Ask HN: What software do you use to take notes? - NuDinNou
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baali
Org-Mode and Emacs: [http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/)

~~~
funkaster
same here. I keep notes in two-three different files (work, personal, misc)
and add todos there. those files are part of the agenda, so I can quickly
summarize everything in one place. I also use tags to group tasks.

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hexmiles
Onenote.

For me the killer feature is the ability to put text wherever i want, and move
it later, i just click where i want to write in the page and type, it really
changed the way i take note, it feel more natural and more close to the "paper
experience".

i tried opensource solution, but all the one i found allow only for "linear"
note taking, witch is ok if i need to take a quick note, but if i need to
"prototype" or brainstorm something i feel them to restrictive.

where onenote is not avaible or overkill i simply use markdown files, with git
for versioning and Syncthing for syncronization.

edit: correct some typo

~~~
baldfat
As a college student I hooked up a microphone (A tiny shotgun mic) and the
audio would sync with my notes. It was simply amazing. As a librarian I bought
OneNote for the whole student body and taught every freshman for 1.5 hours on
how to use it. Less then 2 dozen students said at the end of the year they
used it. I no longer purchased OneNote.

People are strange.

~~~
MichaelGG
And it indexes audio, too. Comes in handy reviewing hour+ meetings where we
can't remember exactly what was said.

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654wak654
Google Keep

[http://keep.google.com/](http://keep.google.com/)

~~~
ChristianGeek
Too much risk of them killing it with little warning.

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LorenzoLlamas
What? Really? No one but one other uses TextEdit? At least among Mac users?
And before that, I used NotePad on Windows.

It's notes. It doesn't need to 'sync' to your mobile device and be in a cloud
somewhere. It's just some notes. What is with everyone these days sharing
their whole lives on a server somewhere?

Is everyone paranoid of data loss? So what? If you lose it all, it was meant
to be. Relax. You guys are supposed to be geeks and yet you are giving the NSA
more data than they could ever hope to get from the average Joe.

If I see another Org-mode or wiki "note" demo on YouTube, I'll croak. Get a
life. Or a girlfriend. Or go play with your children. Or visit some nature.
Get away from the screeeeen.... Not even the president has to organize notes.

I saw one Org-Mode clown rant about how he had 1000+ lines of notes for
various things in one file. That's not notes. That's the fringes of madness.

Delete it all. Start over.

I'm starting to think that the days of hard drive crashes were actually a good
thing.

I can understand if you are a real science researcher or investigative
journalist (for work). Or if you want to ensure you have copies of your tax
returns or medical records.

But notes? NOTES? Grocery lists? Who makes grocery lists and needs to sync
them everywhere?

Go live on a farm for a while or something. Uh, it's cheese of some kind, milk
of some kind, coffee of some kind, produce, fish, meat, and avoid the candy
and canned item aisles. There's your grocery list.

Do you same folks have list about what order to put on your clothes each day?
(Don't answer that).

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askafriend
Default Notes on iOS/OSX

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ericzawo
Dynalist.

It's the ultimate to-do list application. Syncs offline, can support markdown
AND LaTeX AND code, images, links, and shareable options with your team. It's
basically the successor to Workflowy you didn't know you needed. AND it's made
by two awesome university students that maintain a public roadmap and actually
listen to their community.

------
ryeon
Pen and Paper

~~~
MichaelGG
Bingo. I often can't read what I've written but it's much easier to flow and
get ideas out on paper. Theoretically I want to use OneNote but a nice pen and
paper wins.

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reitanqild
Happy with Asciidoc FX with gitlab as backend for now although I am sometimes
looking for and _might_ [0] be happy to pay for an even better solution.

[0]: yep. I sometimes even pay for inexpensive software just because I like
the idea even if I don't end up using it.

------
artimaeis
I'm a pretty big fan of taking notes with pen & paper then setting time aside
to transcribe them to a markdown file and saving them in a GitHub repo.

The pen & paper part means I don't have to lug my laptop around so often - I
try not to use meeting times to actually do things anyways. I figure if a
handful of people are in a room together it's best to focus on the reason
we're all in one place and pen/paper lets me do just that.

Then the digital archival is a way to force me to review my notes and commit
the better parts of them to memory. So long as I can get that done within a
few hours it tends to work well. Then they're available for me and others to
text search accordingly.

~~~
patleeman
I've always tried to reconcile notebook taking with digital notes and this
sounds like a great reason to use both. I have a bad habit of taking notes in
meetings and then forgetting about them.

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stijlist
This shell script:

#!/bin/sh while true; do $EDITOR $NOTESDIR"$(ls -t $NOTESDIR | selecta
--scrolloff --passthrough)" done

It replicates the core interaction model of Notational Velocity: type to
fuzzy-filter the list of notes (sorted by MRU) by filename, enter to edit the
notes, and quit the editor to end up back in the list of notes.

I forked selecta to add those flags - --passthrough means that the text typed
in to filter is emitted on stdout if it doesn't match anything. This way you
create a note if it doesn't exist.

[https://github.com/stijlist/bin/blob/master/nv](https://github.com/stijlist/bin/blob/master/nv)

------
gorbachev
I primarily use Wunderlist, because it's truly cross platform. I can use it on
my desktop, phone and the web just the same. I use it mostly for actionable
notes...things I'm planning on doing something about at some point. It's more
of an idea bank than a todo list, though, for me.

For more free form note taking I'm using Rocketbook's "smart" notebooks
([https://getrocketbook.com/](https://getrocketbook.com/)). I can scan the
notes to Evernote, and when the notebook gets full, I can easily erase the
notes and reuse the notebook.

------
lousken
Depends on type of notes - shopping list google keep(in case they shut it down
there's omni notes). Otherwise I use markdown + latex(math) in whatever editor
I have at my disposal. Then I view it in e.g. hackmd.io / VSC / neutriNote.
I've tried word, onenote but it didn't work for me - writing formulas and
equations is much faster in latex. I don't go full latex though because
markdown is much more readable in its raw form. Graphs are still pain though,
haven't really solved that, especially those without absolute values.

------
ganonm
I have a directory ~/Documents/TODO/ inside which I have single file for each
feature I'm working on. These files simply contain a list of items marked as
completed or not completed using a tick/cross. It's simple, non-proprietary
and is easy to put under source control.

For long-term note taking I use Evernote. This is for things like obscure git
commands and 'how-to's.

------
niceperson
This: [https://github.com/pimterry/notes](https://github.com/pimterry/notes)

This is not my repo.

------
reacharavindh
Notability on 9.7inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. Closest I could get to the
feel of writing on paper. But, I can access my notes whenever whereever. I can
even import PDF docs into it and annotate on them while I read. Just like on
printed paper.

One thing I wish it did is to let me export as HTML instead of PDF. I would
love share my notes as blog posts.

------
pklausler
A fine-pointed Lamy 2000 fountain pen with Sailor black ink on Quo Vadis
notebooks. Typing distracts me.

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oceanghost
I have been happy with Evernote for years. My user number is absurdly low
(like in the 200ks). However I no longer keep any information in evernote I
consider sensitive. Just research notes.

I would love to find a reasonably well made self-hosted note app.

------
brianjolney
Personal notes in Evernote but increasingly taking team notes in Dropbox's
Paper.

------
neurocroc
I use Mind Maps for all my note taking.

[https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-
map](https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map)

I found it to be the most optimal format for this task.

~~~
xdux
that's awesome!

------
pencilcode
Vim + vimwiki for notes that deserve to last. These are saved in bitbucket
private repo. Per project also have a single markdown file inside the
project's directory with dashes and crosses for tasks.

------
neovive
Drafts seems interesting for mobile (with nice Markdown support).
[http://agiletortoise.com/drafts/](http://agiletortoise.com/drafts/)

------
CypressXM
I use DIA, which is unusual since it's a diagramming program. I love it though
I've been using it for 10 years to take notes and manage dev and spec out
projects.

------
ateevchopra
Dropbox Paper. Mainly because of non distracting UI and markdown support. Also
copy paste keeps the format intact. That comes in handy to copy/paste code in
notes.

------
kujenga
Evernote for personal use, Slack messages to myself for work

~~~
zulln
How do you organize those 'notes' in Slack?

~~~
AdamGibbins
from:@me in:@me some search term here -- I'd imagine.

------
iansowinski
I mainly use Lechtum1917 dotted A6 notebook + Micron pen, but when i take less
analogue notes, i choose Vim + markdown + dropbox and MarkdownX on smartphone

------
marcolussetti
Markdown files using Typora ([https://typora.io/](https://typora.io/)) on
either Linux or Windows

------
mnkmnk
Sublime text. I can just open a new document and start typing. I don't need to
save the file and the tab collapse keeps the high level notes clean.

------
jmcfarlane
[https://github.com/jmcfarlane/notable](https://github.com/jmcfarlane/notable)

------
maliker
Text files stored in Google Drive. Editing with Sublime Text on MacOS,
Textastic/Workflow on iOS. Searching via Launchbar and Spotlight.

------
RUG3Y
I'm using the Plain Notes Sublime plugin right now, but I also like OneNote. I
haven't landed on a long-term solution yet.

------
soulchild37
Quiver app

------
onuralp
Bear App. [http://www.bear-writer.com/](http://www.bear-writer.com/)

------
charlieegan3
I have a simple crud app hosted on heroku.

~~~
newbear
What back end? In general, what's the set up like?

~~~
charlieegan3
Rails and Postgres. Pretty standard setup really. Used the rails scaffolding
to put it together.

------
calebio
I write markdown files with emacs.

These notes are stored at `~/notes` which I symlink to `~/Dropbox/notes`.

~~~
proaralyst
I do similarly: Vim & reStructured Text.

------
patleeman
Collate

Full disclosure, I created it! I made it because there was nothing comparable
on the market. Cross-platform, plain text with a powerful markdown editor.
I've since added a rich text editor, web clipper and a workflowy style outline
note type. I'm also planning on adding git support soon.

[http://collatenotes.com](http://collatenotes.com)

------
mirodin
Tiddlywiki

[http://tiddlywiki.com/](http://tiddlywiki.com/)

------
andremendes
A Telegram group with myself, only.

~~~
reitanqild
Same here, in addition to long form in Asciidoc FX.

(It is searchable and taggable so I'll use it like

"""#LP12345 #oil +2dl km234567"""

where LP12345 is my license plate number.

That way I can for example always go back and find how much oil my car uses.

------
goranb
Vim + VimWiki

------
icedata
Emacs and org-mode, use Dropbox to sync across windows, linux, android. Orgzly
on Android.

------
baldfat
I usually do notes in a plain text files and I LOVE MIND MAPS for concepts and
use XMind.

------
reitanqild
Was this thread just killed? I can't see it on any of the three first pages.

------
PLenz
Graph notebooks, the real, dead tree kind. I also like sharpie pens.

------
Jtsummers
Emacs with org-mode and git for syncing across my computers.

------
jm0dotcodes
Classic UNIX file, edited with the 'ed' command :)

Nothing fancy.

------
psyc
OneNote, Mac and iOS

------
achompas
Day One for general notes, 2Do for notes on tasks.

(I use Mac and iOS.)

~~~
reitanqild
Day One is one of a very few apps I miss from Mac OS X, another being Alarms
from Mediaatelier I think although that one disappeared from Mac OS X as well
because the API it used was phased out.

------
buster
Zim with some encrypted file sync is a great tool.

------
goerz
GoodNotes on iPad Pro 12.9 inch with Apple Pencil

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germinalphrase
Default Notes on iPhone.

TextEdit > iCloud on desktop.

------
hartator
It's interesting that everyone seems to do something different. I wonder why
this not a solved issue yet which one best and obvious way.

------
khasan222
Workflowy. Simple and effective.

------
tannerc
iA Writer has been invaluable for me in capturing notes at work or on-the-go.

------
king_magic
OneNote, iOS, Mac and Win10

------
Thorncorona
Evernote

------
Sujan
Simplenote

------
dmitripopov
Notepad

------
Walkman
OneNote webapp on Linux

------
jenhsun
nvALT and any smartphone voice recorder.

~~~
7hertz
This! Can't believe there aren't more people using nvALT. My question for iOS
nvALT users is, what app do you use for the iPhone? I've only been able to
find Simplenote, which is fine, but it syncs the content of my notes as clear
text, which isn't fine. Is there any other iOS app that syncs with nvALT?

------
lanna
OmniOutliner

------
ivcha
RedNotebook

------
janitor61
WikidPad

------
mfaessel
Boostnote

------
hammock
Outlook

------
losteverything
Keep

------
ssambros
Keep

------
jmstfv
gedit

------
altern8tif
Bear

~~~
geoah
Tried bear a bit, the lack of syncing do other things than apple cloud is an
issue, as well as the lack of web/android clients.

------
Kenji
notepad.exe

