
MedleyText - jgalvez
https://medleytext.net/
======
postit
Every month or so I see people attempting to create _the perfect note-taking
system for developers_ and none are up to the task, they're mostly electron
laggy apps which cause more frustration than solves the problem.

A tip if you're designing something like this. Be fast, responsible and
keyboard first. The time to take a note (flush your brain) shouldn't interrupt
your current task and should be as mechanical as possible.

I've been using the same note take system for the last two years. It just
works as expected. It's as fast as my terminal can be and I can use org or MD
if needed.

    
    
      postit@workstation:~# cat bin/logbook 
      #!/bin/sh
    
      TS=$(date +'%H:%M:%S')
      DS=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
      cd ~/txt/logbook/
      joe $DS.md && git add . && git commit -am "Updating $DS entry on $TS" && git push
      exit
    

I have the bin on my path and a keyboard shortcut that fires up a terminal and
opens the script. If I need to find something I can ag/grep the folder, and if
I'm away from my computer, everything is available on GitHub.

ps: I decided to use joe in the script because it's the fastest text editor by
far to start on my system, you can stick to your own solution.

~~~
nawtacawp
What’s TS for?

~~~
christiangenco
The git commit message: `"Updating $DS entry on $TS"`

~~~
TylerE
Surely git commits are timestamped anyway?

~~~
postit
They are indeed, but this pattern solved a few issues I had.

First one was to get rid of always thinking about a commit message.

Second, I can use git blame and understand the order of things I've inserted
w/o headaches. Past information gets agglutinated and I needed granularity
specially during long work hours

[https://imgur.com/a/cfvFh](https://imgur.com/a/cfvFh)

Which time stamp is better in your opinion?

Also with an eye scan I can see how much I've updated on a single note

    
    
      * 4a23de5 - Updating 2017-12-05 entry on 23:30:02 (postit, 3 weeks ago)
      * ed9e37b - Updating 2017-12-05 entry on 23:26:21 (postit, 3 weeks ago)
      * 7692b94 - Updating 2017-12-05 entry on 23:24:57 (postit, 3 weeks ago)
      * 816adce - Updating 2017-12-05 entry on 23:24:21 (postit, 3 weeks ago)
      * fd29ca3 - Updating 2017-12-05 entry on 23:22:08 (postit, 3 weeks ago)
      * b914010 - Updating 2017-12-05 entry on 21:30:44 (postit, 3 weeks ago)
      * 63e7aec - Updating 2017-12-05 entry on 20:54:06 (postit, 3 weeks ago)
      * 2fabda1 - Updating 2017-12-05 entry on 16:38:32 (postit, 3 weeks ago)

~~~
hartator
Can you share some of your actual notes?

------
philippejara
It's amazing how many programs try and fail horribly at reinventing org mode
every.single.month. If anyone got even slightly interested in this project
take a look at emacs's org mode, you won't be disappointed.

~~~
kornish
So true! org-capture is an absolute godsend.

------
Cyberdog
Friendly note that this is an Electron app.

~~~
baldfat
Friendly note there are good electron apps.

~~~
romanovcode
Two, to be precise.

\- Discord

\- VS Code

~~~
Cyberdog
If by "good" you mean "useful." Both are still non-native-UX piles of mess and
would be far better and less resource-intensive if implemented as native apps.

~~~
fbnlsr
I really don't see the problem with either of those. I spend 8+ hours a day in
VSCode and it works flawlessly.

I just spent more than three hours with a friend on Discord playing The
Division and it was smooth as it can be.

It's kind of become the norm to hate on Electron apps, but to be fair, I don't
see the point.

~~~
mdip
While the _bloat_ of having to basically install a full version of Chrome just
to get a UI makes a little part of me die inside, I'll second the 8+ hours a
day in VSCode.

I'm working on a python project right now and enjoying PyCharm quite a bit,
but in a window right next to me is VS Code with my running log. I'm using it
at home with a plug-in to write code in CUDA and C++, I use it at work for
TypeScript and dotnet core C#, editing configuration files. Heck, on one of my
Windows boxes, I have a PowerShell command "Edit-File" that opens up the
target in VS Code, is set to the default commit comment editor for Git and
aliases "nvim" because I can't get NeoVim to work on that box to save my life.

Sure, it doesn't launch anywhere _near_ as quickly as vi/vim/nvim, but since I
live out of the thing, it's always already pulled up and the time it takes to
open a file when the editor is already up is plenty fast.

As far as being resource heavy -- I like to work on the couch at work and it's
nowhere near a plug. I started doing light editing of C# and .NET apps in VS
Code to avoid having Visual Studio halve my battery life. I get a solid 4
hours of editing/testing which isn't all that much less than I get just
leaving Windows running with nothing open. It wasn't always like that, sure --
I recall either Atom or VS Code having a bug where the cursor blinking caused
the CPU to stay steady at 15% (though, ConEmu -- a must-have console app for
Windows[0] hangs at around 5-10% CPU with nothing executing, too), but I
haven't had any battery/memory/CPU issues running Code for the last year or
so.

[0] If you use cmder, that's Conemu

------
0wl3x
I've seen a glut of developer note taking apps lately and every time I see
them I wonder, why not just use something like org mode? That's one of the
biggest things emacs has to offer and once you start to use it, all of these
markdowny developer note taking apps become irrelevant.

~~~
juandazapata
Because not everyone use emacs maybe?

~~~
philippejara
Yeah but if they wish to use a note taking system for code they should be
using emacs, it's not only the one with most features by far but also the one
with the biggest range of customizations, hell you can write your own parser
on top of it. If you are going to introduce another program anyway to do the
note taking the choice should be a no-brainer.

------
bastijn
The problem for me isn't that I can't find a note taking app that works. My
problem is I don't know how to take notes. I always read on people favoring
apps and using xyz for the past decade. All I wonder is what do these people
put in their notes, do they read back often, and how can I learn to get my
state of mind in a note taking app like they do?

~~~
mdip
I _live_ out of my notes, but part of that is due to the format of my notes
and how I work, in general.

While learning a new subject (almost always from a big, fat, e-book), I take
notes as I skim/scan the material. I'll go from cover to cover about 4-5
times, enhancing my notes each time. I re-read my notes in-between reading the
book to see what I _don 't_ understand from my notes. These notes, later,
become a reference material for me.

When I come across something new idea/technique (new to me, not necessarily
"revolutionary", in general), I find the relevant document in my note library
and add to it.

About once a year or so, I go through most of my notes and re-organize things.
Since I've been doing this for 15-odd years, re-organization is usually moving
a small percentage of text around to another file -- my notes repository is
very well organized and often I remember exactly where something is that I'm
looking for without resorting to searching.

 _All_ of my notes are written in Markdown -- something I started doing about
2 years ago. I converted all of the existing notes that I felt were important
into this format because it gave me the best of all worlds -- I get solid,
pleasant (and configurable) formatting, code highlighting which can be viewed
in a styled format in-browser or printed[0] and yet still end up with a plain-
text document that plays nicely with git. All of my notes are stored in five
different git repositories which are now all stored on Keybase's Encrypted
Git. I keep separate repositories to separate out work and personal, but I
have a programming-notes repository that's dedicated to generic notes I've
taken on the programming languages I write in (each has its own folder with
several documents, but minimally a "cheat-sheet" and "snippets" document which
should be self-explanatory).

The Markdown bit is key -- I am not always in a GUI, sometimes I'm having to
refer to things from the terminal and everywhere I go, I have a copy of that
keybase repo. Everywhere I go I also have grep and when I can't remember
something specific, but I know I took notes on it, grep finds my answer faster
than evernote/onenote's search function ever could and I can read what I need
right in the output of that command with an "-A/-B" of sufficient size, or
just open the file in VS Code if I want to see it with formatting.

I get where you're at, though. You don't get value from taking notes until
you've taken a lot of notes and it takes forming the habit of _taking_ notes
to get that value -- not being certain that you'll get any value from your
notes because of the tool you chose or the format it's stored in can be a
barrier to forming that habit. I started keeping programming notes outside of
those I took while _learning_ a language when I realized I was constantly
googling the same thing about languages that I didn't use frequently enough to
commit those things to memory. That's fine and all until you can't remember
the specific incantation of search string that you used, or Google changed the
ranking of things for the search term, or the site that had that great nugget
of information was reformatted or changed URLs so you can't find it and your
bookmarks are no good any longer ... I believe I started taking daily note-
taking seriously after spending a day between Google and writing code only to
throw most of it away when I _finally_ found that library I had been looking
for the next day after remembering the author's name and searching directly
for _him /her_ rather than what I thought was the name of the library[1].

[0] I use Markdown Enhanced Preview with Visual Studio Code and have written
customer proposals and full-on "report-style" documents. When I had to do the
first one of these at the job I took in March, I was given a Word template to
work from and after swearing at Word's awful WYSIWYG interface, I went into
the CSS editor for Markdown, added some rules and managed to get it to
interpret my Markdown in a manner that looked identical to the Word template,
complete with a full-page "Title Page", headers, footers, and a formatted
Table of Contents that it generated automatically from headers (a feature of
the add-on for VS Code). I've sent that CSS file over to at least 20 different
coworkers via Slack.

[10] The thing is, I remember neither now, but it was a C++ library that had
to do with string edit distance algorithms and I could probably find it given
a few minutes with grep targeted at my C++ folder.

~~~
bastijn
Thanks for the elaborate reply.

> I get where you're at, though. You don't get value from taking notes until
> you've taken a lot of notes and it takes forming the habit of taking notes
> to get that value

Exactly, I think.. I struggle with the details of the notes I take. Maybe it
is just practice. Do I take a one-liner, a paragraph? Pictures? In between?

My current way of working is to have a Todoist [0] filled with tasks, properly
tagged and assigned to projects. Emails that need action go into Todoist,
tasks from meetings go into Todoist, any tasks I come up with, Todoist. Next
to this I have a Pocket [1] filled with articles, both to read later but I
also use it as reference material and future use. Also properly tagged (most
of times).

Now that leaves only notes that are not actions. Either from content that is
too large to have in my pocket (say longer than a blog post) or not from any
content I can send to Pocket at all. Probably the freeflow nature of these
comments is what makes it hard for me to write them down. Granularity,
quality, and governance are hard here. On my previous tries I either ended up
with a huge pile of messy notes I never used or with too few notes that didn't
accurately cover my thoughts at the time, i.e. needed to redo the process the
note originated from.

I'll try again. Maybe this time things go right. If it is practice there is no
shortcut to become a successful note-taker it seems.

[0] [https://todoist.com/](https://todoist.com/) [1]
[https://getpocket.com/](https://getpocket.com/)

------
lgas
So it's like jupyter notebooks but you can't execute the code?

------
dbalbright
Reminds me a bit of Typora.

[https://typora.io/](https://typora.io/)

~~~
1wheel
Typora is great! So many two column markdown editors, but WYSIWYG is what you
really want.

~~~
JadeNB
> WYSIWYG is what you really want

WYSIWYGIWYRW?

------
joshstrange
Personally NVAlt is the only note app I use (and SimpleNote on iOS) It's all
synced, easily searchable, it's my universal scratch pad.

~~~
Jonovono
Yup. I've tried every note taking app. nvalt is the best (used to use
justnotes but it's done I guess).

------
federicoponzi
I'm still looking for a good note-taking app. I've tried a few:

* Stackedit: Not developed anymore, I've encountered many bugs.

* Typora: It's very good, as a couple of bugs but it's probably the best to me at the moment.

* Ghostwriter: What I'm trying out these days.

Honestly, my problem with Typora (and also with this MedleyText) is that they
aren't opensource.

------
badtuple
One thing I've noticed with my personal note taking is that most features note
applications offer are more distraction than anything.

I've settled on having a permanently open vim buffer in a hidden window. When
I press a hotkey it's pulled ontop of any windows I have. I type in a plain
ascii pseudo-markdown-org-mode-ish style I've made up over the years but no
one else needs to read. Then I hit the same hotkey to hide the window until I
need it again.

The biggest thing for me is that it pops up, I brain barf all over the buffer,
and then it's gone with no thought on how it's supposed to be formatted or
anything. It should be more like playing an instrument than creating good
documentation. It can be changed into something presentable later iff I need
to. Options and features, while necessary to push your new app, are the
antithesis of seamless note taking for me.

~~~
mdip
I'm with you, here - I've got vim opened in guake available at a hotkey on the
laptop I'm typing on right now. Though, I also have VS Code pulled up on
Desktop #2 -- it's just not as hot-key accessible.

------
f2n
So a closed source electron app? No thanks...

------
bovermyer
I dunno, vim works pretty well for me.

------
jenhsun
Alternative - Boostnote.App [https://boostnote.io/](https://boostnote.io/)

------
zormino
is there anything out there that beats a good old paper notebook and a pen?
The lack of backups is bad but I can't find anything else where I can put down
the notes and ideas in the format I want and draw pictures and diagrams in my
notes. Everything else just falls short.

------
534b44a
I've found mindmaps to be better tools for saving notes than syntax
highlighted text. I currently use the freemium version of XMind, which lacks
search and many other features unless you pay. Still a better deal than just
text IMO.

~~~
forapurpose
I've considered mind maps, but I can't overcome this problem: 10 years from
now, will I be able to use that data? When/if needed, how do I export the data
and what application can utilize it?

~~~
mdip
I'm with you on this -- I have found mind maps useful when brainstorming
(particularly with a small group of people), but I like my notes in a format
that can be grepped and easily version managed, so I use VS Code/Markdown,
git, and a lot of typing.

------
dschep
Has this been abandoned? The MedlyText+S page says it'll be available last
month.

------
azmelanar
Web-site a little bit out of date :)

MedleyText+S Available in Nov. 2017

and button for download is inactive.

------
anardil
Vim, vimwiki and markdown accomplishes everything their homepage says Medley
can do.

You decide the structure and the files, so you can throw it all in git to make
it accessible anywhere.

------
thecrumb
I'm curious about these 'notebooks' as well. I like the idea but not sure I'm
disciplined to keep a notebook of anything useful.

------
surajcm
I thought of giving it a try at work, but it needs admin privileges to install
(on windows) :(

------
pedro596
What is the license?

------
mcguire
.AppImage?

I think I'll pass on downloading and executing a binary file.

~~~
mdip
I was quite happy with that, actually.

Given the options available for installing an application, what would you have
preferred? If it had been a GitHub repository with a releases item, it would
have either been a tarball'd source I have to compile (I run Linux), an RPM
file that might-or-might-not work (I run openSUSE and Fedora/Redhat RPMs are
more common and hit/miss on openSUSE), instructions on how to apt-get or yum
install it -- no openSUSE zypper commands (though, yum instructions often work
depending with the same hit/miss ratio as RPM installs).

An improvement would have been if it was code-signed in some verifiable way
(I'm not sure if it was or wasn't -- I wasn't paying a lot of attention when I
launched it in this virtual, TBH), but the reality is that if you want to
_run_ code, it has to be in a binary format of some kind whether you compile
it yourself or it's compiled for you, and even in the case of self-compiling
... it's not like you're going to do a line-by-line audit of the code looking
to ensure they're not trying to win an underhanded C contest. At least an
AppImage file can be run in a sandbox, and it is a very pleasant way to get a
working binary on a Linux host. It didn't require root privileges to install
or execute (that would have caused raised eyebrows, here).

------
mdip
I keep a _lot_ of notes (probably generating on the order of 10-15 pages on a
good day[0]), so while some folks are knocking the whole "Yet Another Note
Taking App Oh My Gosh!" sort of thing, I am thankful that folks are looking
into this space; it's one that I've spent a lot of time wanting to see get a
whole lot better.

So as to your app, the good points are: it's minimalist with a clean UI and
native code highlighting. Those are pretty much the base requirements before
I'll even consider looking into it, and I'm happy with the large array of
supported languages. It looks quite nice and useful in that regard, so kudos!
I love that it supports basically every OS -- I'm on Windows and Linux split
about 50/50 and too often I'll run into apps that cover MacOS, Android, iOS
and Windows. Since I run Linux at _home_ , that's my preference and it a non-
starter if it's not supported.

Unfortunately, for me, I can't handle another WYSIWYG editor. I'm done with
them. It's not that I don't like formatting -- quite the contrary -- with the
amount of note-taking I do day-to-day, I _require_ good formatting. It's that
I've never found a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't come with it's own set of
F-bombs. I'm not taking my fingers off of the keyboard to hit a button with a
mouse and while keyboard shortcuts are fine, I'll still end up highlighting a
line, hitting that keyboard shortcut and having the WYSIWYG app decide to
apply that formatting in some non-intuitive way (i.e. select a large line with
mixed slant/non-slant and pick the slant button -- three choices: slant
everything, slant nothing, or reverse slanting).

So I've settled on two technologies for my note-taking: Markdown and git. It
just feels right -- it uses a dead simple dialect that allows me to directly
indicate my formatting intent within the writing, it's lightweight enough that
when viewing it in a terminal, the markup rarely decreases the readability
(and sometimes increases it) and combined with a good rendering tool, can make
a document format well for in-browser viewing and printing. I currently rely
on a combination of Visual Studio Code (with Markdown Enhanced Preview for
side-by-side previewing-as-you-type) and plain-old vim with markdown syntax
highlighting for note-taking, combined with Keybase Encrypted Git for version
management. I've yet to find something superior for me, though this would be
pretty close if it simply gave me a Markdown editor with a preview on the
side. And I'd really like a better UX than what's offered by grep for
searching my notes. I'd love for an easy way to say "find all references to
this function in this language" that would rip through my repo and pull out
the relevant sections.

Perhaps I'm a bad example being so particular, but I've tried so many note
taking apps -- online from Atlassian's Confluence (which I personally hate) to
semi-online/offline markdown editors and things like one-note/evernote. For
the most part, the major features of those applications are overshadowed by
the poor experience of actually taking notes[1].

[0] I'm not a university student -- it's mostly for my job, which lately has
consisted of being pulled into projects that have hit a wall to do code
analysis and large-scale re-architecture. With that comes a lot of read-and-
explain work both for myself and for my clients. Like most of you, I
effortlessly type at about the speed people talk, so it keeping a running log
comes easily. I also speed-read (not the gimmicky eyeball exercises but the
old-school skimming and scanning) and practice a form of study that involves
racing through material while typing notes, organizing said notes and re-
reading 3-5 times to maximize extracting information, so on a good weekend,
I'd type up several thousand lines of raw notes.

[1] And I'm not one to "web clip" \-- if the blog post or article is important
enough, I'll summarize it and re-type.

