
Ask HN: What is your ideal note-taking software and/or hardware? - ahstilde
TL:DR Share with me your vision for a perfect note-taking system or software, online, offline, and physical<p>I&#x27;ve struggled with note-taking for years. From college where notes were used for studying to my professional life where notes are used for reference, I&#x27;ve never found a note-taking solution I like. I&#x27;ve used binders, notebooks, large software (Evernote, OneNote), light software (Google Keep), and nothing has ever met all of my needs.<p>I&#x27;ve realized that my needs for the perfect note-taking software are as follows:<p>* When given a note, auto-tag and sort.<p>* A note can be 1) a saved web-page, 2) an image of my physical notebook [should be OCR&#x27;d], 3) text I type into the software itself, or 4) a mixture of the above.<p>* Notes should be indexed and searchable by content and title.<p>* Notes should be synced across devices<p>* Notes should be accessible off-line<p>I&#x27;d be willing to pay around $20 per month for a service like this.<p>What&#x27;s your ideal note-taking software or system look like?
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fosco
I struggled to even try using emacs org mode, but it was entirely worth it, I
highly recommend it, give it a week and honest effort into learning, being
able to export to html allows me to reference easily wihle on the road,
updating the .org is still a challenge while on road without my laptop and ssh
access.

that being said, I think like you, my struggle is with the bottleneck between
my brain and these devices. it is often annoying to sit down or access my
'notebook' wherever it is and I'd rather just make a mental note and it show
up in my spreadsheet.

I like workflowy, but will not use because I do not like using cloud services
as I have little trust for them (been burnt a couple times now, so after
learning the lesson 3 times I finally wised up)

EDIT: some typoes and adding other thoughts...

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mobitar
While it's not fully ready yet, Standard Notes can in theory do all these
things. It's a client based system backed by an abstract model server, meaning
the client chooses how to represent data, and the server can understand any
format.

There is an agreed upon client side format which is discussed in the
specification[1].

It's also decentralized and encrypted which means you'll have total privacy
and security. You can run your own server, or join a community server.

Would love any feedback you have. Follow for updates on Twitter:
@standardnotes.

[1] [https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org)

[2] [https://twitter.com/standardnotes](https://twitter.com/standardnotes)

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rodolphoarruda
For quick notes that I don't need to index nor search later I just grab a
physical notebook that sits on my table. It has a pen in it marking the next
empty page.

Other than that, I click a button on my taskbar to load Notepad or Gedit
depending on the OS I'm using. Take notes there, but don't save it. Once I'm
done, I go to Evernote and paste the notes there, give it a title and add
tags.

I'm one of those people who keep Evernote with only 2 notebooks: Inbox and
Archive. All possible use cases on taken notes are based on tags, which I
add/remove according to my workflow.

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jarrettlenox
My ideal would be very similar to yours. When you lay out the requirements
like you have it makes me realize that it's less note taking and more
"distributed storage and universal access to a resource management solution
that can index and categorize variable content"

That's asking a lot from a note taking app, but not from a CMS.

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was_boring
I use workflowy, but mainly for task management and light note taking. The UI
is cimbersome on desktop, and unusable on Android. The only thing that saves
it is keyboard shortcuts.

I used to use Evernote, and still recommend them for people who want something
more robust and featured. I wish they were lighter in the formatting and
allowed markdown though.

Usecanvas is good if you want something dead simple.

~~~
chuckus
For Evernote, to write in Markdown, I've been using
[http://marxi.co](http://marxi.co) and am a big fan of it, though it does cost
and runs on only web technologies.

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wolfgang42
I use Zim[1], and have been very happy with it.

> When given a note, auto-tag and sort.

I'm not sure what you mean by "auto-tag and sort", but Zim does allow you to
organize pages and also search through them.

> A note can be 1) a saved web-page, 2) an image of my physical notebook
> [should be OCR'd], 3) text I type into the software itself, or 4) a mixture
> of the above.

Zim has support for attachments and embedded images[2]. It doesn't support
OCR, but it would not be difficult to build a little custom tool[3] to use a
separate OCR utility, so you can select an image and have it insert the OCRed
text underneath. When I link to webpages, I generally just copy-paste the
relevant bits into the page, but you could also save the entire webpage as an
attachment. Again, a custom tool could be used to automatically save a copy of
the URL on the page and/or embed its content.

> Notes should be indexed and searchable by content and title.

Zim has a search feature which works pretty well, though I sometimes have to
stick extra synonyms into the text if I find that I keep searching on the
wrong keyword.

> Notes should be synced across devices

> Notes should be accessible off-line

Zim stores everything in plain text files with a vaguely mediawikish markup,
so I've stored the notebook in a Git repository hosted on BitBucket[4] and
periodically push/pull changes between computers. This also leaves me with a
history, so I can go back and `git blame`/`git log` a page to see how a
project evolved.

I've also written another post on HN discussing my organizational system in
more detail here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134401)

[1]: [http://zim-wiki.org/](http://zim-wiki.org/)

[2]: [http://zim-wiki.org/manual/Help/Attachments.html](http://zim-
wiki.org/manual/Help/Attachments.html)

[3]: [http://zim-wiki.org/manual/Help/Custom_Tools.html](http://zim-
wiki.org/manual/Help/Custom_Tools.html)

[4]: [https://bitbucket.org/](https://bitbucket.org/)

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dqv
I like tiddlywiki. It has the potential to do all the things you want, but
will require some set up.

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atmosx
I second this. Tiddlywiki has this kind of nesting support which makes it
ideal for brainstorming, note taking, etc. The structure is extremely
flexible, you can structure your notes however you like.

A similar old OSX app.was Voodoopad. Not sure if its still under dev.

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shahbaby
Probably not what you're looking for but as a student, the surface book w/
OneNote solved all my note taking issues.

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MikeTV
A sub-vocalization microphone and speech recognition system that puts
silently-spoken notes into OneNote.

