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Ask HN: What's your catch-all note taker?

25 points| b1gtuna | 7 years ago

I use Microsoft OneNote and it has been working great for dumping all kinds of stuff (screenshots, logs, ideas, thoughts, love letters, resignation letters, resumes, code snippets and etc). That said I use an iPhone, use Linux for work, and Windows at home. So accessing the OneNote when I am not home has been difficult. What is your favorite dumpster(?) app? Do you recommend it? I am open for both free and paid solutions.

81 comments

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[+] gexla|7 years ago|reply
As of 37 minutes in, not one Orgmode... ;)

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

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

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

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

[+] xte|7 years ago|reply
Emacs-er (I'm a proud one) tend to live in Emacs, not in browsers so a delay it's normal :-)

Especially since HN emacs interface offer a decent way to read but not a way to post and since HN itself is not much good in term of conversation (even worse than Reddit, far far far worse than classic usenet) spending time in adding post capabilities it's probably not much interesting...

[+] b1gtuna|7 years ago|reply
Took a brief look at Orgmode and it looks great. It also appears to be more feature packed than Vimwiki. Let me give it a shot. I'm a Vim user, so I hope I don't get too disoriented by Emacs.
[+] nafizh|7 years ago|reply
I have been using Google Keep for some time and it is really great. But I am always dreading the day Google is announcing they are shutting it down. That is why looking for an alternative.
[+] jjuhl|7 years ago|reply
"As of 37 minutes in, not one Orgmode" - ehh, how did you miss my org mode comment?
[+] Jasber|7 years ago|reply
Shameless plug: I'm building Catch Notes (https://catchnotes.app/) for this

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

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

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

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

[+] jaredcwhite|7 years ago|reply
Wow, this is fabulous! I use Trello AND Basecamp AND Apple Notes so this would be incredibly useful for me. Instant signup.
[+] Mister_Snuggles|7 years ago|reply
I'm also a OneNote fan. I use it in a similar fashion - tons of work-related stuff, a bunch of personal stuff, and a notebook shared with my SO so we can both update grocery lists, etc.

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

[+] b1gtuna|7 years ago|reply
Right, I forgot about the iOS version of the OneNote app. I guess I am searching for a more cross-platform solution (much like Google Notebook. Also, it looks like Microsoft is migrating OneNote out of Office suite and make it available as a default app in Windows, but will require a subscription to Office 365 to unlock features [1]. So cost becomes an issue when this occurs..

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3269056/software-productivit...

[+] ukyrgf|7 years ago|reply
I want to like OneNote, but I just can't stand how things can be positioned anywhere on the page. It's so hard to make my notes look neat and organized.

I started using Notion.so (after a recommendation on HN recently) and the difference is incredible. All the versatility of OneNote, but there is actually somewhat of a hierarchy.

[+] jdoege|7 years ago|reply
I went paperless, this year, and after trying 3 or 4 different note apps, I settled on Notability on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. That I can run the app on my laptop (and phone), synchronized through iCloud makes this incredibly more useful than pen and paper. Importing pdfs and images from other places, keyboard based text entry from the laptop, proper handwriting recognition and search thereon based is amazing. I can tell when technology will work for me when I can quickly adopt it and feel no desire to go back to what I did before. That happened with ereaders for me when they came to the phone (I can read anywhere, anytime and for however long I have, I love it) and it has happened with this, as well.
[+] jjuhl|7 years ago|reply
Emacs org mode (https://orgmode.org).
[+] nine_k|7 years ago|reply
What I badly miss about it is some kind of "org mode server" to synchronize things between several nodes, e.g. laptop and mobile, in a structure-aware way.

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

[+] octorian|7 years ago|reply
A disorganized collection of text files, often (but not always) in Dropbox, and random pieces of scrap paper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[+] hummerbliss|7 years ago|reply
I recently started using Zim Desktop Wiki (http://zim-wiki.org) for the sole reason being that it saves them in text files and the obvious advantages that come with it (sync, no lock-in) etc. I use them across mac, windows, and linux machines. I couldn't find an iPhone app.
[+] fiveFeet|7 years ago|reply
Zim is awesome for note taking. Highly recommended.
[+] rayiner|7 years ago|reply
I use Trello. It's not great at taking notes, but it's very easy to get data into it. Each list and item within a list has an email address, and you can shoot PDFs, web pages, etc., to those from anywhere without special software. It also "spatial,"[1] which is hugely helpful in being able to find things. I've tried a few other things but I don't like them. One Note is glacially slow for notebooks hosted online. And I can never find anything in Evernote.

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

[+] purplezooey|7 years ago|reply
Is it just me or is Trello the most overrated software ever. Stack some cards. Color em. Write some more. Woo. Get bought for a few hundred mil.
[+] mikestew|7 years ago|reply
That said I use an iPhone, use Linux for work, and Windows at home. So accessing the OneNote when I am not home has been difficult.

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

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

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

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

[+] b1gtuna|7 years ago|reply
Whoa, I wasn't aware of the web version of OneNote. This is a nice surprise! I'm a Vim user so I will give vimwiki a shot as well. Thank you.
[+] h0h0h0|7 years ago|reply
Sublime Text for sure.

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

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

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

[+] anonlawyer|7 years ago|reply
My catch-all note taker is a Rhodia notebook with four different Lamy fountain pins, each with a different color ink. For digital stuff, I use Simplenote on mac, iOS, and Android and Resoph Notes (synced to Simplenote) on my Windows work laptop. I only just learned of Dynalist and may give that a spin but doubt that it will unseat Simplenote in my system.
[+] FreezerburnV|7 years ago|reply
As someone who also likes physical paper + fountain pen: how do you carry your fountain pens in a way that they don't leak ink when moving around in a pocket or something similar? (as in, the physical jolt of the pen moving in a pocket causes a little ink to come out of the nib, similar to if you were shaking it)
[+] gotrythis|7 years ago|reply
For note taking, I used to use the LiveScribe pen and paper, which records what's being said, synced to your notes. This is not simply attaching audio to notes. It's far better. You can click on a written note to hear what was being said when you wrote the note, and replay the audio and writing together.

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

Livescribe: https://www.livescribe.com

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

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

Notability: http://gingerlabs.com/

[+] cal97g|7 years ago|reply
Typora. Just a simple WYSIWYG markdown editor. I use it for anything from writing articles to notes to invoices. Has pretty PDF exports which look good and professional for documentation as well a nice selection of themes.
[+] im_dario|7 years ago|reply
Amazing editor. I'm working in a little side project and I had in my mind an editor like this one.
[+] m52go|7 years ago|reply
Zotero. Cross-platform and open-source. You can sync it using your favorite syncing tool, and even encrypt before syncing using something like Cryptomator. I regularly use this set-up on Linux and Windows.
[+] mihaifm|7 years ago|reply
Plain text for notes/bookmarks/todo items/wishlists with my own markdown-like syntax for formatting. I use a small app (Editorial) on my iphone and Dropbox to sync.
[+] b1gtuna|7 years ago|reply
Thanks. This is probably 1 of my top 3 choices at the moment. It is timeless, no need to worry about service shutdown, and robust and free. Of course, it probably has the most learning curve as I have to type out everything.
[+] timdavila|7 years ago|reply
I built my own solution for this after using many different apps and not quite being satisfied with any of them. My ideal editor is markdown based with preview as you type, available everywhere (so sublime wouldn't work), plain text storage that's easy to export, and simple linking between notes. It's at https://www.nominal.net if you're interested.
[+] plokta|7 years ago|reply
I recently discovered VNote: https://github.com/tamlok/vnote

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