
Ask HN: What's your catch-all note taker? - b1gtuna
I use Microsoft OneNote and it has been working great for dumping all kinds of stuff (screenshots, logs, ideas, thoughts, love letters, resignation letters, resumes, code snippets and etc). That said I use an iPhone, use Linux for work, and Windows at home. So accessing the OneNote when I am not home has been difficult. What is your favorite dumpster(?) app? Do you recommend it? I am open for both free and paid solutions.
======
gexla
As of 37 minutes in, not one Orgmode... ;)

I like Google Keep because it's one of the few apps I have found which gives
me a readable preview of the notes. I generally try to keep the notes short.
There is also an option to save the notes as Google Docs and then download as
plain text if you like.

Of you wanted to arrange the short notes into a longer form, then Scrivener is
a good next step. Again, Scrivener allows me to view these short notes in a
readable preview. I can also drag and drop notes onto a larger document. Plus
tons more features.

I have tried tons of other apps and none of them seem to allow a readable text
preview. I like plain text, but I also like some sort of visual reference
where I can scan loads of texts. Of course, this doesn't work well for longer
text.

There have been some threads here lately about Perkeep, which I think has a
lot of potential. A Google Keep interface on Perkeep would be perfect. What I
like about Perkeep is that all content is content addressable and you can
create meta-data external to the file which can hold things like tags, links
between files, hierarchy, titles and a bunch more.

~~~
jjuhl
"As of 37 minutes in, not one Orgmode" \- ehh, how did you miss my org mode
comment?

~~~
swsieber
Well, your org mode comment was made 42 minutes in. At least, as I'm posting
this, the post was 52 minutes old, your org mode comment was 10 minutes old,
and this comment of yours was 1 minute in...

So... latency.

------
Jasber
Shameless plug: I'm building Catch Notes
([https://catchnotes.app/](https://catchnotes.app/)) for this

The idea is to capture notes/thoughts/todos quickly and send them to any
service (Trello/Basecamp/Asana/etc...). For people doing deep work
(programmers, designers, writers) you want to stay in flow but also be able to
capture any random thought that pops in your head.

This project is a bit harder than ones I've done in the past because I'm
trying to take it cross-platform (macOS first) and keep it native UI
everywhere.

For the past few years I've been storing almost everything in Markdown and
organizing files into yearly folders—I call it my "memex".

It ends up being pretty simple, but I end up missing some information that
gets silo'd off in services like Trello.

~~~
timdavila
Very cool, congrats on building it. Do you have any affiliation with the old
catch.com team?

I used Catch Notes for a bit several years ago before they were bought out. In
case you weren't aware: [https://www.cnet.com/how-to/export-your-data-from-
catch-note...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/export-your-data-from-catch-notes-
before-it-shuts-down/)

------
Mister_Snuggles
I'm also a OneNote fan. I use it in a similar fashion - tons of work-related
stuff, a bunch of personal stuff, and a notebook shared with my SO so we can
both update grocery lists, etc.

I've got the OneNote app on my iPhone and it works well enough for what I need
to access on the go. What trouble do you have accessing it when you're not at
home? My biggest use-case for OneNote on the iPhone is to tick items on the
grocery list - it works great and changes propagate to my SO's phone in under
a second.

~~~
b1gtuna
Right, I forgot about the iOS version of the OneNote app. I guess I am
searching for a more cross-platform solution (much like Google Notebook. Also,
it looks like Microsoft is migrating OneNote out of Office suite and make it
available as a default app in Windows, but will require a subscription to
Office 365 to unlock features [1]. So cost becomes an issue when this occurs..

[1] [https://www.pcworld.com/article/3269056/software-
productivit...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3269056/software-
productivity/microsoft-will-stop-developing-onenote-2016-in-favor-of-the-
windows-10-onenote-app.html)

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
This is something I will need to keep an eye on. I've come to depend on
OneNote pretty heavily.

On the plus side, Office 365 is quite cheap considering you get 1TB of
OneDrive storage for the price. Since you're a Linux user that might not be
useful to you though.

------
jdoege
I went paperless, this year, and after trying 3 or 4 different note apps, I
settled on Notability on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. That I can run the app
on my laptop (and phone), synchronized through iCloud makes this incredibly
more useful than pen and paper. Importing pdfs and images from other places,
keyboard based text entry from the laptop, proper handwriting recognition and
search thereon based is amazing. I can tell when technology will work for me
when I can quickly adopt it and feel no desire to go back to what I did
before. That happened with ereaders for me when they came to the phone (I can
read anywhere, anytime and for however long I have, I love it) and it has
happened with this, as well.

------
jjuhl
Emacs org mode ([https://orgmode.org](https://orgmode.org)).

~~~
nine_k
What I badly miss about it is some kind of "org mode server" to synchronize
things between several nodes, e.g. laptop and mobile, in a _structure-aware_
way.

So far I sync via git, which sort of works but is definitely not great on
mobile.

~~~
vtail
Curious why you want a _structure aware way_?

My current setup (syncing between home and work laptops) is to auto-save files
every few second in emacs, and "git pull; git commit -am `date`; git push"
every few minutes in a cron. Works like a charm.

edit: I also do "git add * .org; git add * .org_archive" inside the org folder
before the commit, in the same cron job.

~~~
nine_k
Structure-aware: if one change sets a TODO item to WIP, and another to DONE, a
structure-aware merge algorithm could resolve this conflict, e.g. based on
time; plain git needs human attention.

Well, yes, immediate sync should work, all merges would be fast-forward except
for a vanishingly rare case of two conflicting simultaneous pushes.

It's not very practical if one of the devices is mobile, so it's not always
online, and parallel changes may build up sometimes.

~~~
vtail
That makes sense. I realize in my use case, even if I have one device offline,
e.g., working on a laptop on a flight, in most times I will be able to sync
before I switch to another device, so it rarely creates a problem.

------
octorian
A disorganized collection of text files, often (but not always) in Dropbox,
and random pieces of scrap paper.

I've tried fancier solutions over the years, including Tomboy and Evernote
(and maybe even Google Keep, for a few minutes), but none of them have had
sticking power.

Ultimately, my note-taking needs fall into two categories:

1) Something I can paste text into, where said text is best kept plain. (Word
processor formatting would just get annoying, and cause endless problems,
especially if that text is a code/command-line snippet.)

2) Something I can scribble on, where the content is likely to be some sort of
sketch/diagram/chart with annotations. Most software note-taking solutions
would fall flat on their head here, because its not what they're designed for.

When I was in school, I actually found that taking notes on a computer only
worked in liberal arts classes. In STEM classes, handwritten notes were almost
always easier.

FWIW, I recently picked up a reMarkable tablet as another way of attacking the
"scraps of paper" problem (and as a nice offline PDF reader). Its generally
nice, but still doesn't quite have the resolution to match a fine-tipped
pen/pencil annotating a diagram without being close enough to the limit to
drive one OCD crazy. (But it is getting fairly close.)

------
hummerbliss
I recently started using Zim Desktop Wiki ([http://zim-wiki.org](http://zim-
wiki.org)) for the sole reason being that it saves them in text files and the
obvious advantages that come with it (sync, no lock-in) etc. I use them across
mac, windows, and linux machines. I couldn't find an iPhone app.

~~~
fiveFeet
Zim is awesome for note taking. Highly recommended.

------
privong
There's a lot of input on this from previous ask HN's too:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20note%20taking&sort=byPop...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20note%20taking&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

------
rayiner
I use Trello. It's not great at taking notes, but it's very easy to get data
into it. Each list and item within a list has an email address, and you can
shoot PDFs, web pages, etc., to those from anywhere without special software.
It also "spatial,"[1] which is hugely helpful in being able to find things.
I've tried a few other things but I don't like them. One Note is glacially
slow for notebooks hosted online. And I can never find anything in Evernote.

[1]
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/)

------
purplezooey
Is it just me or is Trello the most overrated software ever. Stack some cards.
Color em. Write some more. Woo. Get bought for a few hundred mil.

------
mikestew
_That said I use an iPhone, use Linux for work, and Windows at home. So
accessing the OneNote when I am not home has been difficult._

It shouldn't be, as there's an iPhone client, a Windows client, and you can
use the web version for Linux. I have my complaints about OneNote, oh I've got
complaints. But cross-platform isn't one of them. I don't have a personal
notebook that use much anymore, but I've got one for a local non-profit that I
work with, and a couple for work, all of which are accessible anywhere I have
a connection.

That said, I just use vimwiki and Apple's Notes/Reminders apps. I've used
OneNote since it was an internal Microsoft build running on my Toshiba Portege
Tablet PC, but instead of adding features that have (IMO) been needed for over
a decade, it looks like they'll be _removing_ functionality in the next
release. So it's vimwiki for anything remotely complicated, and Apple's apps
for the day-to-day "remind me to buy cat food" stuff.

vimwiki, which means you better be using vim, isn't a text version of OneNote,
but it's close enough. And in a lot of respects I find it less annoying than
OneNote's quirks. Project management, daily log, work notes, things that could
use bullets and mulit-level outlining and the like. Export to HTML if it needs
to be printed. As there doesn't seem to be any kind of iOS client, I might
write one of these weekends when I'm bored. But I dump the wiki files to
iCloud, so I can get to it from work or home, and if I were desperate I
suppose I could view the raw files on iOS.

Apple's stuff I use mainly in conjunction with Siri. "Hey, Siri, remind me at
8:00 tonight to pay the light bill". Quick, one-off stuff I don't want to
forget and would like a reminder for later. No heavy, project-oriented stuff
goes in there.

~~~
b1gtuna
Whoa, I wasn't aware of the web version of OneNote. This is a nice surprise!
I'm a Vim user so I will give vimwiki a shot as well. Thank you.

------
h0h0h0
Sublime Text for sure.

I used to use Apple Notes and still have years of stuff on there. Before that
it was Evernote. And before that it was text files somewhere.

I came back to text files just because of the lack of formatting. It forces a
primitiveness on the idea that ensures that it doesn't become distracting.

A lot of people in the WIP community are starting to use Notion. Haven't
looked at it yet.

------
anonlawyer
My catch-all note taker is a Rhodia notebook with four different Lamy fountain
pins, each with a different color ink. For digital stuff, I use Simplenote on
mac, iOS, and Android and Resoph Notes (synced to Simplenote) on my Windows
work laptop. I only just learned of Dynalist and may give that a spin but
doubt that it will unseat Simplenote in my system.

~~~
FreezerburnV
As someone who also likes physical paper + fountain pen: how do you carry your
fountain pens in a way that they don't leak ink when moving around in a pocket
or something similar? (as in, the physical jolt of the pen moving in a pocket
causes a little ink to come out of the nib, similar to if you were shaking it)

------
gotrythis
For note taking, I used to use the LiveScribe pen and paper, which records
what's being said, synced to your notes. This is not simply attaching audio to
notes. It's far better. You can click on a written note to hear what was being
said when you wrote the note, and replay the audio and writing together.

It allows you to be present in meetings and just jotting down headlines of
things to review, instead of madly scribbling notes.

Livescribe: [https://www.livescribe.com](https://www.livescribe.com)

However, I hated the notebooks, simply because I didn't like carrying around
multiple notebooks.

Now I use an iPad app called Notability, which does the same thing, without
the annoyance of dealing with paper. I just wish they had a Windows version
for when I get a Surface Book!

Notability: [http://gingerlabs.com/](http://gingerlabs.com/)

------
cal97g
Typora. Just a simple WYSIWYG markdown editor. I use it for anything from
writing articles to notes to invoices. Has pretty PDF exports which look good
and professional for documentation as well a nice selection of themes.

~~~
im_dario
Amazing editor. I'm working in a little side project and I had in my mind an
editor like this one.

------
m52go
Zotero. Cross-platform and open-source. You can sync it using your favorite
syncing tool, and even encrypt before syncing using something like
Cryptomator. I regularly use this set-up on Linux and Windows.

------
cyann
Currently moving from ResphNotes on PC
([https://resoph.com](https://resoph.com)) and nvALT
([http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/](http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/))
on Mac (with text files shared on cloud folder) to StandardNotes
([https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/)) which is E2E and
supports all platforms.

------
mihaifm
Plain text for notes/bookmarks/todo items/wishlists with my own markdown-like
syntax for formatting. I use a small app (Editorial) on my iphone and Dropbox
to sync.

~~~
b1gtuna
Thanks. This is probably 1 of my top 3 choices at the moment. It is timeless,
no need to worry about service shutdown, and robust and free. Of course, it
probably has the most learning curve as I have to type out everything.

------
timdavila
I built my own solution for this after using many different apps and not quite
being satisfied with any of them. My ideal editor is markdown based with
preview as you type, available everywhere (so sublime wouldn't work), plain
text storage that's easy to export, and simple linking between notes. It's at
[https://www.nominal.net](https://www.nominal.net) if you're interested.

------
plokta
I recently discovered VNote:
[https://github.com/tamlok/vnote](https://github.com/tamlok/vnote)

Works great for me so far. Its QT based and uses plain Markdown files. Notes
are organized in notebooks with (sub-)folders. Some of the features on top of
this are tagging, full text search, reader-mode, vim key-bindings,
attachments, MathJax, PlantUML, and Mermaid.js support.

------
storgendibal
I used OneNote on a Surface Pro 1 for several years, but recently switched
over to Goodnotes on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. Goodnotes has fewer
features than OneNote, but the auto-shape tool is pretty sweet and I actually
like the fact that it does not have infinite-sized pages.

I do miss OneNote's OCR, text indexing/search, and seamless cross-platform
sync (web, mobile, laptop).

------
apatil
Notes ([http://github.com/pimterry/notes](http://github.com/pimterry/notes))
on Keybase's kbfs. I really like having my notes be plain text files in an e2e
encrypted network folder. The main downside is that there's no great way to
create notes from keybase's Android app.

------
jshaqaw
Evernote. Nothing is perfect but still nothi g comes close to make sure I have
everything I need across my desktop, iPad, and iPhone at all times. I like the
scrolling list of notes interface and search is pretty good. I’ve had my work
and life in Evernote for almost a decade now and it scales great.

------
elefantastisch
Dynalist [https://dynalist.io/](https://dynalist.io/)

------
drKarl
Vimwiki for text notes

~~~
b1gtuna
Thanks! Never seen this but I already like it. I use Vim and the fact that I
don't have to leave my terminal is definitely a bonus. Have you found a way to
access it via your phone/mobile?

------
krembo
I've tried many of them, but my favorite is Gmail. Yep. Whenever there's
somethin I need to keep for the long run I'm sending my self an email with it.
Attachments supported, formatting supported, search is pretty awesome, so it
has all I need.

------
zwieback
We're an MS shop for office apps and I like OneNote and how it integrates with
everything else and when I open it up I enjoy using it.

Still I never seem to actually use it... Maybe I'm just not a note taker other
than the odd post-it note.

------
pandemicsyn
I made the switch to [https://bear.app](https://bear.app) a while ago (over a
year). Its simple yet full featured enough that its the one I've stuck with
the longest.

------
jmhobbs
I tend to capture stuff in Quiver[0] now. It has decent search, shared
notebooks, etc.

[0] [http://happenapps.com/#quiver](http://happenapps.com/#quiver)

~~~
BlackjackCF
+1 for Quiver.

I bought it years ago. I've never looked back. Such a great notebook.

------
falcolas
Vimwiki. It's pretty much an 80% solution of org mode for vim, and works a
treat for my usecase. I then just store those files in a cloud file sharing
system and access them everywhere.

------
burkemw3
Standard Notes: [https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/)

Mostly text, Web/iPhone/Android, private, freemium+self hosted

------
chrisscastaneda
SimpleNote [https://simplenote.com](https://simplenote.com) Lightweight/not
bloated, quick, and syncs quickly across all my devices

~~~
pongogogo
+1 for simplenote, for plain text it's the best I have found.

------
paulgb
I switched from OneNote to Notion (notion.so) for my personal notes and love
it. The mobile apps are pretty slick. There is no Linux client afaik but the
web client is full-featured.

------
n_t
For many years it was plain text with Vim. Then started using Trello, then
Zenkit for immediate actionable things. But in parallel also used Apple notes
and now days Agenda.

------
ArneBab
I’m using emacs org-mode. For everything, except notes on paper.

------
sjnair96
Google keep. Works on all devices. Only barrier right now is the annoying load
up time. Especially if you install it as a desktop app, it takes too long to
load up.

~~~
vidanay
I use Keep as well, but one thing I find very annoying is how frequently it
loses it's place when my phone goes to sleep. Nitpicky - but this is
especially annoying for the grocery shopping list.

------
evo_9
Bear Notes. It's incredibly flexible. The key feature is the ability to create
complex hierarchy/tree categories with simple hash tagging of notes.

------
Ocerge
Pen and paper has yet to be defeated for me, personally

------
b1gtuna
I'm giving Vimwiki a shot at the moment. I can mark a task as finished with
C-space, but is there a way to archive this finished task?

------
joshstrange
nvAlt is the OS X client I use and I use the Simplenote iOS app (and backend
to sync my notes). I have it on a hotkey so I can pull it up quickly. I only
use if for text/links and would like one that could handle more and maybe even
code snippets a little better but only if I get the same speed. NvAlt is
blazing fast and always works (same for the iOS app).

------
cle
When I'm on my computer, it's Emacs org-mode.

On my iPad, I use GoodNotes with an Apple Pencil, which is an amazing
experience.

------
gunnarde
Papier [https://getpapier.com/](https://getpapier.com/)

~~~
b1gtuna
Thanks. Looks promising, except the notes don't seem to get synced between
devices according to the reviews.

------
Daedren
Standard Notes. Encrypted, has a lot of nifty extensions such as a Markdown
and Vim editors.

You can even selfhost it.

------
hiroshi3110
[https://scrapbox.io](https://scrapbox.io)

------
kowdermeister
Google keep

~~~
b1gtuna
I love Google Keep, but I am afraid they'd kill it all of sudden much like
Google Notebook and Inbox.

~~~
kowdermeister
So what? Use it till you can. The worst case scenario is that I have to spend
half an hour again to pick a todo app sometime in the future :)

~~~
sitzkrieg
sure, but beware if you want to export your data from google keep, it will be
HTML and not easy to import to most other tools

------
rmbeard
Slack and use integrations to back up important stuff to say evernote.

------
xte
org-mode, with org-capture and Emacs bookmarks. In the past I have used deft,
before zim and even before a custom spaghetti-code tiny monster that was a
series of script and text files...

------
aprdm
Google drive! Just taking notes in google docs work pretty well.

------
hprotagonist
apple notes for throwaway stuff and shopping lists and other nonsense.

org-mode in a git repo for everything else.

notability for lectures, just for the audio synch

------
slouch
Trello and a WhatsApp thread with myself

------
citrablue
Notion.so, its awesome.

------
manchmod
notability

