This is going to be one of those threads where everyone rattles off their own note-taking setup, which is great and all. So:
There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and (2) sync --- I need my notes mirrored onto my phone.
For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good, in fact, because it doesn't feel much better to use than does TextEdit. Both search and sync work fine. I don't have to think about what I'm writing or how it fits into the scheme of things because I'm guaranteed to be able to find things with search. I can drag screenshots of lecture videos in and write short sentences about them.
I had Bear.app for awhile and was initially skeptical of it, but it has now replaced Notes.app for me; it's a better writing environment, it has sticky notes (pinned to the top of the note list) which turn out to be really valuable, does native Markdown, and search and sync work reliably on my laptop and phone.
So, Notes and Bear.app are my two recommendations.
I'm interested to see if anybody comes up with something macOS-supported that outdoes Bear.
I'm an Emacs person, I've written a couple thousand lines of elisp, and I have never, ever been able to get into org mode.
Apple Notes user and fan here.
Being able to drag and drop images to a note and annotating it is super useful to me. Also, being able to pickup writing or sketching on the iPad or iPhone works superb. Being part of the walled-garden and all.
I wanted to try Bear after reading your comment. But, I don’t need yet another subscription software. If it was a one time paid app, I would have thought of it, but subscription just kills it for me. It boggles my mind why I should pay subscription for a note-taking app. Just let me pay for the current set of features and let me use it as is however long I want. If I want to upgrade, I’ll choose to pay then. :-( may be I am getting old.
There’s been a rise in notes apps inspired by Bear’s style but without a subscription, and I’ve tried a few, coming away with UpNote.app as the winner. It’s beautiful, multi-platform (Mac, iOS, Windows, Android), and has a super-responsive dev who’s already implemented a few of my suggestions. Bear development seems glacial compared to UpNote.
I’m extremely happy with it!
http://www.getupnote.com
It looks interesting. Ticks (almost) all my boxes of needs. Even has a 129 Kr lifetime purchase option which sounds very good.
I frequently use my Linux workstation and access my Apple Notes via the web interface for iCloud. Do you know if there is a web interface for upnote? for all those Linux users?
My priority is that I want my notes to live forever. Using GitHub seems to achieve that purpose. (I used many notes app before which I threw away when moving to a new app)
I use nb (https://github.com/xwmx/nb) and sync to gitlab. The best part of nb, is that you can bookmark a url, and nb will keep a copy of the page with the bookmarked url. So if the page disappears later, you still have a copy with your notes.
It's all stored as markdown, so you can go in and edit the page. nb also syncs automatically every time a note is edited.
Images, pdfs, docs, etc. can all be dumped into nb.
On mobile, I use gitjournal, and point it to the same gitlab repository, so the same notes are synced on mobile.
The next best thing is notable (https://notable.app/), which provides a much better interface, but doesn't do the download url thing. Gitjournal and notational-fzf also work with notable.
I've been using git as my storage and sync location for a couple of years now. Use it with Obsidian on my Mac, Working Copy is pulling and pushing the repo on my iOS device. At some point I also used the Gollum Wiki to have it available on the web as well.
It's just important to have automated triggers to push and pull things to avoid conflicts. That's possible with Shortcuts on iOS and there's a git-plugin for Obsidian as well.
I have small daemons for linux and mac that automatically push / pull from a git repository and sync my notes.
Its a 10 LOC bash script on each OS, it allows me to keep all my notes in markdown format, and use whatever markdown editor I want.
It allows me to sync any kind of content, not only notes, but also images, jupyter notebooks, whatever I want.
As a MD editor i tend to use Typora, but I might use VS Code, emacs, etc. depending on what i am doing.
I use about ~3 machines in total for work and personal time, and this works seamlessly across all of them. It allows me to keep my work notes separate from my personal notes, and e.g. keep them in our work's git servers.
I'm just hoping that Bear 2.0 (or whatever the big next version they've been working on for a long time is called) doesn't undo Bear. While Bear isn't perfect and there are a few features that are sorely missing (searching within a note on mobile being probably tops for me), it is overall very very good. It is elegant, syncs seamlessly, feels like the native app that it is, and has just been a staple for me for years.
A lot of the newer hotness like Craft, Notion, Obsidian, etc. have a bazillion features but are anything but lean, fast, targeted apps that I want in a notes solution. The Bear folks get tons of pressure to feature it up. While they do need to evolve it (the appearance of stagnation isn't great for an annual subscription app), I hope they keep Bear Bear.
+1 for Notes, but I use Notes as like my scratch/dumping area and then move things into Notion.
I make an Inbox note in both to just dump stuff and then move it around. In my Notion I have a "Knowledge Garden" page which is like this hyper linked super wiki page of all my knowledge and as you dig in to the links it gets deeper. (e.g. a toggle for "computers" with bunch of paragraphs talking about [Cloud] and [AWS (Cloud > AWS)] and etc. links)
I should probably just use Obsidian or Roam but things working well on Mobile is important to me and the Notes and Notion apps work exceptionally.
To be honest: if Notes would just let me make non-share links to use to navigate between notes (without all the hacks you can do) I wouldn't really need Notion.
I can't help myself when it comes to trying new notepads/notetaking tools, so obviously I just signed up for Notion, but:
My own setup is pen & paper first, and then into emacs orgmode. The trouble with this is that, well, it's not GREAT on mobile. The bonus with this is that it's the only tool I've yet seen that can give me a corpus of notes that can ALSO contain intermingled complex TODO items.
It seems super dumb that OneNote doesn't do this. You CAN mark something as a ToDo in OneNote, but it's just decoration; it has no semantic meaning. If OneNote had the ability to show a "ToDos" tab that was generated automatically based on the todo-tags in the notebook, it would be a much more powerful tool.
I mean, there are reasons to avoid it (MSFT, proprietary files), but it's a really powerful and well-distributed tool. Lots of folks in corporate jobs probably can't get access to arbitrary things, but OneNote is part of Office.
Haha let me rattle on about my own note-taking setup (or indeed my own Startup) [1]... but no I won't.
Instead I'd like to share a little what I've learnt from building a note-taking startup for the past three years with my co-founder – it's easily the hardest thing we've both done.
Much of what you've said is concurrent with the majority of our users. Ubiquity and having your knowledge accessible at any time, on all of your devices is super important – but also the most challenging to create. Build a web app, then all of your users want a faster native desktop app. Build a desktop app, and then users want a fluid accessible web experience... Developing this as a team of two is very difficult; but then hearing how some users use your app every day for a year and can't live without it is hugely rewarding [2]
Note-taking is very personal and so everyone has different expectations on what they'd like. There are so many apps for different personalities and workflows – there's never 'one solution fits all'. Even though Notion has kinda done this, very successfully, one could argue that it is a 'Jack of all trades, master of none' app. That's why it's super important that every note-taking / productivity app has an API, so users can easily build the workflow with the apps that work best for them.
Congratulations on your hard work building an app that you care about.
As a user, we are all trained to be vigilant about locking ourselves into services/companies because of circumstances. In this IT landscape, users are not just limited to Windows or Mac or iPhone. The base set of expectations have gone up, particularly when there are passable alternatives that are farther than the incumbent in features.
For a note-taking app,
MacOS App
Windows App
iPhone App
Android App
web interface (for all others including Linux users)
ought to cover it. I realise how much of work that is. But, that is the playing field when competing against apps that do different subset of the above list.
Staying away from resource hungry electron app will make me happily pay for it (just my opinion).
Exactly, I need to take lots of notes and beyond search and sync, I need it conveniently everywhere with me on all devices.
That's why I use Google Keep --- which is pretty terrible... except it's free, it's everywhere there's a browser, there's an app for it on every phone/tablet, and it works offline when I sometimes don't have internet connection.
Works ok since I write notes in plain text, with some markdown notation (but without actual Markdown support in Keep).
In the past, I've used Notational Velocity and other fancy things, but I find plain text is best. And now I need sync on all devices, so went with Keep.
Yeah ubiquity of Keep makes it very sticky. Getting iCloud notes on a PC is a real pain and requires you have your phone most times (Apple browser logins seem to have much shorter persistence)
I use iA writer a lot, but would be happy with any iOS text editor, as I like keeping notes in plain text, and then iCloud Drive does my sync natively. On Mac I use TextEdit or vim.
WRT syncing, syncthing has changed the way I think about that problem that is no problem anymore.
WRT note taking, nothing beats a bunch of markdown files that are kept in sync with syncthing. Depending on the OS, I use different tools to edit the markdown files. It doesn't matter which app you use with almost plain text files.
The one thing I need that Apple’s notes doesn’t have, but thankfully bear does, is the ability to link to a note from outside the app. I like to be able to drop links to my notes in other documents of mine, and Apple notes makes this nearly impossible.
I agree about minimalism being key, but I would add one thing beyond search and sync, which is a way to restore context when I've been away from a project for a while. Tags or a notebook structure works for that. Search for the tag or notebook for a project, click on it, and there are my notes, with the most recently touched notes at the top, helping me reorient myself and pick up where I left off.
It adds a bit of friction for note-taking, the need to appropriately tag or locate the note, but I find that doesn't hold me back. If I don't assign a new note in a notebook, it goes into my default, where it sticks out and will quickly get reclassified.
I'm considering getting an iPhone just for notes. I had an old iphone, the iOS version didn't allow the sharing of notes feature. I thought I could just log into the iCloud website and edit my notes, however you are unable to view or edit shared notes from the website. It's very confusing.
I'm currently using iA Writer on Android. Notes are automaticaly saved as markdown to a Dropbox folder which I can open on my other devices fairly easily.
I'm using Roam and quite happy, though I'm growing kind of frustrated that it's pretty much impossible to get anything in there quickly on an iPhone other than opening Roam in Safari, waiting for the spinner to finish, then paste, and an iOS Shortcuts workflow on their site that's broken.
But other than that, it's the first notes app that really clicks for me. It's very fast (they do lots of things in the local browser, I think), plus I've never been able to work with categories or folders, everytime I try I quickly end up with such a lot of categories that they're not really useful anymore, and I find myself wasting time and energy figuring out the best category for a particular item, and then I still don't find it again. With Roam I don't have to do any of that, as it's just a graph, I just dump things in my Daily Notes, add a bunch of hashtags, and it'll show up on all the hashtag pages and in search. It can do a lot more that I haven't looked into yet (some kind of graph search I think?), but that alone is a total game changer for me.
Bear, notes etc use undocumented databases as their source of truth, which seriously limits you and locks you in.
I use org-mode with standard unix search solutions, such as the interactive ugrep. On mobile, I use WorkingCopy (a git frontend), or my web front end (https://notes.lilf.ir/), both of which offer search. I can also use emacs via SSH, but I haven’t done that.
Org-mode is, in the end, just a better markdown with a lot of elisp extensions available. You don’t need to know everything about it to start using it. Worst case scenario, write your intended text in some format pandoc understands (e.g., markdown, html), and see how it is converted to org-mode. The IRC channel #org-mode and https://org-roam.discourse.group/ are also helpful.
After Evernote went Electron and stripped the context-feature, DevonThink won me over. I use it for its flexibility in indexing, file-like-organization, OCR, encryption and flexible synchronization. Also the devs are very respondant and I like not having to pay for a subscription.
I tried to use DT for years, and eventually just decided it was Not For Me.
It got so file-like that I realized I could get almost everything I liked about how it cataloged, say, PDFs by just putting the PDFs in a folder and using regular file system search. Plus the lack of mobile was a problem at the time. Have they fixed that?
Evernote was very sticky for me since 2009, but started quickly looking for alternatives once the new app was Electron-based. I tried Bear a few years ago but didn't like it. Also tried Obsidian and a few others but they were too finicky for me. Finally tried DevonThink but it was overkill for my purpose, formatting was weird and different with all the note type variations, and their pricing model killed it for me (max two devices).
I basically needed something with great search, easy formatting, and inline image support. And I found it with Ulysses. I thought it was only for people writing long-form works, but it works fantastically for my use case. It ended up being the thing that replaced Evernote for me after 12 years.
Evernote's great web clipper, great search, and text recognition in images is what has kept me as a subscriber for many years now. Their recent client changes are really not to my liking so I think I'm finally going to move on.
It's kind of a bummer for me. I kind of wish about five years ago they would have tapered off all new feature development and switched 100% into maintenance mode with a headcount of less than 40 people.
I think org mode is frankly over-rated but having said that I use it myself for two things: a daily work-log and some tabular timekeeping. Really? the mechanics of the indent model are pretty crap.
It is possible to move from org to Markdown and then do better for pdf, eg via pandoc or some other emacs mode. I've used that in the past, because Markdown mode was even more confusing to me as a non-native emacs user.
That vi never got an org mode before the great uplift to vim says a lot to me. Emacs had more modes than there are things in heaven, Horatio. (than are dreamt of in your philosophy of editors)
I really like Agenda app. Similar to Bear notes with two advantages- connecting notes to calendar entries is smart, it means you are organized with no effort, and create reminders in line in your notes.
I'm using Agenda app and I find search and browsing to be rather difficult compared to Bear. Perhaps the 1-to-1 connection to calendar events makes it worth it - that's what made me switch.
I followed the same trajectory as you from Notes to Bear, but have ended up on Craft. It might do too much for you, but I’ve honestly never used an app that is both so featureful and some beautiful.
My god, I haven't seen Craft before and... I haven't been so hyped about a software in a while. It's the perfect sweet-spot between Bear and Notion. Seriously... thank you!
At first I was a little concerned when I saw Notions "block concept" and it doesn't feel as snappy as Bear because of that, but the way you can start a new related document super easily from each block is just really good. The Search is amazing, changes are insta-synced between devices (like... live as you type) spending a little time on cards makes your doc look pretty good (if you care) and the share-options are all I ever wanted.
I also like the separation of "daily notes" and your regular documents. With Bear the sidebar always feels a little messy (despite pinning), but if daily docs are moved to a separate area that is ordered by time, it cleans up the "stage" for my more important, long-enduring notes.
I just spent about an hour testing the waters with Craft, but this is love at first sight so far!
I had déjà vu when I read this comment, as I think I tweeted almost word for word your first paragraph when I discovered Craft.
I’m something of an unpaid evangelist for it - it’s pretty close to life changing software for me, as it’s completely changed how I think and write. Glad you love it!
They have an extremely active Slack community that’s well-staffed, and their extremely responsive to feature requests. Their pace of development over the first year of their launch is incredible.
Just looked at it and it is promising. One question: the price is free but there seems to be in app purchases but I haven't found what they are despite actively looking for them.
Anyone knows what they are? It makes a ton of difference if it is a mandatory monthly plan that kicks in after I migrated everything, or skins or optional collaboration features etc.
It gets a lot of comparisons to Notion, but I don’t think that’s really accurate. It feels much more focused on writing and note taking for me than Notion - it doesn’t do all the fancy page types, etc. But yes, it is Mac native.
The default storage location is their web service, but you do have the option of storing all files locally. You do lose some collaboration features if you do that.
I think craft can store your notes on-device? Not sure. The one big difference between it and Notion is the databases — craft doesn’t have them. If not for that, I’d switch to craft in a heartbeat
I've used everything from Evernote to Emacs (primarily for text manipulation and org-mode project/task tracking), Bear to Apple Notes, Workflowy to OmniOutliner, etc. I had been keeping a lot in Apple Notes but then I must have synced incorrectly somehow because text I had written on my desktop disappeared after I wrote text in the same note on my phone, and I couldn't find a way to get it back. I've been using Obsidian (offline) and I really enjoy it.
Best note taking I’ve done is just rubber-ducking to myself in a (public) slack channel solely for that purpose. Never worry about hierarchies, and easily link back to past messages. For a dedicated app and methodology, I find https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ mimics that style.
Does Bear now support tables? I tried it and liked it, but the lack of tables was a deal-breaker (and replies to my questions make it clear that it wasn't a priority)
So I'm using VS Code with the Journal plugin, Markdown notes, and ripgrep for searching. Works fine for me. For more fancy stuff I use DevonThink.
(And I too have never got into org mode, despite several tries)
If you like Notes, but want something you can get a workflow together on, I recommend NotePlan. Hits all your buttons, and I’m a fan, in no small part that it doesn’t close things into a proprietary ecosystem or storage mechanism.
I think the fact that the topic of note taking comes up so frequently may suggest that it's still a problem to which there is not a very satisfactory solution.
I'm continually baffled at how the rest of the world hasn't discovered this, but it could be because I sort of live at the margins of "ultra geek" and "normie."
Local, self-hosted "wiki-like" tool. You write notes, it saves them, supports links and todos and calendars etc. Tons of plugins for math, git, etc etc.
The killer aspect, I think, though. Any hypothetical "grandma" can open it up and use it immediately and it's very useful. But because it saves as plain-text (Markdown-ish) with links and pages equalling files and folders, it's always infinitely extensible with Bash or other scripts. For me, it's all the extensibility of org-mode without, I mean, you know.
I've been using Tiddly Wiki for years, and can very much recommend it.
To start, all you need is a template HTML file. No installation, no nothing - it's self-hosted within the HTML! You save changes by clicking the "Save" button, which generates an HTML with changes.
If you really want, you can install a Node.js version which saves changes automatically. But you don't need it to start.
Thanks. Spent half an hour playing around with it, and must admit that it seems magical.
Implementation aside, the whole idea of splitting information into minimal parts _and then displaying your whole route_ on one page is a stroke of genius.
The hardest part coming from the outside is grokking where the state (/database) lives: I soon found out that you could save everything in a new .html-file, and also got github sync to work, but I missed the option to use a local node-install. This is something I need to look into before comitting, as much of my workflow is centered around scripts modifying notes.
I started with a single .html file, and then moved to Node.js. You don't need to look much into it, since you can import data from the .html file.
The only hiccup I've had so far was that I could reference images in the same folder with an [img[relative-path-to-file.jpg]] syntax from the HTML file, but not from the Node.JS version (you need to "import" images first). Wasn't a big deal for me, since I just had to manually update an image or two. Most of my notes in that wiki were just text.
I started using TiddlyWiki many years ago and loved the idea, until browsers started cracking down on webpages saving files. Has that changed significantly, or do you still need some hack to work around it?
I have. And where it just didn't do it for me is how everything's locked up in that file. Again, the killer part for me is that I can use basic Linux file tools on it easily; e.g. I can either use the internal search, which is good, but also grep.
I migrated to ZIM from OneNote desktop. OneNote Desktop was everything I needed. Did not migrate to the OneNote cloud thing. Nowadays it's ZIM wiki using SVN as a backend. Not missing out on anything in particular. Ok, the table plugin for ZIM is still lacking IMHO.
None that I found :( You can in theory use inkscape for sketching and then put the resulting SVG into Zim or any note taking app that allows embedding SVGs, but that's the best it gets from what I could find.
Yeah zimwiki seems to run on macos only by chance and not because anyone tested it or put any work in to it. I love using it on linux but when I tried out MacOS I had to use notes.
Obsidian.MD works pretty well and meets all of the stated requirements. Everything is markdown on disk, but the tool is maintaining an index for linking things. The index powers search and graphing, but otherwise everything works just as well in VS Code. It works really well for me, with the one downside being it is an electron app. Because it is all markdown based, you could use a native tool of choice (I use Ulysses on iPad). They have a sync service, but I just use iCloud.
I use Obsidian and one thing I'm not getting about peoples concerns with e2e encryption - does nobody realize once it's decrypted on the devices you use (work laptops, etc since it's your ubiquitous note taking app) that anyone with access to your laptop (IT) has full access to every single .md file downloaded to your system?
People talk about encrypting their vaults and everything else all the time. I've never seen anyone mention the fact that your entire life of notes (whatever they may be) are now completely plain-text (well, markdown) files accessible to anyone with access to your machine. And IT will be well aware that you just dumped 10000 files into a directory, although hopefully they think you're just pulling git clones and don't go further.
So, what, do I not use markdown when at work? Do I not care? Do I stifle my posts in case anyone at work reads them? It just seems like a terrible system for very personal note taking.
Does throwing the stuff in icloud mitigate this? Gdrive? Dropbox? Even encrypting a folder gives admins access to all of my files as soon as I decrypt it. If I use an online app that I have to auth to and the connection is encrypted unless they're doing DPI they're not going to see any of my notes...
This seems like a huge problem with markdown notes.
e2e encryption is not trying to solve the problem you describe. If I'm going to open and view private notes on a non-private machine, no amount of encryption will help me.
The whole point of e2e encryption is to make it impossible for anyone other than the intended recipients to access the information. So conceptually, the ends of e2e are people, not devices.
I think the parent has a valid point in that terminating the encrypted channel at the device level leaves a pretty gaping hole in the not so rare event that people are forced to use employer provided devices at least some of the time.
There's a reverse issue as well though. It may well be the intention of employers (or even a legal requirement) to stop employees from syphoning off company data through some encrypted channel that IT has no control over.
So in some cases the assumption you're making that device = user may be an unavoidable compromise.
I hate that you need to manage your media by yourself. I mean, I cannot attach images to my note without doing some extra effort (upload to vault somewhere and link to it). I just want it to be more efficient.
I anticipated that "in 2021" would mean a discussion of the recent tools for taking notes that have exploded (Roam, Obsidian, backlinks, etc.) This could have just as well been "Note Taking in 2011". Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but the title is misleading.
I am back to Simplenote after trying too many alternatives. nvAlt on Mac and Simplenote app on iPhone.
Bear would have been fine if it wasn’t subscription based and allowed me to choose a sync option like dropbox or iCloud sync and let me have local files. FSNotes has years , at this speed, ahead of it. Everything else is just sad Electron - web apps masquerading as native apps. No I don’t like Joplin interface.
Also, among Apple cloud offerings or iCloud suite Notes.app is the only one probably that doesn’t suck disgustingly. But then I don’t trust Apple to keep the sync working fine as they deprecate apps too soon on older OS versions.
Think we are in the same boat, although I never really made it away from Simplenote.
Currently not using the actual Simplenote app, instead it is Byword on iOS, nvpy on Linux, ResophNotes on Windows and nvAlt on OS X (and syncing via Dropbox).
For many years I used a small app called "notesy" on iOS, but that disapeared completely at some point -- never found out who made it.
Have been thinking about joplin, but I never even tried it since I have a lot of toolchain set up around scripted edits to files (e.g. my timesheet it built by scanning notes, and I clock in and out of projects with a small script triggered from Launchy).
I tried Obsidian, Zettlr, Standard Notes, Dendron, even tried taking notes in Scrivener.
In the end I bit the bullet and started using Emacs + Org-Mode/Org-Roam. The flexibility and customization are unparallelled. I use it for to-dos, for random scribbles, for in-depth musings. Categorizing thoughts and linking them together is so much easier than any other software I've used.
The first few months are really tough, and for someone who has never used Vim or other terminal style interfaces before learning shortcuts took a while. But after 6 months, I can't go back.
I'm also using (Doom) Emacs + ORG-Mode. However exporting my notes to the outside world is not that smooth as with Tiddlywiki. I know there is ox-hugo (which BTW I use to write my blog posts) but for a Zettelkasten/knowledge DB I think it's not enough.
Whenever one of these threads pops up I'm always surprised at the lack of responses for OneNote.
For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices, supports the iPad pencil, supports OCR and text searching in images, has native apps, and it's free.
I said this uptopic, but I've tried to love OneNote a few times in the past partly out of interoperability / possible collaboration and partly out of popularity, but I just can't get there.
One of the key things that kills it for me is that I really need my notetaking tool to be smart. I tag lines as "to-do", and my tool of choice can assemble an agenda of items i need to accomplish in a metadocument, even if they're spanned across multiple files.
OneNote, frustratingly, HAS a way to tag something as a Todo, but it's just decoration. There's no provision for showing you all the Todos in a document in a summarized view or whatever, or at least none I could find.
I'm willing to admit that my need here to comingle todo items and notes is perhaps idiosyncratic, but fortunately it's not TOO niche because it's basically the foundational idea of Orgmode.
(....and that's the story of how Ubermonkey became an emacs user.)
+1 for OneNote. I need a notes tool that works on desktop and mobile, where I can easily view and edit notes (text and images) even when being offline. Most tools unfortunately don't pass this basic criteria.
I really enjoyed using OneNote on Windows or Mac but no native Linux client turned out to be a deal breaker for me. Web app is sluggish and limited, then using it through Wine was pretty buggy. I finally gave up and switched to a platform agnostic solution.
I used OneNote for a long time. It's not bad, but it has some quirks that I wasn't fond of: why are notes in these weird draggable boxes? When I decided to export my notes to a different format it was a huge pain. I ended up creating a keyboard macro script and cycling through each note one by one. Once I exported all my notes to word documents, I was able to convert them to markdown/org from there.
For me that actually is one thing I really love about OneNote and hate about everything that tries forcing my notes from something paper-like into something text-file-like because that's just not how I take notes. I tend to scribble into corners or wherever there's space. It doesn't linearize well, but it doesn't have to (at least for me).
I have recently developed my own terminal-based UI for day journalling and todo/task tracking [1] in markdown files because I was sick of rearranging todos in other tools and just needed something which provides a standard template for each day (journal, high priority, todos of the day).
The main advantage is that you can "migrate" all unfinished todos to a new page/day and thus get a clean start each day. This idea comes from bullet journalling.
To get it done I had to dig a bit into ncurses, which turned out more interesting than I thought. For instance, Windows Terminal just gained support for bracketed paste a couple of months ago and my tool supports it.
Long term I would like to add generated views (for instance: last year this time one of your highlights was...) and support recurring tasks to be inserted into the daily log.
I tried emacs and org mode but my vim muscle memory was too strong.
I ended up mostly sticking with vim-wiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
I have a very small script that syncs my local wiki(s) with a private GitHub repo. I set them all up to be in markdown.
I use Google Keep for just random stuff I have to jot down but don't really care about organizing.
Honestly though, even plain markdown doesn't work for a lot of types of notes I take. For personal stuff I find myself using Notion a lot. The LaTeX support is pretty great.
At work I've actually kind of fallen in love with Confluence. Even though the editor can be a little cumbersome, the search functionality is great the pages just look really nice. Confluence mobile viewing/editing also works really nice. Now that I'm saying (er, typing) all of this out loud, I almost want to switch to Confluence for personal notes instead of Notion haha.
Similar here! Vimwiki for the more timeless things (recipes, keyboard shortcuts, etc), Google Keep for the (multiplayer!) shopping list and several relatively transient todo lists.
I think plain text is a pretty bad medium for note taking, at least with regards to how my brain functions. I want pictures and audio and bookmarks to websites and embed pdfs into it. I don't want to have to worry about where i'm storing the media relative to my notes files, they should just be a part of it as soon as I drop it into it. And sometimes i want to rearrange bits spatially. Dragging each part around the 'canvas' to help make sense of everything in a way so the scattered thoughts in my head can be considered and potentially organized in a way that makes sense. I know that this also falls more into "brainstorming" but that is largely what my notes are used for. Plain text just doesn't really fulfill my needs.
I think Curio [1] is probably the closest thing to what I want in my head, though one of those HUGE downsides to software like this (and why plaintext is vastly preferred by the HN crowd) is that it's not at all portable or even necessarily decipherable. If Zengobi disappears or I lose access to their software then I'm just out of luck, which has made me hesitant to even try using it and why despite my feelings about it, a great deal of notes I've written are simply in plain text.
If anyone has suggestions for solutions that are like this, I'm all ears.
Onenote does all those things. clunkily in the case of free arrangement, but hold ALT and it will do it.
In my crazy moments, I imagine porting Onenote's files to a linux program for read/writing Onenote pre-Windows 10 local files.
Then I remember there's almost no way I'm up to finishing that task, even if the file format is open, and I never get past the quagmire of 'what IS desktop linux, is it a .deb, a .rpm, must I use C or C++ i wanna use F#, GTK or QT and strange licenses and and'...then i fire back up my Windows pc and jot down my thoughts, embedded images, files, audio and all right in one file, and decide not to start yet another software project.
Onenote is just about irreplaceable for the following use cases, but open source stuff is close.
roam and notion dont even get on my list
1. notes are stored in an offline file
notewiki and wikidpad falls short here.
4. viewable images inline
cherrytree iirc falls short here? or maybe not but it deserves to be on the list ranked better than 'cloud notes'
5. tables
it is below here where joplin falls short afaik
7. ink and touch features
it is below here where xournal++ falls short though they have a ticket open to eventually use a newer file format that would support this use case...and then i plan to switch if at all practical
2. embed files right in the same file so i only have to sync / backup one file, not any linked files all over the disk
3. image / audio embeds that display/play the media inline
Thanks for this. I'm aware of OneNote being pretty flexible but have never really committed to using it for any length of time to really see if it's what I want or not. It seems to have similar pitfalls that Curio does, though the plus side being that Microsoft is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon and tend to be pretty good about supporting its Office suite well.
Xournal++ [1] I had never heard of. It doesn't seem like it's what I'm personally looking for but what an interesting project and definitely one worth looking at!
The problem isn’t with plaintext, but with lazy development and lock-in dark patterns.
If you look at org-mode, it can do a lot of these things (perhaps even all of them on the GUI emacs), while keeping it plain-text. It, of course, needs the necessary elisp to properly display such a rich plain-text file, but things are still pretty accessible in a normal text editor.
Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see org-babel, which is more powerful than jupyter notebooks, but still uses plain text (as opposed to JSON). Databases (as the source of truth) are not a prerequisite to rich, multimedia files.
No matter how badly I want org-mode to be the solution here (and it admittedly covers a lot of people’s needs) there is nothing about plain text files that will enable me to move objects and rich media around in 2D space. Of course in org-mode you could handle metadata of blobs of data and include things like coordinates but plain text doesn’t really have any concept of 2D space. Any sort of rich media you want to embed other than images require a different view like web view or pdf tools but doesn’t naturally embed inside of the text file. Would it be impossible to do? Probably not, it’s emacs. But org-mode as it is right now certainly doesn’t cover most of these requirements.
Logseq is one I highly recommend: http://logseq.com/ Outliner, local file storage, API plugins, todo's and loads more. On top of everything, it is free.
It's kinda fascinating how something as simple as notetaking is still one of the big unsolved challanges in IT. We are constantly reimplementing the same decade-old concepts again and again, in slight variations and combinations, but yet hardly moving into a higher level of conquering this domain.
One reason is for sure is the wide number of requirements that everyone has. But another one seems to be the lack of big money flowing into that area and the low effort in researching it as a result. It's basically all just personal preference and randomness spreading.
I wouldn't say it's unsolved, many people have a workflow that have worked for them for many years. Including people who used paper 20 years ago and still do today with the same techniques.
It's a little like project management: there is no right or no wrong way to do it, just things that work for some people (or teams) and others that work better for different people (or teams).
Additionally, the frontier between "note taking" and "personal project management", or "todo list" is blurry as they're usually done with same tools.
The main difference is that notetaking being personal, there is no reason to converge and all use the same techniques. By contrast in project management, you have to work more or less the same way with the rest of your team or organization.
> I wouldn't say it's unsolved, many people have a workflow that have worked for them for many years.
I mean it's unsolved in the sense that there is not dominating solution that works as a foundantion for a broader set of features and exchangable workflows. Everyone is constantly reinventing the same solutions, building the same low effort apps. It's all many many little isolated silos.
> It's a little like project management: there is no right or no wrong way to do it
There is many standardization in project-managment, from low to high levels. Though, it's true that on lowest levels there is also similar widespread of silos, because people avoid the complex solutions or simly don't know them.
> It's kinda fascinating how something as simple as notetaking is still one of the big unsolved challanges in IT.
IIRC, author of the (now closed) Taking Note blog [1] once said that you're actually lucky if you haven't yet decided for a "final" note taking technique by your 40s or even 50s. Unfortunately I can't find the exact quote.
The trouble with notes is that it's a huge territory and people are talking about their tools without further context. Talking about preferences between a Land Rover and a Corolla isn't productive until you start breaking down your specific needs.
I like Tiago Forte's approach for his PARA system. The system stands alone and may be adapted to any of your tools. This includes note taking, project management, calendar, etc.
The tools for note taking are basically view layers for me.
The article mentions Org mode a lot. If you want to try it, but are no Emacs user or also want to use it on mobile (iOS or Android), there is a FOSS solution called organice which I use daily for everything from notes to private and professional project management: https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice
At WWDC apple announced that notes.app is going to support tags in the new version -- I thought that was great because while I don't use it exclusively, it's one more place things tend to accumulate.
But I've been thinking a lot about tags rather than specific tools lately. I've been hoping to find prior art on how to approach tagging in a clean way. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I'm seen Johnny Decimal[0] and I guess the itch I'm trying to scratch in my brain is to find a description of a way to approach tagging things which addresses the ways they can be hierarchical, and the ways they can be relational. A meta-tagging approach.
I dumped all note-taking tools and just use Sublime. I took the idea of timestamp-based ids from Zettelkasten and simplified it even more. My setup now is:
Create text file named `YYYY-MM-DD Title of the Note.txt`. Save to a folder. Write freeform.
I think it's important to understand one concept of note-taking:
You can either spend more time organizing to spend less time retrieving information later. Or you can spend less time organizing and (slightly) more time retrieving information.
If you're starting out or don't refer to older notes that often, it's a better idea to just dump everything with as little friction as possible and use a search tool to find information.
This is basically org journal. With a quick search you can find everything you need. I agree the tagging aspect and organization is overkill for many purposes, but the benefits is that it might help you remember related topics that a search would not have turned up.
These are not mutually exclusive. And the fact that they are not mutually exclusive is, in my opinion, one of the major obstacles in being able to develop a really good process for taking notes and then operating on those notes. I frankly don’t care much for any note software out there because the note taking part is generally easy so I just default to Apple notes for jotting down “external brain hard drive” stuff.
I’m actually working on a solution that integrates the notes and the tasks. See, I’m in meetings all the time so I write things like:
1. Client’s main priority is look and feel of website. (This is just a note)
2. Client needs to be done with project Dec 1 (also just a note)
*3. Ryan (me) to set up meeting with Joe and Jane. (This a note but I have to do something here and track it)
I can’t stand taking notes and separately having a todo list. They need to be integrated. You need to be able to take notes and quickly see all the todos that came out of it. You also need to be able to prioritize those todos and filter them as part of your day and executing on those todos. This is what I’m working on and I think it is the silver bullet for me.
If anyone wants to come along my journey or wants to see the prototype, email me (ryeguy_24 at yahoo).
I'd also want to integrate notes & TODO - but also time-tracking, i.e. the ability to "click" on any note/TODO and log time against it. Perhaps a TODO can be a note with a tag like "#todo"/"#todo-important"/etc, and time-logs can be child notes..
You can do this with Org-mode in emacs! It will look something like this:
* project
** DONE investigation
...
** TODO implementation [2/3]
DEADLINE: <2021-06-21 Mon>
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 13:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 16:03] => 2:33
CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 10:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 13:04] => 2:34
:END:
do X and Y, be careful about Z
- [X] part 1
- [X] part 2
- [ ] part 3
And you can quickly show the time spent on each entry:
I need help in making notes. Whenever I make some notes, the problem with my notes is that I don't revisit them because they seem to lack information on my first read. So I go back to the source and read it again. Each time I do it, I get new insight. So everytime I see these note taking posts, I don't get the point of making notes. How often do you guys revisit your notes?
Like everyone else on this tread I built a note-taking system!
Mine is called MindPalace and its special feature is that it is focused on spaced repetition and remembering the notes after they were written.
For me, whenever I would take notes, they would become stale and forgotten. Despite Emerson's quote “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”, I felt that there is a lot more to be gained from remembering them.
For instance, I can remember meetings past and insights gained by following up on meeting notes, or insights I got from reading books. I have almost a 1000 notes in my personal notebook.
CLI and local web plain text note‑taking, bookmarking, and archiving with linking, tagging, filtering, search, Git versioning & syncing, Pandoc conversion, + more in a single portable script.
FWIW, I have used single panel outlines for years starting with Omni Outliner on my OSX 10.0.1 days. However, after switching off Mac, I've come to depended on Ecco Pro[1] which I presently use on Ubuntu/Gnome via Wine.
Ecco Pro only has one level of undo but it just does just what is needed and I've never had it loose any data on me. It was last compiled in 1997 but there are ways to tweak it out for modern OS's.
I have automated scripts to convert Ecco outlines into Markdown also have time invoicing outputs etc. As Ecco does not have any rich text or any intrinsic special formatting coding, its easy to use Ecco as your own personal note taking DSL. For Example:
.: <title_block> :.
[.] - todo (open)
[x] - todo (done)
[~] - todo (in progress)
etc...
Man, throwback! I loved Ecco back in the day. It was definitely the spiritual successor to the niche hit Lotus Agenda, which was unfortunately so weird that Lotus gave up and created Organizer instead. That was a shame, because Agenda was insanely powerful. I was really glad to see Ecco happen, and sadder still when I eventually had to move off it.
Not even a mention to Onenote, Liquidtext and Outline?
IMHO, if you want to do digital note taking in 2021, your best tools are on iPadOS, Android and Windows, where such tools allows handwritten notes and optionally allow to convert those into plain text via OCR.
This or using one of those recent expensive last generation e-ink devices.
It wasn't my intention to have such a big thread. I couldn't anticipate that "2021" in the title would trigger so many people to share their personal thoughts about apps and note taking techniques.
While the article's main focus was about note taking itself, I didn't want to compare existing solutions or even have some ranking. I also didn't have the time to try everything out (like Roam, Obsidian etc.). It's just that I have a strong preference for Tiddlywiki since I've been using it for years (not only for a Zettelkasten and note taking but also as a great UI for visualizing links between objects).
Nevertheless I'll definitely have a look at your recommendations.
I'm surprised that Joplin hasn't really been mentioned here.
It supports hierarchical or tag based notes + to-do lists, in plaintext/markdown/wysiwyg. It supports syncing to several providers, and I sync with my personal webdav server. It has vi/emacs keybindings and supports external editors. It also has a mobile app.
So I use that for digital notes, and a nice leuchtterm grid journal for physical notes. I generally do language studies in the physical journal and use the digital notes more for references.
I spent years experimenting with note taking/personal knowledge bases. After moving on from Evernote, I even wrote my own clone in Clojure and Clojurescript with a Firefox plugin for web capture.
I am now done with such time wasting nonsense. For several years I have been using Apple Notes (all my Apple devices except Apple Watch, and web browser version on Linux). I bought a simple app that exports all notes to a standard text file format for periodic backups.
I grew up with pen and paper too, but now I couldn't live without the synchronization and easy sharing enabled by digital. Also I suck at organizing with paper while digitally I can neatly organize everything in folder.
However I do think digital note taking is more painful than hand writing if you want to go beyond plain text, and digital devices can be distracting when I should be focusing so I recently ordered an e-ink tablet that I'm waiting to be delivered. My hope is that it brings flexibility of paper with the organization and sync/sharing functionalities of digital.
Similar here, pen and paper for almost all notes. If I want to keep it for longer I might add it on my personal wiki. But I try to keep it simple and stupid.
I feel people spend too much time focusing on how to make/digitalize notes instead of just make notes.
Would be interested to see methods how to do that better. I am more of a mechanic pencil and paper user. Sometimes use markers when feeling fancy. Has there any new developments since the "bullet journal"?
I just want something that's not an Electron app, not plain text, and not bloody markdown. I hate markdown, and I hate that it's taken over everything.
When not near a keyboard, use paper.
When near one, use plain text.
For your sanity, keep metadata embedded in each file.
I keep k:v pairs. One per line. e.g
"topic: D3",
"subject: scales",
"context: Side Project"
Use grep, awk (whatever). Slice, group, dice, join, merge, backup as and how you want.
A bash-like shell is the only dependency. Check into git regularly.
Some scripts I use
## group by topic. search for lines that start with "topic". print topic and the file name
grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort
## find all files containing the "topic" tag
grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort
## find all files NOT containing "topic". useful for cleaning up
grep -iL "^topic" *.txt
## find first 10 files not containing "topic" and open each in vi sequentially
for f in $(grep -ilL "^topic" *.txt | head); do vi $f; done
Having been making a go at several of the suggested applications, which all use MD, I’m also starting to like it less and less.
I find the side-by-side panes of some just a hilariously stupid waste of space. And the editors that at least do live “previews” feel so janky when editing; watching pound signs appear and disappear as you move off a line, or having text shift around as bold and italics markers come and go.
No, I don’t need all the formatting capabilities of a word processor. But there’s a reason why MD is often pretty-fied: it’s damn ugly and noisy as hell.
I get that people want a “pure” text format for longevity’s sake; but just demand a text export-in MD if you like. But working in MD is crazy making; it’s ugly, distracting, and worst of all, the “raw” form is nothing like documents and formatting we’re all used to, so even if you get used to it, all of the other documents in the world you interact with will still be using real bold, italics, and headers of increasing size.
As a person who also hates the stupid split screen, I think you will like https://bangle.io , it is WYSIWYG
local note taking app.
It saves notes in markdown but provides you with a pretty interface. The goal of this project is to provide a nice interface like notion while keeping the data in users machine in a human readable format.
I think Markdown exists mostly to make the editing experience predictable for both the user and developer. I don't think I've ever seen a rich text editor that doesn't require babysitting.
I don't care how it's stored, as long as I can export it for backups' sake. I don't want to see markdown, I don't want to use it for formatting text, I don't want to use it as a user-interface, and I certainly don't want text jumping around and reformatting stuff as I type.
I've been down this rabbit hole too many times. My advice is take notes - it is good and fun. There are lots of ways to take notes, pick one you like and stay happy. While there are differences between approaches, the big thing is notes or no notes. Also remember, what works well for you might not be the same as what is hip at the moment...
What do you use for taking notes in corp environment where data security is hard requirement and using 3rd party online solution (or the one that requires you to open an account for)?
So far I'm stuck with offline solution (cherrytree, I'm with them since using Linux back in the day) which is not ideal but gets me going.
Also it's relatively easy to make scheduled backups to internal servers where I can retrieve them in case of laptop failure and/or migration to new hardware.
Not saying I really need to use other software than cherrytree but would like to try something else (you know, that itchy feel in the back of your brain).
Note taking is very important as it helps you retain stuff and helps you learn better in general. I am huge on taking notes whenever I'm learning something new and the strategy that worked for me best was using markdown in vim to take notes and use git to save them.
Last but not least if you are a huge note taker I would suggest using Mdbook(A project powered by Rust) as it allows you to write in markdown and uses full-text search feature which makes it easier when searching for something specific in your notes.
Anyways would love to hear from you guys what tools have worked for you guys when taking notes
After spending countless hours researching, trying (and then abandoning) notetaking apps such as OneNote, Evernote, Zimwiki, plain markdown files, and more, I ended up writing notes in Docx and then putting them on Onedrive.
While Docx might be clunky, I could edit it from my phone, on the web, and on my desktop. I could put images in them. The file format has enough momentum that I am sure I could still open it 20 years from now.
Most importantly, I could store the Docx file next to my other project resources, and when I am done, I could archive the whole folder away.
Syncthing on desktop + mobile + RaspberryPi home server for syncing.
Sublime Text for editing markdown notes on desktop.
Markor (Markor: Markdown Editor) for editing those on Android.
Highly recommended.
I just use Google Keep + OneNote + Google Docs as an extensive, interlinked knowledge system. It is very similar to the Zettelkasten method, where Google Keep is the “slip-box”, and then once a week I organize and interlink the notes in a more extensive Google Doc system I call my “second brain”. Best part? By default I can search and retrieve everything from my spotlight search on iPhone or Google Drive. It indexes everything really well and you can interlink any part with Google Doc bookmarks and normal HTML links.
Tried Tiddlywiki based on recommendations on this page. Started nice and saved few pages, could update the settings etc. Then updated the setting to widen the wiki column size and suddenly all the links (like Home/Settings etc) stopped working with exception of Theme/Appearance and Save. Thankfully didn't put a lot of content in it. I guess I'll have to continue with dokuwiki + my plaintext markdown note setup.
I know, it shouldn't be possible to mess it up that way. .. _But_ the links didn't stop working. You probably made the "wiki column size" (aka story-river) wider and didn't move the sidebar out of the way. So the story-river did "catch" the clicks... There are some changes on the way, that should make it harder, to create confusion like this.
I would actually love to use pen and paper. The problem is I have very hard time reading the notes I have taken when it was important to write fast. I'm not a great typist either but recognizing extremely heavily misspelled (because of fast blind-typing I have never learnt to do right) words consisting of actually readable letters is much easier than deciphering the weird glyphs I produce when fast-writing.
I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social.
In grad school I was for a year part of a small study group. We shared notes, on paper and aloud. It made each of us far, far better at the subject than we could have been on our own. And we were at most 7 people (sometimes only 3).
When developing Hode[1], and when helping develop Semantic Synchrony[2], I imagined some kind of mind-meld utopia where superbeings would not just frolic in but also tend each others' knowledge gardens. (Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ... which I can't remember ...)
Reading nonlinearly is a faster way to accumulate knowledge than reading linearly. That's is why people who really care prefer newspapers to watching the news on TV. And a format that lets lots of people contribute their input can potentially convey more than a format that locks you into reading a single author. Alas, the potential for noise is higher too -- but still, this is why Wikipedia has been so wildly successful.
One might ask, "We've already got Wikipedia; what possible improvement on that do you see?" The thing about Wikipedia is it presents what the author(s) consider(s) settled knowledge. It is a place for record, not a place for debate. A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable.
In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos. I once frolicked for an afternoon through Andy Matuschak's[4], which was quite enjoyable. But it was mostly about ... can you guess? ... how to build a knowledge base.
If someone finds a scheme that scales, I believe it could be much more powerful than what we currently call AI.
> Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ...
Is it #digitalgarden?
> I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social.
AFAIK note taking apps often have a feature to share notes, if that counts, e.g., Obsidian (view-only), Roam (view and edit), Notion (view, edit, and comment), and so on. With sharing and comments enabled, you can even use Google Docs as your PKB (some people actually do this), given that you don't need fancy features like bi-directional links.
Just like regular blogs, some gardeners also implement a social protocol called Webmention [1]. It's more like a pingback in WordPress than a collaboration tool though.
> A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable.
I would love to see this implemented in existing apps. The current solutions I know either involve 3rd party plugins (e.g., hypothes.is), or you have to self-hosted it yourself (e.g., cactus.chat, based on Matrix protocol).
Another alternative, which I learned from visiting other gardeners [2], is that you can link the edit button in your note to a GitHub PR. It's not friendly to non-developers who visit your garden, but this is better than nothing IMO.
> In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos.
5 months ago there is a Show HN about a decentralized knowledge graph called Agora [3]. The cool thing is, everyone is part of one large knowledge graph, which means nodes (notes) from multiple users can be aggregated around [[topic]]. I hope the project is still alive..
ps. I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.. I only started researching on this topic recently to create my own PKB (I literally published my first note couple days ago [4]).
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this, but if you are on a Mac, KeepIt[1] is great. It is basically an overlay on top of the normal Mac file system (a bit like DevonThink in that regard).
Using TiddlyWiki on VPS so it's online accessible from my home IP address without authorization and with from any other location. Served using the Caddy webserver which automatically handles the TLS certificates. Taking notes for years using Tags for search and grouping.
I write markdown in text files and organize them into directories backed up by dropbox ( but could be anything really ). It works way better than all the different note taking apps I've used.
not really, vscode with preview on works in a similar way, but I don't really need to use it like that, mostly I just navigate the directories and find the file with the notes I'm interested in reading. If I do forget where something is, simple search finds it and I don't even consume it as rendered markdown, usually just as plain text. I find it really useful, I have a ton of notes on all kinds of things that I keep referring to.
I did a lot of research on the topic when I started my university studies in microengineering. At the start of uni, there's a lot of money and time being spent by students to set up the "best note taking environment" to ensure their success, usually resulting in expensive iPad Pros with Apple Pencils or the Windows Surface equivilent. In the end I chose a simple piece of software for my 2012 Thinkpad: OneNote. Why? Equation support. There are so many problems with it, but after trialing it against paper and pen, I never looked back, just for the ability to quickly flip back to last-year's lecture/exercices on-the-go. We each have our own journey and find our preferred solution, but here are a few reasons why I chose OneNote over the plethora of other available solutions.
It's free. I wouldn't mind paying for something, but this gives you peace of mind that it will stay yours without restrictions, like Google Docs/Sheets/etc. Secondly, it's fast. It's an optimized Windows app that starts in the blink of an eye and uses few system resources. It's visually simple, doens't distract you and has nice smooth animations, it's easier to read/write formatted text with equations than muck around with Markdown/LaTeX. Instant sync, in fact, real-time like Google Docs between devices. The equation support is great once you learn it, it's almost as good as LaTeX. It has pretty decent spell check (although I wish I could set a preferred writing language and not have it deduce from my active keyboard). Good organisation into books, sections and pages. Students get unlimited storage with OneDrive, so no problem there, and trust me, it will be a while until you exhaust your free storage with note taking. Paste images/screen captures, tables. I've never used the pen mode because I don't have any device with a stylus, but I prefer text anyway for it's searchability and typing speed. It takes a little while to really understand the formatting engine, but once you get a feel for the markdown-like underlying invisible structure, it makes it easier to format and move things around. You create your own style and organisation that you can understand and navigate quickly.
It's one of the things keeping me on Windows, sadly. Encryption is absolutely not important for me for lecture note-taking, anything remotly important I'll stick in 1password or on a locally encrypted drive. The day I want to migrate, I'll export it as PDF and archive it in the fairly unlikely event I will want to refer back to something. Over time I've learnt that what's in your head is more important than having a perfectly organised personal wiki of knowledge. I would reconsider it for the long-term, but it's fantastic to use something that feels polished and backed by a large company, like GMail vs settings up your own VPS/email software and client. I'm not a fan of big-tech endorsed products, but I can't seem to keep myself away from this one.
My pet theory is that Onenote can be seen by some HN types as too pedestrian (therefore not worth mentioning) because it is so popular yet is looked down on because it is made by Microsoft. MS is often looked down on by linux-first-everything-is-markdown techies because of their 90s and Windows 10 sins.
"I've never used the pen mode because I don't have any device with a stylus, but I prefer text anyway for it's searchability and typing speed."
The pen mode is pretty good because it does OCR on your writing and indexes it the same as plain text. What I don't like is that it happens asynchronously. When I was testing it, I could search and find notes from yesterday, but not today.
That's a tool that lets you combine the flexibility of paper and some of the features of digital, but just using it doesn't tell you how to write your notes, how to organize them, etc.
There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and (2) sync --- I need my notes mirrored onto my phone.
For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good, in fact, because it doesn't feel much better to use than does TextEdit. Both search and sync work fine. I don't have to think about what I'm writing or how it fits into the scheme of things because I'm guaranteed to be able to find things with search. I can drag screenshots of lecture videos in and write short sentences about them.
I had Bear.app for awhile and was initially skeptical of it, but it has now replaced Notes.app for me; it's a better writing environment, it has sticky notes (pinned to the top of the note list) which turn out to be really valuable, does native Markdown, and search and sync work reliably on my laptop and phone.
So, Notes and Bear.app are my two recommendations.
I'm interested to see if anybody comes up with something macOS-supported that outdoes Bear.
I'm an Emacs person, I've written a couple thousand lines of elisp, and I have never, ever been able to get into org mode.