikihow. I was thinking that a service would at least be easier to search/remember to go to.
ajuc 6y ago
I create "notes" directory on my desktop at work, and each day I start a new text file named $DATE_$JIRATASKNO_$DECRIPTION.txt Whenever I copy-paste stuff that might be useful I leave it there. Stuff like stacktraces, class:line_number when I was searching where something happens, links to webpages related to the task. I was keeping a notepad tab open at all times anyway to keep context when I was doing something (otherwise I forget when I'm back from lunch and have to search again). So this is only making this context permanent and searcheable. Then when I do something 3 months later and get a stacktrace I vaguely remember or other problem that I can imagine what the keyword would be - I just grep in that directory and find all the context needed, including jira task, commits, all related webpages, etc. I also write short free-text notes there, but these are usually very short and less important than the copy-pasted stuff.
sshb 6y ago
Also pretty elegant tool: https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn
olsgaarddk 6y ago
Inspired by similar plaintext to-do discussions on HN I also built my own system. I use Sublime and I love scrolling. The second makes the system in TFTA not good for me, and given the first, I didn't mind my implementation being editor specific - but the principal is dead simple, as to not really matter. I have a small custom function stored in Sublimes user package folder which, when called using the [cmd]+[shift]+p command palette will insert a small template in the top of the current file (my `daily.txt`). This is just a headline with the date, and name of day of week and Two lines called start and end (with datetime filled in in start) let's me keep loose track of my hours. I also have a sub-heading that says to-do, with two `[ ] ...` txt checkboxes already added, another headline called did and a line that separates it from the previous day. "To-do" is for things I plan on doing, "did" is for ad-hoc things I ended up doing. This helps me keep track of how much work I actually did, which is nice for days where everything is meetings and firefighting and I don't close issues in the tracker or PRs in git. I can use go-to symbol to jump to a date, or just search the document for key words. Like I said, I like scrolling, and enjoy being able to just scroll down to see the previous day. The system is like I said dead simple, easy to operate, easy for anyone to implement and customize to their liking. I've used mine for a few months and it has been great!
ninetax 6y ago
Ha! I recently started to do the same thing, except just a timestamp every time I run the script. If I want a blank page in the middle of the day I get one. `vn` opens a new one, `vl` opens the most recent one.
nickthemagicman 6y ago
Trello has been the best Notes and todo app I could find.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  I love Trello but I don't want my data on the cloud. I wish I could have something as nice and easy as Trello but self hosted
  - Ecto5 6y ago
    I use a combination of nextcloud deck + all its other addons. I've installed it on a rasberry pi and a simple zerotier setup so that my notes are accessible over the internet. Has been working for me for years now.
  - npteljes 6y ago
    As a self-hosted Trello alternative, I use OpenTasks[0], created some Lists to sort my different kind of notes, and sync this between my machines with DAVx5 and Nextcloud. Not as streamlined as a trello, but hey, FOSS and self-hosted. On desktop I can view my tasks and lists with Nextcloud's web app, or Thunderbird's Lightning addon. With OpenTasks, one task can have a title, a detailed description, a checklist, start and due dates, completeness status, even priority - I usually just use the title, and often the checklist, excellent for groceries and household chores. You could also try Wekan[1], which is awesome on desktop, but I found the mobile interface unusable. [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.dmfs.tasks/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.dmfs.tasks/ [1] https://wekan.github.io/ https://wekan.github.io/
    - mssundaram 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing that!
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      This looks great. With to-dos and notes I'm like 80% mobile. Does next loud have mobile apps?
0x008 6y ago
Ah yes, the monthly note taking discussion.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  I like to think of it as a positive bike shedding session - instead of arguing about the color of the bike shed, we all share and compliment each other on how interesting and cool our bike shed designs are.
ito 6y ago
For years, I experimented with paper, org-mode, text notes (Sublime Text, TextEdit) to manage my thoughts and life. What I ended up with was folder after folder of disorganized notes, files like daily.txt, todo.txt, log.rtf that ended up disgusting me. I would so strongly recommended everyone reading this to check out Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/). At it's core, it's a collection of text notes in the cloud. Just open it up and start typing your thoughts down. No folders or hierarchy. The key enabler is that is that you can link together different pages. Roam Research helps you make so much better sense of your thoughts - I use it personally to plan out goals, projects, brainstorm research, track meetings/dates, and keep a daily log of everything I go through. I can't recommend it enough - even my dad started using it everyday after I showed him. Just try it out and starting typing a few notes. It'll start off as a simple graph for text notes / documents, but there are so many more powerful features to discover, too. EDIT: Roam is a cloud-based service, notes are not end-to-end encrypted. It doesn't bother me, but if it bothers you, there are many open source, offline-first alternatives that the community has created (emacs-org, Foam, Obsidian, etc.). I am in no way sponsored by Roam, I don't know anybody at Roam, I don't run any of those bullshit Roam courses, and Roam is expensive as fuck, but let me tell you this: there are so many features and UI optimizations that make Roam have the best user experience. Don't compromise your time and user experience.
- 0x008 6y ago
  Obligatory mention of foam for vs code here.
  - mimischi 6y ago
    As well as org-roam for Emacs! https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
- pps 6y ago
  After exactly year of using it, I moved back to Notion, even though I have Roam for free. Thanks to Roam's hype they have backlinks now (+ it's possible now to create new page in another page/db with "[[", that will leave only link/mention to that new page), which means both structured and flat zettelkasten-style notes (done in some master notes DB) are possible, plus regular DBs and all of the other cool stuff. This is a complete solution for me, all of my notes are much better organised now. And yes, I know, Roam has much more features than backlinks, I was using all of them, queries and block references, and sidebar, and ..., but for real work I'm not missing anything else than a sidebar. Sidebar is the best part of Roam IMO, even Obsidian with their multipane can't compete with that. With Notion I can open new tab in browser or new window in desktop app and keep it side-by-side and it's ok too, not as good and fast experience as with Roam, but good enough.
grtehy 6y ago
Reposting my setup here. It's not the best setup but it's based on trying different things. Might be useful for those who are trying to figure out their own setup: ======= Just another opinion on the balanced note taking method: I think org-mode solves almost all offline note-taking requirements * org-roam makes it super-easy to link notes * emacs as an editor is as usable as any other editor * Rich media is possible and easy to do in org-mode. Attach a snapshot, embed a video file * Code with documentation is a feature not available in most other note taking methods/apps. It's possible to run code snippets and add comments, documentation about them in the same space * Latex support is advanced. Inline equations work seamlessly * Search support is advanced Drawbacks: * One of the main drawbacks is that all your notes end up offline. This was a deal-breaker for me. ox-hugo helps in publishing your notes to a (private) static site where it can be searched, viewed but not edited on the fly * Publishing through ox-hugo is separate from maintaining a backup/sync of your notes in /org/ format. You'll have to do this separately through Dropbox/GDrive/etc * A backup of your org notes is not usable until you set up your emacs environment and download all your notes
- hiq 6y ago
  One drawback you omitted is that you have to set it up and learn how to use it before you reach a point where it competes with other less sophisticated solutions. I try to keep some notes.org file and use it regularly, but I'm just faster with unix tools and vim, so it's hard to make the upfront investment in learning emacs and start somewhat from scratch. I think there's also some kind of discoverability issue with org-mode features: I don't really know which features should I look into to improve my setup further and have something really nice instead of a glorified markdown. One day I'll just read the manual from start to finish and try to start properly from there, one day.
  - psibi 6y ago
    I have been just using a single function `org-roam-find-file` to insert or read an existing note. I'm pretty sure there are various other functionalities, but this seems to be enough for me as of now. If I have to search something with it, I just fall back to deadgrep's [0] interface. So, I don't think you need to read the entire manual to be productive! Infact, I would say that starting small and slowing forming the habit is a good way to use this effectively. [0] https://github.com/Wilfred/deadgrep https://github.com/Wilfred/deadgrep
dna_polymerase 6y ago
Or as a single line [0]: alias lb='vim ~/logbook/$(date "+%s")' [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769161
yodsanklai 6y ago
I like to use the tools available on my system, so I simply use Apple Notes. It's simple, good for synchronization, backing and searching, good for regular text with minimal formatting, but not good for code snippets unfortunately. I'm open to alternatives (but don't want to bother with versioning). Overall, taking notes isn't a solved issue for me. I mostly like pen and paper as a thinking tool, but I'm not able to archive and search them, and it' slower when writing pure text. Maybe a "Remarkable" would be a good tool, but I'm not sure I want even more screens and devices I already have.
- sails 6y ago
  Worth noting, exporting Apple Notes in bulk loses any hyperlinked URLS. It also doesn't copy hyperlinks when copy-pasting out of Notes. Terrible for portability.
- mhdhn 6y ago
  It lets you interleave pictures. Really useful feature. It also does the URL expansion thing, what's that called?, where they expand a url into a mini snippet of the corresponding website. That's sometimes useful. However, there's no clean way to control it.
- aidos 6y ago
  I can recommend the Remarkable. The nice thing about it is that I don’t even see it as a screen. It just exists as a more organised and versatile version of the paper notes I normally keep. But it’s a lot closer to paper than to a digital device (good for me, maybe limiting for some).
dageshi 6y ago
My system as of right now... Todoist on my phone for tasks. I like todoist because it's got a nicely polished interface and an excellent API. I use an AWS Lambda to define and push repeating tasks into Todoist at set times, it also moves tasks from certain lists into my inbox at certain times of the day/week. Basically I don't want to fiddle with setting times or scheduling in todoist except for one off scheduled tasks. I just want to put tasks into the right lists and let the lambda move them into the inbox when I need to do them. This is effectively a kind of timeboxing so I generally do all my work in the morning till early afternoon and then do research/admin for the next days tasks in the afternoon. For notes and project management I use Roam Research which I found suited me best.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- feteru 6y ago
  Do you think Roam is worth it, and are there any alternatives that are comparable to Roam?
  - dageshi 6y ago
    I really like Roam, it seems to be made by people who're thinking deeply about what a note taking system should be, I don't mind paying for that reason. I think there are a bunch of alternatives out there, just googling roam research alternatives will throw them up, I just don't want to spend a lot of time searching and evaluating different systems when frankly roam is good enough for me.
gravitas 6y ago
I use markdown + git as the core note components (organization methodologies layered on top, dealer's choice), wanted to share this Android neat app for those who do the same: https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal
- chadlavi 6y ago
  also a markdown + git user here. I just open it up like it's a code repo in VSCode. (for anyone interested, "Working Copy" iOS app is great for this. It's a git client for iOS, and its contents are even accessible in the Files app. Can't speak to Android use, but looks like parent comment has recs)
- notetaker 6y ago
  Thanks for GitJournal. Will try it out. I have been thinking of converting from OneNote to markdown. One thing that has been keeping me from making the switch is search, especially from mobile. Any one knows of any solution that is capable of searching through all the markdown notes similar to how OneNote does from mobile? I am thinking of hosting the notes in a RPi with Gitea or Nextcloud and access it using VPN (using Rpi as a trial and later move on to a dedicate mini PC if I end up liking this setup).
  - vhanda 6y ago
    Hi. GitJournal author over here. If you can provide me with a video of what you mean, and what you would like that would really make implementing this much easier.
dboreham 6y ago
Random data point: OneNote, Microsoft sticky notes, moleskine books, emails to myself, github issues; depending on the context. In some future utopia there would be a unified solution. Small hunch I'd have to create that myself in order to be content with it.
danmur 6y ago
I have a system too. Every time I want to record something I simply have an anxiety attack.
SamBorick 6y ago
Gonna go against the grain here: I use proprietary software! I dump all my random thoughts into my todoist inbox. Every couple of days I sift through and take action, or categorize as needed between notion notes and todoist projects.
alexpetralia 6y ago
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a fairly straightforward "personal knowledge management" (PKM) methodology. 1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget. 2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread. 3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful. Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.
- varrock 6y ago
  This sounds like a good idea if you are on top of things. I was going to push back by saying it almost sounds like a chore, but a lot of the reason notes are jotted down is in fact to learn. So this process makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
- nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
  Google Keep has a limit with how large notes can be, and how many unarchived notes can dictate app performance. It's neat you simply decided to use it to hold on to things for about a week, prefering instead to store them in OneNote (or anything you want), a more stable product. Thanks for this advice!
davidn20 6y ago
Honestly, I'm surprised at the amount of different answers here. It shows how personal note taking is to the user. I currently love notion. I switched over from Evernote, and it has been a game changer. The only downside is I'm tied to notion (the company), in a way I wouldn't be if I used something like markdown and git. That said, I think it's worth it to have the features in notion.
- bauerd 6y ago
  What features do you use?
  - davidn20 6y ago
    Templates, Linked Database, Styles/Designs, Sorting/Filtering of databases. I also follow alot of Ali Abdaal workflow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONG26-2mIHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONG26-2mIHU
akulbe 6y ago
I get why folks like paper, but I'd lose it, it'd get spilled on (because kids). That, and it's just so easy to get buried in piles of paper… so I do everything digital. I even work to stay as paperless as possible. I'd like to make a plug for Standard Notes. standardnotes.org I don't work for them. I get nothing from mentioning them. It's cross-platform, and you have the option of encrypting things. It's my go-to place for notes.
TomAnthony 6y ago
I am very surprised nobody has yet mentioned Notational Velocity, or better yet the fork nvALT [1]. I hate any _friction_ to writing a note. I just want to get it out of my brain (or find it, if a previous thought) as quickly as possible. With nvALT you start typing and it is searching immediately, but if there is no match and you hit enter you are now writing a new note. Each note is stored as a text file, and so is findable via other search methods on your machine, and is easy to sync via your chosen technology. I have tried a variety of approaches as I love the idea of linking between notes, and adding images, and tagging and all that stuff. But in reality all of that adds friction, and so prevents me from making the note (which is the critical part). [1] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
- timtyrrell 6y ago
  Also this one for those that want to live in Vim: https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim
makeworld 6y ago
nb seems like a souped-up version of this tool, and a few others mentioned in the thread. https://github.com/xwmx/nb https://github.com/xwmx/nb
- hyb 6y ago
  +1 for nb, the dev posted it here a couple months back and I immediately switched to using it, does the job perfectly.
notyourday 6y ago
I go for a low-fi approach: it is a single text file. $ notes appends a new line, current date like Mon 05 Oct 2020 10:20:47 AM EDT another new line and a set of === as a separator and moves the editor cursor to the bottom. So I can immediately type. If I type $ notes So that was weird then it will take whatever I typed at the command line and append that as well allowing me to continue to type in the editor. Finally I use :tag to freetag notes so I can easily search through notes based on the topics. I figure eventually I might figure out a better system but so far this one worked very well.
georgefrick 6y ago
I went from paper to a tablet for a year (as a challenge), ended up back on paper. My boss got me into using nicer notebooks, and I've been doing it for years (about 6). I then switched to MD files, eventually ending up using Stackedit extensively for a while similar to the tablet effort. Now, between work, hobbies, being a DM; I've given up and spent some time in One Note... and now that's where I've migrated everything. I'm always interested in how others do this in case they've figured something out. I still use a paper notebook as a personal journal, important notes, etc. I also still use a notepad for those daily notes / thinking on paper that you can throw away at the end of the day.
- packetlost 6y ago
  I personally use a combination of Notion for collaborative notes/tasks/whatever, bullet journal for daily notes/tasks, and a markdown based zettelkasten for knowledgebase-type stuff. There's a fair amount of duplicated information, but both Notion and the Zettelkasten or easily searchable, and it's trivial to copy-paste between them. I really like the paper method for day-to-day stuff, but for research or work-related notes, I simply can't write fast enough to keep up (particularly if I'm trying to capture info from a meeting), and the lack of searchability means I can never fully rely on paper notes as a means of retaining information long-term.
stargrave 6y ago
Personally I used Python's tnote program, but, because of Python, it worked pretty slowly. So I rewrite on pure POSIX shell and it serves me for nearly ten years: http://www.git.stargrave.org/?p=t.git;a=blob;f=t http://www.git.stargrave.org/?p=t.git;a=blob;f=t Comparing to author's solution, it gives ability to briefly list notes, use multiple "namespaces", quickly add (without invoking the editor), delete or modify each specified note. Also there is no bashism and it works out of box on *BSD (that lacks bash) and GNU systems.
marinhero 6y ago
After years of using tons of notebooks I decided to move to Notability on my iPad. The Apple Pencil + Paperlike experience really do it for me. Notability is nice and when I write feature designs I don’t have to transcribe my handwriting to the computer. I simply select the handwriting, convert it to text and move it over my computer. Another great thing about this is that I can run searches on my handwriting, I really enjoy that because looking for that one page in a notebook is never practical, specially when you have many notebooks. I’m a fan of the simplicity of your system but I don’t know if it’ll work for me. I really like writing with a pencil, that’s when I feel like I’m learning or reflecting on information.
darkr 6y ago
Having a generally positive experience with Dendron: (https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron ) currently, having recently migrated several thousand markdown-format notes captured over the past few years.
npsimons 6y ago
Oh look, someone reinvented org-mode.
brw12 6y ago
I'm a dedicated Evernote user. I add just about everything I generate or want to record to Evernote, in one big "notebook", and then I extensively use tagging to make sure everything is findable. I try to use every tag I might ever search for, for which this note would be relevant. Sometimes I add content to existing notes, if they are relevant and include the same family of concepts. I often merge notes; e.g., I save all my tweets to Evernote via IFTTT, and then merge all of them for each given month. I often add notes with no tagging at all, and I have a shortcut to search for notes with no tags, as a sort of inbox. The ability to search everything at once is the key: I can search "movies" or "startup" or "medicine" and find everything with those tags, or those words in the title or text, or even in PDFs. (I use a Fuji ScanSnap to scan documents into Evernote, with fully searchable text.) The biggest feature I wish for is transcription of voice notes or audio files, so the content would be searchable. Evernote's Mac app is notoriously slow, but it's gotten better over the years. I still don't understand why they can't make it as fast as the web app.
pinjasaur 6y ago
I have a script that functions very similarly, called `jot`[1]. I also have one for rapid steam-of-conscious thoughts[2] and organized journaling[3]. Personally, I'm a fan of the "plaintext files in a directory" pattern for notes, thoughts, and writing. [1]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jot https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jot [2]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jt https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jt [3]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jrnl https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jrnl
pdx_flyer 6y ago
I have been struggling to keep notes effectively. A lot of my notes "expire" a few days after taking them, but others I will need years later. For most of my job I take physical notes. I don't love it but it's easy for me to grab a pen and paper just about anywhere I am. Where I struggle is doing something with those notes after the fact. When I am at my computer, I usually just keep a plain text file going for the day and just save it for the date. I also have Teams recordings, screenshots, and other stuff that I have to just put in a folder. I don't have tagging or anything and keeping up this information just isn't working. Any tips?
- richardliutl 6y ago
  Physical notes are great for the reasons you mention - I tend to transcribe my physical notes into e.g. Google Docs/Dropbox which seems to make it easier to refer back to them. Of course you run into potential privacy issues for sensitive notes; on that front, pen and paper notes (or an offline machine) are hard to beat.
kovek 6y ago
For me, I'm an avid browser, lurker, reader of HN, Reddit, and when I come through an interesting paragraph in an article, or a comment in a thread, I screenshot it. Next step will be to automatically move the screenshot from iCloud onto a computer, run OCR on the screenshots, index them, and make it possible to search through their text with near-equal search terms (eg "cute dog" would match "cute puppy" as well) Anyone has ideas on how to make that possible?
- richardliutl 6y ago
  Screenshot + OCR seems tough, but sounds like it could be your preferred workflow. More robust will always be 1. a link to the article/thread and 2. a transcription of the content (esp. tailored to you [1]) imo. Your search term idea is interesting, I know Google is/has been doing this. [1] https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/ https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/
- blandflakes 6y ago
  I've considered similar but thought that ingesting the actual text from a link would be easier.
varrock 6y ago
Does anybody have a counter argument for just using macOS notes if you exclusively use Apple products? They sync nicely with my devices and make note taking pretty simple for me.
- jxy 6y ago
  Proprietary format. Difficult to link (or backlink) to other notes. Difficult to export, index, or analyze with other tools.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    They are difficult to export. I had great success with Exporter.app, it converts to markdown and even handles the images. It then imports nicely into Bear.app. https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12
  - jlgaddis 6y ago
    They're accessible via IMAP. For me, at least, that makes them quite easy to export or $whatever with.
- jdillaaa 6y ago
  It's a proprietary note ecosystem, so if you ever try to leave (or not use iCloud, which iOS/macOS note syncing depends on), it will be very difficult to regain control of your notes. I did this and it took a lot of effort, involved parsing out some protocol buffers, and losing a lot of formatting. I now just use markdown text files, never going back to that. There are iOS shortcuts now which can let you do this programmatically, but you also lose formatting, and its a hack.
- donaldihunter 6y ago
  I’ve been using macOS notes for a couple of years for daily note taking, because it is just so convenient with cloud sync. I have been planning to transcribe everything I want to keep into a git repo of .md files, for exactly the lockin reasons the other replies have mentioned. I hope to settle on macOS notes for daily stuff and transcribing to a repo for long term.
ilian 6y ago
A suitable addition to your system for managing notes is the open source tool TagSpaces (https://www.tagspaces.org https://www.tagspaces.org). With it you can tag, preview and edit your markdown files in one application, without any vendor locking.
m0ngr31 6y ago
I created a self-hosted app to keep track of my thoughts and tasks during the day: https://github.com/m0ngr31/DailyNotes https://github.com/m0ngr31/DailyNotes It helps me to break things out based on date or by topic, which this supports.
EduardMe 6y ago
I build a whole iOS/Mac app around the idea of daily notes and now also backlinking :) https://noteplan.co https://noteplan.co
jlgaddis 6y ago
Just wait until systemd-notesd comes along and shows us all the One True Way(TM) of taking notes!

217 points by hachibu 6y ago

I've built a similar system from scratch - also using this Dropbox daily notes file technique - except my script generates folders and sub folders for each year (YYYY) and each month within each year (YYY-MM) whenever I instantiate a file on a certain day. Makes long term management much easier than having thousands of files in one folder. Same grep principles apply (and I use hashtags within my notes to track keywords).

hachibu 6y ago
That's a very good idea. I might use that for my script. Thanks!
asdff 6y ago
Why even break it down? If you are using grep and presumably editors that can go to a pattern anyway you might as well write to a single file.
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  I also manage my notes on the go by opening the Dropbox app on my phone and editing the txt files from there. Having subfolders helps with navigation on the Dropbox app.
- hiq 6y ago
  In case of infrequent synchronizations you reduce the number of conflicts by having separate files rather than a single big one.
jdshaffer 6y ago
I'm terrible at scripting, but I'm curious how you handled that. Do you mind sharing the script you created?
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  Sure thing. It's a script called "d" (for diary) that I keep in my home folder. I try minimise mouse usage, so I've got a keyboard shortcut for opening a terminal, and then in the terminal I run ./d === start of script === #!/bin/bash y=`date +%Y`; ym=`date +%Y-%m`; ymd=`date +%Y-%m-%d`; if [ ! -d "Dropbox/diary/$y" ]; then mkdir Dropbox/diary/$y fi if [ ! -d "Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym" ]; then mkdir Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym fi vim Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym/$ymd.txt === end script === I could probably refactor the hell out of this. But I'm an old beard that prefers explicit readability. For example I don't need to use YYYY-MM for the month sub-folders (I could just use MM), and similarly I don't need the full YYYY-MM-DD.txt for the day files (I could just use DD.txt) - so your preference may vary. And yeah I use .txt files because I can edit those natively in the Dropbox app on my phone too. Don't need any special apps installed to manage my notes on the go. In terms of the contents of the files, I've kept the searchability really simple by using hashtags, example: === Dropbox/diary/2020/12/04.txt === ## #keyword1 #keyword2 Here be notes on keyword1 and keyword2. ## #keyword3 Here be notes captured later on the same day on keyword3. These can span multiple lines if I want. ## #keyword4 Here be notes on keyword4 captured even later in the day. === I use the single hashtag keyword system for quick grepping (and future indexing if I want to build a searchable database out of this one day), and the double hashtag ## at the start of each note snippet so that I can parse individual snippets more easily. Hope that helps! :)
  - jdshaffer 6y ago
    Thank you so much! I really appreciate it! (And sorry for the way delayed response... I went to bed shortly after posting.)
  - aGHz 6y ago
    Quick tip, you could replace the ifs with mkdir -p Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym
    - herodoturtle 6y ago
      Neat, thanks!
nickjj 6y ago
This is what I do too. I have 20 years of notes saved like this. I also open sourced a zero dependency Bash script that handles this at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes https://github.com/nickjj/notes It supports adding notes in 3 different ways: notes hello world appends the text to the YYYY-MM.txt dated file echo cool | notes same as above except you can pipe in text notes opens the YYYY-MM.txt file in your configured $EDITOR I use all 3 methods of input on a regular basis depending on what I want to jot down.

aidos 6y ago

Local text files of notes are the best. For me, I go even simpler. I have a single file in my Dropbox folder that I’ve been using for over a decade. To open it, I just use Alfred (and before that, quicksilver). I pop new stuff at the top. Every now and again I search for something way back when. Works really well for me.

Groxx 6y ago

Similar tactic here, has been working extremely well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22279802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22279802 I also set it up to auto-create/open my daily-doc in the background when I open a new terminal session, since days that I do that are days that I most want to take notes. It serves as a very good, very minor reminder to actually write something down. And if I don't write anything, I can just delete empty files later with a trivial `find`.

znpy 6y ago

I just use rednotebook on Linux and it's very good. I have daily notes, a small calendar to navigate to dates in the past/future, a tag cloud populated with words I've written the most, and a search bar that I don't know how it works but usually finds what I'm looking for. It's no fancy system but it's immediate, no dumb nerding and dumb wheel reinvention needed.

harrisonjackson 6y ago

For a long time I had a Zapier setup that did something similar. v1 created a templated note in evernote which I eventually enhanced to a more custom solution. v2 used google cloud print to create a pdf from html and add to my google drive then move it into the Notability folder so I could access it and write on it from the Notability app on my ipad. I loved this because I could also pull in weather, horoscope, daily calvin and hobbes, news headlines, top gitlab issues for my projects and add them to the html template/pdf. Frequently I'd end up physically printing it.

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psibi 6y ago

For the past couple of months I have been using org-roam [0] for this and I find it quite effective. Just found out that I have 87 different notes lying around: $ ls *org | wc -l 87 [0] https://www.orgroam.com/ https://www.orgroam.com/

JohnL4 6y ago
I just use plain org-mode (orgzly on my phone), storing files on Dropbox (personal) or One Drive (work). AutoHotKey to emacs, then org-capture. (Evernote if I find web content that's good.)

inatreecrown2 6y ago

Very nice! i installed it and will give it a shot. Thanks for sharing!

Brajeshwar 6y ago

I'm still figuring out my own ways. Right now, lots of text/markdown files. I really like "My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file"[1]. 1. https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/ https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/

bravura 6y ago

Yet-another-note-taking-system that doesn't solve my core problem: I want to browse my notes in chronological order AND in thematic order. i.e. I want to do semantic search and automatic topic grouping. [edit: The use-case I have in mind is you are learning about a topic, and your chronological "research notebook" is also an automatic zettlekasten.]

bayindirh 6y ago
Zim Wiki?
zaplin 6y ago
zettelkasten ? edit: you proposed zettelkasten-like solution just when I posted
asdff 6y ago
you can do this all in bash. you could set up a function that takes the text of your note as input along with your metadata and makes a timestamp. then you just index your notes however you'd like.
blackbear_ 6y ago
That's easily done in Org mode for Emacs https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/
- DougBTX 6y ago
  Org mode is something that I've always thought I should look at, but never quite have. One thing I like to do with my notes is to keep a short "todo" list at the top, listed in the order that I'm planning to work on them. Something like: Todo ==== - Fix Widget - Extend Screen - Profit Then if I need to re-prioritise, I re-order: Todo ==== - Profit - Fix Widget - Extend Screen and mark tasks as completed: Todo ==== + Profit - Fix Widget - Extend Screen Once there are too many completed tasks at the top, I move them down into a "Done" section. Is there a way to manage that in Org mode (linking tasks to further notes would be great to have) while keeping items in relative priority order without explicitly setting due dates or priority "scores"?

asdff 6y ago

I prefer keeping it all in one file, less messy since you are using grep anyway: alias note='(date; cat; echo) >> ~/notes.txt'

nicbou 6y ago

I use paper. Digital notes are great if you need them to be available everywhere, or edit them time and time again, but paper is still significantly better for me. I keep my recipes in Keep and on my personal website, because I often amend them. However I discovered that printed recipes are much more pleasant to use. Likewise, I'd much rather have a dirty notebook to sketch and write on when I'm working in the garage, or anywhere that's not my desk

bayindirh 6y ago
Pen and paper is frowned upon by people but, they're indispensable for me too. Allows you to concentrate better, the result is much more refined and as an added bonus, fountain pens are nice.
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aidos 6y ago
Sorry to be “that guy”, but I’ve switched to Remarkable recently and I love it. It’s for people like us who work best on paper.
- lukaszkups 6y ago
  was about to say something similar, but using OneNote while working on Surface Book 2, taking handwritten notes with Surface Pen. Totally recommends it.
- cjameskeller 6y ago
  Just got mine a couple weeks back and it's great! The software could use some additional features, but thanks to the open platform, it is getting them from some dedicated users. I've even seen a user run offline OCR on it, and we may soon be able to integrate with metadata to make those notes searchable. Credit to https://github.com/utopiah https://github.com/utopiah , post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jj5yt2/offline_ocr_on_device_no_cloud_no_ssh_on_rm2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jj5yt2/of...
6y ago

sharken 6y ago

A nice solution for those that can get by with text-only notes. For storing images I use Microsoft OneNote as more often than not, there is a need to document something with text and images. And search is excellent.

asdff 6y ago
One way to work images in text-only notes is to bake in the path names to the image files on your local drive rather than paste an image into the note. If I'm in terminal I can copy that text with the path, hit cmd n "open" cmd v enter and view the image with the system viewer (preview in this case). If I'm looking at the text file in textedit on mac os, I can actually do this from the right click menu under services after highlighting the path name. Could be a good solution if you are tired of onenote's bloat.

tomlockwood 6y ago

I wrote something similar that got a bit of traction on here yonks ago - a bit less elegant than this though. https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn

syas 6y ago
Seems useful for daily stand ups (we do dark stand ups at the end of the day). I might give this a go

ekianjo 6y ago

I guess the author has never heard of vim-wiki? > The way it works is that every time I run the script, it opens the note for that day in my editor of choice vimwiki's diary function does that for you under the hood.

tasuki 6y ago
Yes, it sounds like they reimplemented 1% of vimwiki...
w0m 6y ago
my workflow for stream of conscious notes: \ww I add tags as relevant if I think about it, and for projects/tasks spanning multiple days i'll create a root item. I created a local git repo I try and keep everything checked into; I might push it up to a private github/bitbucket repo eventually, but I haven't been careful with scrubbing credentials from shell snippets so leerly on pushing anywhere remote.
npsimons 6y ago
> I guess the author has never heard of vim-wiki? The author, as well as most everyone in the comments here, have apparently never heard of org-mode. Yeah, I can understand that for some people emacs is a non-starter, but trust me, if you want to do it, I can just about guarantee it's possible in org-mode. It's just that flexible, and everyone's org-mode setup is different, customized to their needs.

jareware 6y ago

I feel like Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/) should also get mentioned: storing notes in plain Markdown files, optionally synced via e.g. Dropbox. Bonus points for also having mobile apps that sync with the same backend.

StavrosK 6y ago
I looked for many alternatives to taking notes and Joplin ended up being what I went with, it's fantastic. I wrote a small script to export my notes to a static website because I figured someone could use the knowledge, even if it's just a brain dump: https://notes.stavros.io/ https://notes.stavros.io/ I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  That is really awesome, this kind of functionality would be a really awesome plugin to Joplin itself somehow. > I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it. Alongside this idea, would you use a browser plugin that shares your bookmarks as a stream? Almost like a cross of the github "X starred Y" stream and Twitter (with none of the social-y features). I favorite a lot of things from day to day and would love to know what others are favoriting/finding as well. Also, somewhat unrelated to that, would you pay for encrypted offsite joplin sync target/backups? I'd love to make it possible to also share-from-joplin for single notes but that feature isn't there yet. The only way to make it happen otherwise would be synchronizing somewhere unencrypted (!) and then asking that somewhere to "publish" your notes. Unfortunately, since joplin doesn't have multiple "profiles" or any way to separate encryption keys or which notes are and aren't encrypted... it's hard to do that as well..

octoberfranklin 6y ago

vim with folding Still the best tree editor I've found. I left emacs for it!

blackbear_ 6y ago
Emacs has folding too, so that cannot be the only reason..?
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  Yeah emacs has like eleventeen different folding modes. That's the problem. Vim has folding as a basic feature of the editor binary, not some aftermarket script. So editing operations on folded regions always do what you expect.

pitterpatter 6y ago

I tend to have a notes.txt in different folders. One for each project, one for each bug investigation, etc. I'll admit I need to work on a better backup story

srich36 6y ago

For the past few months I’ve been taking markdown notes which are then transformed into HTML and pushed to an s3 bucket for public viewing. Probably not the best solution within this thread but it costs approximately nothing is a great way to get access to a web-based version of your notes anywhere. This allows you to throw extra features in the HTML like searching for files and randomly selecting a note for viewing at your leisure.

StavrosK 6y ago
I made a comment here with the same idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300423 I love the idea that I have a place to publish random stuff that I don't have to spend lots of time writing, I can just drop a sentence and maybe someone else will find it useful. The big problem is that Google will basically never give you that page in a result, no matter how relevant it may be to your query, because it prefers SEO-rich content farms like Wikihow. I was thinking that a service would at least be easier to search/remember to go to.

ajuc 6y ago

I create "notes" directory on my desktop at work, and each day I start a new text file named $DATE_$JIRATASKNO_$DECRIPTION.txt Whenever I copy-paste stuff that might be useful I leave it there. Stuff like stacktraces, class:line_number when I was searching where something happens, links to webpages related to the task. I was keeping a notepad tab open at all times anyway to keep context when I was doing something (otherwise I forget when I'm back from lunch and have to search again). So this is only making this context permanent and searcheable. Then when I do something 3 months later and get a stacktrace I vaguely remember or other problem that I can imagine what the keyword would be - I just grep in that directory and find all the context needed, including jira task, commits, all related webpages, etc. I also write short free-text notes there, but these are usually very short and less important than the copy-pasted stuff.

sshb 6y ago

Also pretty elegant tool: https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn

olsgaarddk 6y ago

Inspired by similar plaintext to-do discussions on HN I also built my own system. I use Sublime and I love scrolling. The second makes the system in TFTA not good for me, and given the first, I didn't mind my implementation being editor specific - but the principal is dead simple, as to not really matter. I have a small custom function stored in Sublimes user package folder which, when called using the [cmd]+[shift]+p command palette will insert a small template in the top of the current file (my `daily.txt`). This is just a headline with the date, and name of day of week and Two lines called start and end (with datetime filled in in start) let's me keep loose track of my hours. I also have a sub-heading that says to-do, with two `[ ] ...` txt checkboxes already added, another headline called did and a line that separates it from the previous day. "To-do" is for things I plan on doing, "did" is for ad-hoc things I ended up doing. This helps me keep track of how much work I actually did, which is nice for days where everything is meetings and firefighting and I don't close issues in the tracker or PRs in git. I can use go-to symbol to jump to a date, or just search the document for key words. Like I said, I like scrolling, and enjoy being able to just scroll down to see the previous day. The system is like I said dead simple, easy to operate, easy for anyone to implement and customize to their liking. I've used mine for a few months and it has been great!

ninetax 6y ago

Ha! I recently started to do the same thing, except just a timestamp every time I run the script. If I want a blank page in the middle of the day I get one. `vn` opens a new one, `vl` opens the most recent one.

nickthemagicman 6y ago

Trello has been the best Notes and todo app I could find.

mssundaram 6y ago
I love Trello but I don't want my data on the cloud. I wish I could have something as nice and easy as Trello but self hosted
- Ecto5 6y ago
  I use a combination of nextcloud deck + all its other addons. I've installed it on a rasberry pi and a simple zerotier setup so that my notes are accessible over the internet. Has been working for me for years now.
- npteljes 6y ago
  As a self-hosted Trello alternative, I use OpenTasks[0], created some Lists to sort my different kind of notes, and sync this between my machines with DAVx5 and Nextcloud. Not as streamlined as a trello, but hey, FOSS and self-hosted. On desktop I can view my tasks and lists with Nextcloud's web app, or Thunderbird's Lightning addon. With OpenTasks, one task can have a title, a detailed description, a checklist, start and due dates, completeness status, even priority - I usually just use the title, and often the checklist, excellent for groceries and household chores. You could also try Wekan[1], which is awesome on desktop, but I found the mobile interface unusable. [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.dmfs.tasks/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.dmfs.tasks/ [1] https://wekan.github.io/ https://wekan.github.io/
  - mssundaram 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing that!
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    This looks great. With to-dos and notes I'm like 80% mobile. Does next loud have mobile apps?

0x008 6y ago

Ah yes, the monthly note taking discussion.

mssundaram 6y ago
I like to think of it as a positive bike shedding session - instead of arguing about the color of the bike shed, we all share and compliment each other on how interesting and cool our bike shed designs are.

ito 6y ago

For years, I experimented with paper, org-mode, text notes (Sublime Text, TextEdit) to manage my thoughts and life. What I ended up with was folder after folder of disorganized notes, files like daily.txt, todo.txt, log.rtf that ended up disgusting me. I would so strongly recommended everyone reading this to check out Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/). At it's core, it's a collection of text notes in the cloud. Just open it up and start typing your thoughts down. No folders or hierarchy. The key enabler is that is that you can link together different pages. Roam Research helps you make so much better sense of your thoughts - I use it personally to plan out goals, projects, brainstorm research, track meetings/dates, and keep a daily log of everything I go through. I can't recommend it enough - even my dad started using it everyday after I showed him. Just try it out and starting typing a few notes. It'll start off as a simple graph for text notes / documents, but there are so many more powerful features to discover, too. EDIT: Roam is a cloud-based service, notes are not end-to-end encrypted. It doesn't bother me, but if it bothers you, there are many open source, offline-first alternatives that the community has created (emacs-org, Foam, Obsidian, etc.). I am in no way sponsored by Roam, I don't know anybody at Roam, I don't run any of those bullshit Roam courses, and Roam is expensive as fuck, but let me tell you this: there are so many features and UI optimizations that make Roam have the best user experience. Don't compromise your time and user experience.

0x008 6y ago
Obligatory mention of foam for vs code here.
- mimischi 6y ago
  As well as org-roam for Emacs! https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
pps 6y ago
After exactly year of using it, I moved back to Notion, even though I have Roam for free. Thanks to Roam's hype they have backlinks now (+ it's possible now to create new page in another page/db with "[[", that will leave only link/mention to that new page), which means both structured and flat zettelkasten-style notes (done in some master notes DB) are possible, plus regular DBs and all of the other cool stuff. This is a complete solution for me, all of my notes are much better organised now. And yes, I know, Roam has much more features than backlinks, I was using all of them, queries and block references, and sidebar, and ..., but for real work I'm not missing anything else than a sidebar. Sidebar is the best part of Roam IMO, even Obsidian with their multipane can't compete with that. With Notion I can open new tab in browser or new window in desktop app and keep it side-by-side and it's ok too, not as good and fast experience as with Roam, but good enough.

grtehy 6y ago

Reposting my setup here. It's not the best setup but it's based on trying different things. Might be useful for those who are trying to figure out their own setup: ======= Just another opinion on the balanced note taking method: I think org-mode solves almost all offline note-taking requirements * org-roam makes it super-easy to link notes * emacs as an editor is as usable as any other editor * Rich media is possible and easy to do in org-mode. Attach a snapshot, embed a video file * Code with documentation is a feature not available in most other note taking methods/apps. It's possible to run code snippets and add comments, documentation about them in the same space * Latex support is advanced. Inline equations work seamlessly * Search support is advanced Drawbacks: * One of the main drawbacks is that all your notes end up offline. This was a deal-breaker for me. ox-hugo helps in publishing your notes to a (private) static site where it can be searched, viewed but not edited on the fly * Publishing through ox-hugo is separate from maintaining a backup/sync of your notes in /org/ format. You'll have to do this separately through Dropbox/GDrive/etc * A backup of your org notes is not usable until you set up your emacs environment and download all your notes

hiq 6y ago
One drawback you omitted is that you have to set it up and learn how to use it before you reach a point where it competes with other less sophisticated solutions. I try to keep some notes.org file and use it regularly, but I'm just faster with unix tools and vim, so it's hard to make the upfront investment in learning emacs and start somewhat from scratch. I think there's also some kind of discoverability issue with org-mode features: I don't really know which features should I look into to improve my setup further and have something really nice instead of a glorified markdown. One day I'll just read the manual from start to finish and try to start properly from there, one day.
- psibi 6y ago
  I have been just using a single function `org-roam-find-file` to insert or read an existing note. I'm pretty sure there are various other functionalities, but this seems to be enough for me as of now. If I have to search something with it, I just fall back to deadgrep's [0] interface. So, I don't think you need to read the entire manual to be productive! Infact, I would say that starting small and slowing forming the habit is a good way to use this effectively. [0] https://github.com/Wilfred/deadgrep https://github.com/Wilfred/deadgrep

dna_polymerase 6y ago

Or as a single line [0]: alias lb='vim ~/logbook/$(date "+%s")' [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769161

yodsanklai 6y ago

I like to use the tools available on my system, so I simply use Apple Notes. It's simple, good for synchronization, backing and searching, good for regular text with minimal formatting, but not good for code snippets unfortunately. I'm open to alternatives (but don't want to bother with versioning). Overall, taking notes isn't a solved issue for me. I mostly like pen and paper as a thinking tool, but I'm not able to archive and search them, and it' slower when writing pure text. Maybe a "Remarkable" would be a good tool, but I'm not sure I want even more screens and devices I already have.

sails 6y ago
Worth noting, exporting Apple Notes in bulk loses any hyperlinked URLS. It also doesn't copy hyperlinks when copy-pasting out of Notes. Terrible for portability.
mhdhn 6y ago
It lets you interleave pictures. Really useful feature. It also does the URL expansion thing, what's that called?, where they expand a url into a mini snippet of the corresponding website. That's sometimes useful. However, there's no clean way to control it.
aidos 6y ago
I can recommend the Remarkable. The nice thing about it is that I don’t even see it as a screen. It just exists as a more organised and versatile version of the paper notes I normally keep. But it’s a lot closer to paper than to a digital device (good for me, maybe limiting for some).

dageshi 6y ago

My system as of right now... Todoist on my phone for tasks. I like todoist because it's got a nicely polished interface and an excellent API. I use an AWS Lambda to define and push repeating tasks into Todoist at set times, it also moves tasks from certain lists into my inbox at certain times of the day/week. Basically I don't want to fiddle with setting times or scheduling in todoist except for one off scheduled tasks. I just want to put tasks into the right lists and let the lambda move them into the inbox when I need to do them. This is effectively a kind of timeboxing so I generally do all my work in the morning till early afternoon and then do research/admin for the next days tasks in the afternoon. For notes and project management I use Roam Research which I found suited me best.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
feteru 6y ago
Do you think Roam is worth it, and are there any alternatives that are comparable to Roam?
- dageshi 6y ago
  I really like Roam, it seems to be made by people who're thinking deeply about what a note taking system should be, I don't mind paying for that reason. I think there are a bunch of alternatives out there, just googling roam research alternatives will throw them up, I just don't want to spend a lot of time searching and evaluating different systems when frankly roam is good enough for me.

gravitas 6y ago

I use markdown + git as the core note components (organization methodologies layered on top, dealer's choice), wanted to share this Android neat app for those who do the same: https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal

chadlavi 6y ago
also a markdown + git user here. I just open it up like it's a code repo in VSCode. (for anyone interested, "Working Copy" iOS app is great for this. It's a git client for iOS, and its contents are even accessible in the Files app. Can't speak to Android use, but looks like parent comment has recs)
notetaker 6y ago
Thanks for GitJournal. Will try it out. I have been thinking of converting from OneNote to markdown. One thing that has been keeping me from making the switch is search, especially from mobile. Any one knows of any solution that is capable of searching through all the markdown notes similar to how OneNote does from mobile? I am thinking of hosting the notes in a RPi with Gitea or Nextcloud and access it using VPN (using Rpi as a trial and later move on to a dedicate mini PC if I end up liking this setup).
- vhanda 6y ago
  Hi. GitJournal author over here. If you can provide me with a video of what you mean, and what you would like that would really make implementing this much easier.

dboreham 6y ago

Random data point: OneNote, Microsoft sticky notes, moleskine books, emails to myself, github issues; depending on the context. In some future utopia there would be a unified solution. Small hunch I'd have to create that myself in order to be content with it.

danmur 6y ago

I have a system too. Every time I want to record something I simply have an anxiety attack.

SamBorick 6y ago

Gonna go against the grain here: I use proprietary software! I dump all my random thoughts into my todoist inbox. Every couple of days I sift through and take action, or categorize as needed between notion notes and todoist projects.

alexpetralia 6y ago

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a fairly straightforward "personal knowledge management" (PKM) methodology. 1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget. 2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread. 3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful. Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.

varrock 6y ago
This sounds like a good idea if you are on top of things. I was going to push back by saying it almost sounds like a chore, but a lot of the reason notes are jotted down is in fact to learn. So this process makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
Google Keep has a limit with how large notes can be, and how many unarchived notes can dictate app performance. It's neat you simply decided to use it to hold on to things for about a week, prefering instead to store them in OneNote (or anything you want), a more stable product. Thanks for this advice!

davidn20 6y ago

Honestly, I'm surprised at the amount of different answers here. It shows how personal note taking is to the user. I currently love notion. I switched over from Evernote, and it has been a game changer. The only downside is I'm tied to notion (the company), in a way I wouldn't be if I used something like markdown and git. That said, I think it's worth it to have the features in notion.

bauerd 6y ago
What features do you use?
- davidn20 6y ago
  Templates, Linked Database, Styles/Designs, Sorting/Filtering of databases. I also follow alot of Ali Abdaal workflow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONG26-2mIHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONG26-2mIHU

akulbe 6y ago

I get why folks like paper, but I'd lose it, it'd get spilled on (because kids). That, and it's just so easy to get buried in piles of paper… so I do everything digital. I even work to stay as paperless as possible. I'd like to make a plug for Standard Notes. standardnotes.org I don't work for them. I get nothing from mentioning them. It's cross-platform, and you have the option of encrypting things. It's my go-to place for notes.

TomAnthony 6y ago

I am very surprised nobody has yet mentioned Notational Velocity, or better yet the fork nvALT [1]. I hate any _friction_ to writing a note. I just want to get it out of my brain (or find it, if a previous thought) as quickly as possible. With nvALT you start typing and it is searching immediately, but if there is no match and you hit enter you are now writing a new note. Each note is stored as a text file, and so is findable via other search methods on your machine, and is easy to sync via your chosen technology. I have tried a variety of approaches as I love the idea of linking between notes, and adding images, and tagging and all that stuff. But in reality all of that adds friction, and so prevents me from making the note (which is the critical part). [1] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

timtyrrell 6y ago
Also this one for those that want to live in Vim: https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim

makeworld 6y ago

nb seems like a souped-up version of this tool, and a few others mentioned in the thread. https://github.com/xwmx/nb https://github.com/xwmx/nb

hyb 6y ago
+1 for nb, the dev posted it here a couple months back and I immediately switched to using it, does the job perfectly.

notyourday 6y ago

I go for a low-fi approach: it is a single text file. $ notes appends a new line, current date like Mon 05 Oct 2020 10:20:47 AM EDT another new line and a set of === as a separator and moves the editor cursor to the bottom. So I can immediately type. If I type $ notes So that was weird then it will take whatever I typed at the command line and append that as well allowing me to continue to type in the editor. Finally I use :tag to freetag notes so I can easily search through notes based on the topics. I figure eventually I might figure out a better system but so far this one worked very well.

georgefrick 6y ago

I went from paper to a tablet for a year (as a challenge), ended up back on paper. My boss got me into using nicer notebooks, and I've been doing it for years (about 6). I then switched to MD files, eventually ending up using Stackedit extensively for a while similar to the tablet effort. Now, between work, hobbies, being a DM; I've given up and spent some time in One Note... and now that's where I've migrated everything. I'm always interested in how others do this in case they've figured something out. I still use a paper notebook as a personal journal, important notes, etc. I also still use a notepad for those daily notes / thinking on paper that you can throw away at the end of the day.

packetlost 6y ago
I personally use a combination of Notion for collaborative notes/tasks/whatever, bullet journal for daily notes/tasks, and a markdown based zettelkasten for knowledgebase-type stuff. There's a fair amount of duplicated information, but both Notion and the Zettelkasten or easily searchable, and it's trivial to copy-paste between them. I really like the paper method for day-to-day stuff, but for research or work-related notes, I simply can't write fast enough to keep up (particularly if I'm trying to capture info from a meeting), and the lack of searchability means I can never fully rely on paper notes as a means of retaining information long-term.

stargrave 6y ago

Personally I used Python's tnote program, but, because of Python, it worked pretty slowly. So I rewrite on pure POSIX shell and it serves me for nearly ten years: http://www.git.stargrave.org/?p=t.git;a=blob;f=t http://www.git.stargrave.org/?p=t.git;a=blob;f=t Comparing to author's solution, it gives ability to briefly list notes, use multiple "namespaces", quickly add (without invoking the editor), delete or modify each specified note. Also there is no bashism and it works out of box on *BSD (that lacks bash) and GNU systems.

marinhero 6y ago

After years of using tons of notebooks I decided to move to Notability on my iPad. The Apple Pencil + Paperlike experience really do it for me. Notability is nice and when I write feature designs I don’t have to transcribe my handwriting to the computer. I simply select the handwriting, convert it to text and move it over my computer. Another great thing about this is that I can run searches on my handwriting, I really enjoy that because looking for that one page in a notebook is never practical, specially when you have many notebooks. I’m a fan of the simplicity of your system but I don’t know if it’ll work for me. I really like writing with a pencil, that’s when I feel like I’m learning or reflecting on information.

darkr 6y ago

Having a generally positive experience with Dendron: (https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron ) currently, having recently migrated several thousand markdown-format notes captured over the past few years.

npsimons 6y ago

Oh look, someone reinvented org-mode.

brw12 6y ago

I'm a dedicated Evernote user. I add just about everything I generate or want to record to Evernote, in one big "notebook", and then I extensively use tagging to make sure everything is findable. I try to use every tag I might ever search for, for which this note would be relevant. Sometimes I add content to existing notes, if they are relevant and include the same family of concepts. I often merge notes; e.g., I save all my tweets to Evernote via IFTTT, and then merge all of them for each given month. I often add notes with no tagging at all, and I have a shortcut to search for notes with no tags, as a sort of inbox. The ability to search everything at once is the key: I can search "movies" or "startup" or "medicine" and find everything with those tags, or those words in the title or text, or even in PDFs. (I use a Fuji ScanSnap to scan documents into Evernote, with fully searchable text.) The biggest feature I wish for is transcription of voice notes or audio files, so the content would be searchable. Evernote's Mac app is notoriously slow, but it's gotten better over the years. I still don't understand why they can't make it as fast as the web app.

pinjasaur 6y ago

I have a script that functions very similarly, called `jot`[1]. I also have one for rapid steam-of-conscious thoughts[2] and organized journaling[3]. Personally, I'm a fan of the "plaintext files in a directory" pattern for notes, thoughts, and writing. [1]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jot https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jot [2]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jt https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jt [3]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jrnl https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jrnl

pdx_flyer 6y ago

I have been struggling to keep notes effectively. A lot of my notes "expire" a few days after taking them, but others I will need years later. For most of my job I take physical notes. I don't love it but it's easy for me to grab a pen and paper just about anywhere I am. Where I struggle is doing something with those notes after the fact. When I am at my computer, I usually just keep a plain text file going for the day and just save it for the date. I also have Teams recordings, screenshots, and other stuff that I have to just put in a folder. I don't have tagging or anything and keeping up this information just isn't working. Any tips?

richardliutl 6y ago
Physical notes are great for the reasons you mention - I tend to transcribe my physical notes into e.g. Google Docs/Dropbox which seems to make it easier to refer back to them. Of course you run into potential privacy issues for sensitive notes; on that front, pen and paper notes (or an offline machine) are hard to beat.

kovek 6y ago

For me, I'm an avid browser, lurker, reader of HN, Reddit, and when I come through an interesting paragraph in an article, or a comment in a thread, I screenshot it. Next step will be to automatically move the screenshot from iCloud onto a computer, run OCR on the screenshots, index them, and make it possible to search through their text with near-equal search terms (eg "cute dog" would match "cute puppy" as well) Anyone has ideas on how to make that possible?

richardliutl 6y ago
Screenshot + OCR seems tough, but sounds like it could be your preferred workflow. More robust will always be 1. a link to the article/thread and 2. a transcription of the content (esp. tailored to you [1]) imo. Your search term idea is interesting, I know Google is/has been doing this. [1] https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/ https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/
blandflakes 6y ago
I've considered similar but thought that ingesting the actual text from a link would be easier.

varrock 6y ago

Does anybody have a counter argument for just using macOS notes if you exclusively use Apple products? They sync nicely with my devices and make note taking pretty simple for me.

jxy 6y ago
Proprietary format. Difficult to link (or backlink) to other notes. Difficult to export, index, or analyze with other tools.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  They are difficult to export. I had great success with Exporter.app, it converts to markdown and even handles the images. It then imports nicely into Bear.app. https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  They're accessible via IMAP. For me, at least, that makes them quite easy to export or $whatever with.
jdillaaa 6y ago
It's a proprietary note ecosystem, so if you ever try to leave (or not use iCloud, which iOS/macOS note syncing depends on), it will be very difficult to regain control of your notes. I did this and it took a lot of effort, involved parsing out some protocol buffers, and losing a lot of formatting. I now just use markdown text files, never going back to that. There are iOS shortcuts now which can let you do this programmatically, but you also lose formatting, and its a hack.
donaldihunter 6y ago
I’ve been using macOS notes for a couple of years for daily note taking, because it is just so convenient with cloud sync. I have been planning to transcribe everything I want to keep into a git repo of .md files, for exactly the lockin reasons the other replies have mentioned. I hope to settle on macOS notes for daily stuff and transcribing to a repo for long term.

ilian 6y ago

A suitable addition to your system for managing notes is the open source tool TagSpaces (https://www.tagspaces.org https://www.tagspaces.org). With it you can tag, preview and edit your markdown files in one application, without any vendor locking.

m0ngr31 6y ago

I created a self-hosted app to keep track of my thoughts and tasks during the day: https://github.com/m0ngr31/DailyNotes https://github.com/m0ngr31/DailyNotes It helps me to break things out based on date or by topic, which this supports.

EduardMe 6y ago

I build a whole iOS/Mac app around the idea of daily notes and now also backlinking :) https://noteplan.co https://noteplan.co

jlgaddis 6y ago

Just wait until systemd-notesd comes along and shows us all the One True Way(TM) of taking notes!