I have written a few scripts to manage my abundant note taking.
In a specific directory, I arrange notes according to subject in directories, and the script parses them and spits out HTML files that displays them in a fashion I find useful. With MathJax, I can render LaTeX. It also spits out an index files so I can see at a glance my subjects and notes on those subjects.
I've been giving some thought to doing something more involved, so I can get full text search capabilities from the index page. It's something I play around with every so often as the inspiration hits me. I will not be surprised if this posts leads me back to playing with it for a bit, although I am busy for the upcoming week already.
You can trivially get something similar with something like vimwiki [0]. The only reason I went further was that I wanted greater levels of customization.
Edit: The full text search from the index is just a nicety given the way I like having the notes displayed. I can already grep from the command line, of course. I have other ideas about nice-to-have dynamic behaviour, but a lot of the stuff falls into the lower percentages of the 20% of the 80-20 split.
In The Pragmatic Programmer, one of the tips advocates keeping knowledge in plain text:
> Keep Knowledge in Plain Text
> Plain text won’t become obsolete. It helps leverage your work and simplifies debugging and testing.
The full text expands on the benefits, such as searchability and other stuff I can't recall at the moment.
I try to stay as close to possible to plain text as I can. Even Markdown is a bit heavy for the task, although I have given some thought to adopting it and avoiding needing any custom parsing.
Lastly, I wasn't clear why I output to HTML. I put them up on a server so that I can access them remotely. I can also upload notes, or input a quick note to a textarea and submit it. It's device-agnostic; I just need a browser. I haven't bothered to implement making currently existing notes editable.
I've been trying to take note in plain text. One issue that I have is math note, I ended up having to use markdown + pseudo latex for the note + math symbol, and output to HTML. I'm definitely not happy with the current setup. Is there any good solution for math symbols in general?
In a specific directory, I arrange notes according to subject in directories, and the script parses them and spits out HTML files that displays them in a fashion I find useful. With MathJax, I can render LaTeX. It also spits out an index files so I can see at a glance my subjects and notes on those subjects.
I've been giving some thought to doing something more involved, so I can get full text search capabilities from the index page. It's something I play around with every so often as the inspiration hits me. I will not be surprised if this posts leads me back to playing with it for a bit, although I am busy for the upcoming week already.
You can trivially get something similar with something like vimwiki [0]. The only reason I went further was that I wanted greater levels of customization.
[0] https://code.google.com/p/vimwiki/
Edit: The full text search from the index is just a nicety given the way I like having the notes displayed. I can already grep from the command line, of course. I have other ideas about nice-to-have dynamic behaviour, but a lot of the stuff falls into the lower percentages of the 20% of the 80-20 split.
In The Pragmatic Programmer, one of the tips advocates keeping knowledge in plain text:
> Keep Knowledge in Plain Text
> Plain text won’t become obsolete. It helps leverage your work and simplifies debugging and testing.
The full text expands on the benefits, such as searchability and other stuff I can't recall at the moment.
I try to stay as close to possible to plain text as I can. Even Markdown is a bit heavy for the task, although I have given some thought to adopting it and avoiding needing any custom parsing.
Lastly, I wasn't clear why I output to HTML. I put them up on a server so that I can access them remotely. I can also upload notes, or input a quick note to a textarea and submit it. It's device-agnostic; I just need a browser. I haven't bothered to implement making currently existing notes editable.