
Ask HN: Any good alternatives to pen and paper? - martin_a
I&#x27;m taking quite a few notes at work, sometimes just reminders, sometimes a quick scribble, you know the deal.<p>I think I&#x27;ve filled several notebooks this year and I wonder whether there&#x27;s something better than putting ink on dead wood.<p>Does HN have any good alternatives? Possibly without some strange app which is coupled to a 3rd party service or something like that.<p>Full digitalization of the notes would be great, but I&#x27;m up to whatever you can recommend.<p>Thanks!
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wenc
I have a two media philosophy.

1) Physical: I use a TWSBI ECO fountain pen and a Rhodia wirebound 6" x 8.25"
notepad. A good fountain pen on good paper is the most pleasurable means I've
found for note-taking. Pleasure is important to me. The notepad has
perforations on each page, so if I ever need to digitize something, I just
tear the page off and snap a pic using Dropbox, which creates a nice PDF for
me. The PDF looks beautiful. Beauty is also important to me.

2) Electronic: For digital notes, I just use Google Docs. I have a single
continuous document full of thoughts, observations, etc., each thought
separated by an em-dash (--) on a new-line. I've tried more complicated
systems, but simplicity ultimately won out. Also I can access Google Docs on
my desktop, work computer, phone and tablet. I've since learned that some of
my favorite writers scribble their thoughts on Google Docs too.

Do the two systems converge? Sometimes. Sometimes I transcribe stuff from my
Rhodia notepad to my Google Docs document, but often times I don't. In my
philosophy, they don't have to converge.

Note-taking on Google Docs is about archiving information.

Note-taking on a notepad about training the mind. I remember things better
when I write them. Being able to flip through pages helps builds spatial
memory. I rarely go back to stuff I write on a notepad because I tend to
remember them. If I really need to remember them long-term and make them
searchable, I transfer them to Google Docs, and in the process, reinforce that
memory.

Having a two media approach sounds inefficient from an information collection
perspective because your info is dispersed and exists in two disjoint forms.
But if your objective isn't just to store information in a repository but to
supercharge your own thinking, this turns out to be a surprisingly effective
approach, I've found.

~~~
idoh
That's cool on the TWSBI ECO, that's what I use as well. Some questions, if
you don't mind:

A - what ink do you use? I'm still looking for one that works really well.
Main thing is I hate blead through the paper B - Do you use the Rhodia paper
one sided or two sided? I'm looking for a paper that I can use two sided with
no bleed through, but other than super thick sketch paper haven't found
anything.

~~~
wenc
I wanted a really black ink, so I settled with the Rohrer und Klingner
Leipziger Schwarz (~$11). It's black with dark navy tones. I really like how
it looks on paper. Inks I tried that weren't black enough: Herbin Perle Noire,
Noodler's American Eel.

Rhodia paper -- I use it two-sided with no bleed through (Rhodia Dotpad No 16,
~$6). Rhodia and Clairefontaine paper can generally be used both-sided with no
issues. There's a Japanese brand, Profolio that I also like, and 2-sided is
not an issue. The best paper I've ever written on is the Rhodia No 18 premium.
It's $16 per pad (A4 sized) but the glide is smooth and the quality is
amazing.

~~~
The_DaveG
I'm a huge fan of A4 notebooks and fountain pens!

I'm currently partial to the Leuchtturm 1917 master series, at least in part
because of all the beautiful colors there are to choose.

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martin_a
Oh wow, this looks like what I thought of, but the price tag is... well...
it's present. :-D

[https://remarkable.com/](https://remarkable.com/)

~~~
TurkishPoptart
Looks interesting, but I clicked "buy now" to view the price, and there's just
an infinite loop of a Javascript loading indicator...waited 4 seconds and
dipped out.

~~~
kasi
starts at $499

~~~
martin_a
Yeah, but with a cover and the "nicer" stylus, you are around $700. :-(

------
timoth3y
After years of experimenting, I've concluded that it's not the medium, it's
the ritual.

Things like meeting minutes I take electronically, but I still use physical
notebooks as my main idea capture. I then go through and transcribe the notes
onto the computer if I feel like follow-up action is needed.

I find that the most valuable part of the process is reviewing those written
notes. Theoretically, I should be able to do the same thing with a program
like Evernote, and I've tried that. In practice, I wound up taking shortcuts.

Going through and re-evaluating or adding to your original thoughts when
moving from one medium to another is a valuable exercise.

------
johnsonjo
If money is not really a problem you could use the 3rd gen iPad Pro with 12.9"
display and apple pencil. The default note taking app works well enough. It's
kept my notes over the last several years. The pencil is pretty great for
drawing diagrams and figures, so I would definitely purchase that with it. I
found the 12.9" display works best for me, because I like to split the tablet
window in half with 1 app on each side with my notes app usually being on one
of the sides. The other apps I use alongside the notes are brilliant.org's app
and pdfs of math or programming texts.

If your looking for something more around the ~$400 range you may look at a
cheaper alternative. I've seen advertisements for this paper-like e-ink tablet
Remarkable [1] quite a bit and it seems like it might be a nice alternative.

[1]:
[https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable](https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable)

------
0wis
I used an iPad 2 with a note taking app during my 2 years of engineering
master in college. It was synced with my Google Drive, I didn’t struggled with
complex equations and drawings and allowed in text search (which wasn’t that
great at the time). I used a free pen given by a random company during a job
fair and raised eyebrows to costly alternatives.

It was great however the battery lifetime and occasional bugs made me nervous
sometimes.

Confort wasn’t that great, I couldn’t put my wrist on the screen and learnt to
write without. The device was quite thick, which you suddenly notice compared
to a classic paper when you take notes for hours.

Its the only notes I still have since I couldn’t easily scan perforated seyes
paper (often double pages) that I used at the time and I let my huge binders
at my parent’s home. Just for this, it has tremendous value. Maybe if I had to
do it again today I would spend a few hours mastering LaTeX to being faster to
take note of huge equations on a laptop.

------
octokatt
In terms of focus and tactile cues to help you remember your notes,
unfortunately probably not.

I've used an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, iPad Mini with pencil, Microsoft
Surface with that pen, and a couple of different dedicated notes taking
tablets (though not Remarkable... yet?)

Dead trees and ink, plus an app to scan and keep track of indexes has worked
the best for recall and social factors. Practicing taking dense notes helps
the notebooks last longer, as does only using 240+ page notebooks. Actual
Bullet Journaling, instead of Instagram-worthy nonsense even the creator
hates, works pretty well.

Transcribing the notes occasionally to a markdown for Git was annoying, until
I realized I was editing and adding a lot by doing so, to the point where I
usually updated my notebook a bit during the process.

My 2c, your mileage may vary.

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devnonymous
You've already discovered the remarkable tablet so I'm just going to say that
I'm a huge fan. I use it quite heavily for note taking. I can't recommend it
enough. You may find second hand units for cheaper, since they've been around
for a couple of years now and there exists a large majority of people who
weren't really heavy paper users but bought it for the sake of novelty.

That said, if your primary problem is going through a lot of books quickly and
you cannot afford the remarkable, even a used one, you may want to consider
something like:

[https://getrocketbook.com](https://getrocketbook.com)

One of my colleagues uses it and seems to be pretty happy with it.

~~~
p1esk
How does Remarkable compare with the new Sony e-ink tablet?

~~~
devnonymous
I wouldn't know since I've not used one. I didn't even know that they had a
new model of the DPT. Judging by a quick google though, I think the biggest
difference is the display and touchscreen. The Sony appears to have a
"Electrophoretic display" and a "Projected capacitive touchscreen" whereas the
remarkable has a proprietary 'Canvas display' based on E-ink Carta -- all that
to say, I can place my hand on the remarkable display and write / sketch /
highlight ..etc. I'm not sure whether that is true of the DPT. The biggest
problems with the writing on regular touchscreens is accidental unwanted
'writing' by your palm instead of the pen.

edit: I should add that the remarkable runs linux and as such is pretty
hackable. You can ssh into it and hack it in a number of interesting ways[1]
if you're into that sort of thing. Although for my purposes just adding custom
writing templates itself is worth the hack-ability.

[1] [https://github.com/reHackable/](https://github.com/reHackable/)

------
asdff
I really don't want to move away from handwriting notes. You learn better that
way. Plus, most note taking apps suck, look the same, and lock you in to a
proprietary system that's going to be obsolete when the devs release the next
paid update. For my scripts and code I do take notes electronically, but just
in .txt files stuck in relevant folders. The best system is very little
system.

I nearly pulled the trigger on an e ink tablet but ended up bailing on it. Pen
and paper is cheap and ubiquitous, and I can recycle it unlike the tablet
that's mostly going to end up in the dump, and just another thing to charge or
forget at home.

------
WheelsAtLarge
I don't think you can beat pen and paper. It's cheap, portable, it's easier to
remember what you write vs digital input and it's easy to access. Given that,
I think it can be improved.

I've used OneNote before and it's great at organizing note so I've started to
take photos of my notes and organizing them in OneNote. In theory, it can OCR
them but it's really wishful thinking given my handwriting.

I suspect that my notebooks will outlast my OneNote notes but only time will
tell.

------
shitgoose
A _fountain_ pen and paper.

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solresol
I found that putting ink on dead wood with a livescribe pen gave me all the
advantages of paper and a lot of the advantages of a tablet. I can search
through my notebooks from several years ago with the digitised copy on my
phone.

The other advantage is that you don't get distracted by email and other things
on it.

~~~
shifto
Does this work decently? Is text searchable? Do you write cursive? Thanks.

~~~
solresol
Yes, it does work as long as I don't write too small. But I don't do cursive
so I don't know how it would fare.

------
qnsi
Do you want somehow to digitalize your current notes or software to create
your own?

I can recommend you Zettelkasten. I actually wrote software for myself, in my
opinion you get the most freedom that way and second brain should be custom
tailored for you.

New software that is getting praise right now is Roam Research, but I haven’t
used it

~~~
martin_a
Well, I dream of some kind of eInk tablet/display thing which will do OCR on
my crappy handwriting and will automatically create txt files or something
like that and send them via mail. Or put them in a pre-defined folder. Maybe I
could reopen those notes on the device, cross something out and it will get
saved.

Pretty much like paper in the end, but without paper.

~~~
service_bus
A yoga style tablet and Microsoft one note can be leveraged to do roughly the
things you are describing.

It also has the advantage that when you add screenshots, those are also OCRed
and searchable.

It's not quite as native feeling as grabbing a pen and paper though, so it
takes some getting used to.

------
AlchemistCamp
Pencil and paper is _excellent_.

~~~
rockcamus
Sure it is fine. But sometimes you need to send the notes via email and it is
easier if you have on digital format

~~~
toomuchtodo
Snap a photo, email it.

------
The_DaveG
I'm currently going down this route myself. I fill 6-10 notebooks a year and
am wondering if there is a better way. For me it's specifically how can I take
what I write and then make that editable text so I don't have to duplicate
work.

My current test is an iPad Pro and Apple pencil with GoodNotes. It's not
inexpensive and I didn't buy the tablet specifically for this reason, but it's
a test.

It's good for some things: meetings notes, proposal work, things I need to
send to other people.

It is not a replacement for pen and paper. For me I like fountain pens and
paper. So I still have one or two notebooks that I'm using for daily schedule,
etc.

~~~
d_runs_far
This has been my go to for about a year now. I have set up a couple templates
that I use as blank pages. I keep four notebooks: one for each my day job, my
side projects, house renovations and one for notes at conferences or when
taking a course.

I used to carry at least two or three different note/sketchbooks and a small
collection of pens. Now, just the iPad Pro and pencil.

~~~
The_DaveG
Yeah, I'm still trying to do more on the iPad, and it's working well. At the
end of the day, I really like the feeling of pen on paper, which is what it
will keep me from fully going paperless.

------
quickthrower2
I use onenote at work. As an editor it sucks for tables etc., but as an
organisation and search system is alright, and for team collaboration it’s
pretty useful. I.e. I can promote personal notes to team ones easily.

------
Nomentatus
NEO2 - it's ancient but so well built. Buy used, there's no modern better
product 'cause the NEO2 was so common and well made. Instant on. Neo makes a
pen product now, if that's more appealing to you. But what I need now is
software that auto sorts (according to tags) each note into the right place in
my various notes documents. Now I'm doing that manually.

------
quintes
Onenote.

For everything, literally capturing meeting notes, screenshots everything. A
local notebook but can sync to the cloud

------
geoelectric
Digitally, I use a variation on BuJo rapid logging, implemented in Markdown
with plaintext. BuJo itself has become essentially scrapbooking for task
management, but the basic idea of logging in bullet lists makes a lot of
sense.

Markdown has three legal bullets for UL lists, which along with some sigils
after the bullet/space is plenty for complex logging one line at a time.
Here's the "key" at the top of each of my journals:

    
    
        #### Entry Key
        
        *   Event
        *   Project
        *   Planned Task
        +   New Task
        -   Note
        
        #### Event Status
        
        * ! Key
        * ? Maybe
        * % Cancelled
        
        #### Task/Project Status
    
        + ! Key
        + ? Watch
        + ^ Tracked
        + ~ Carried 
        + $ Completed
        + @ Delegated
        + % Dropped
    

Sample log for a day looks like:

    
    
        ### Friday :: November 8, 2019
        
        #### Highlights
    
        -   This cool thing that happened!
    
        #### Planned
    
        *   Some event
            -   Meeting notes
            +   Action Item
    
        *   Some planned task I copied from OmniFocus
    
        #### Journal
        
        + ^ Follow up on so and so issue
        + ^ Make sure stakeholders aligned
        
        -   Reached out to Coworker
            + $ Wait for followup
            + $ Schedule lunch for Tuesday
          
        - ! Some great idea
        -   DJSON awesome for nested JSON
        -   To extract from logs, wrap with [""]
    

I use Keyboard Maestro macros to quickly create the header skeletons from
templates as needed and I fill in "Planned" during my daily prep. From there
it's just appending to the bottom. I also have Alfred workflows and other
scripts that know how to append a bullet line to the journal file, which helps
a lot for logging notes from anywhere.

Periodically, I search for "+<tab>" in the text file, and it finds all the new
tasks I haven't marked with sigils in the gutter row. That lets me quickly
move them into OmniFocus for longer-term tracking. Someday I'll script it.

For you, if you really only want notes, even simpler. It's just a day header
and appending a bunch of - bullets!

But there'll always be times when it comes down to paper. When all that fails,
I have a nice-looking aged-brass Fisher space pen in my front pocket and a
Moleskine Cahier (the cheap cardboard ones) in my back pocket. If there's
something important to catch unexpectedly the last thing I want to do is
fumble with my phone. The notebook is by far the quickest option.

There are some really nice leather wallets for Cahier/Field Guide-sized
notebooks, and it actually helps balance my sitting posture by having wallets
in both sides. Here's an example of one wallet I bought--I bought both a
Horween and Chromexcel version from this seller and they're both high quality.

[https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Horween-Leather-Moleskine-
ref...](https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Horween-Leather-Moleskine-
refills/dp/B01DTCYV2S)

If you make it nice enough to carry around, it quits feeling like a chore to
do so.

------
aosaigh
iPad, Apple Pencil, Paper-like screen protector & Notability

~~~
martin_a
I will look into this. Bonus would be that I could use the iPad for other
things, too.

------
nancycut9
hackers for hire : [https://www.hackerslist.co/](https://www.hackerslist.co/)

