Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them?

Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by criddell on Thursday February 02, 2017 @07:57AM (#13550183)

How do you deal with diagrams and sketches?

I have a directory called notes that has a bunch of separate text files. Now I've been slowly adding Word files because often I want to include an annotated screenshot.

I've often wished I could paste images into my source code. My editor would generate something like:

  /*IMG: BASE64 (or some other image encoding) of the image */

I do ascii art in some places, but too often I have a comment that just says "see flow.png in the documentation directory".

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by majewsky on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:47AM (#13550423)

Not related to coding notes, but I type my university lecture notes in LaTeX, and over the years I've picked up enough TikZ to write down graphs and diagrams in near-realtime.

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by hluska on Thursday February 02, 2017 @02:31PM (#13553718)

I thought I was pretty decent with TikZ, then I read this. That's extremely impressive - nice job!!

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by dhd415 on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:02AM (#13550202)

If using Microsoft tools is an option for you, you might consider OneNote. I almost chose it for my use, but wanted something lighter weight.

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by ashazar on Thursday February 02, 2017 @09:22AM (#13550641)

Microsoft has a mobile app "Office Lens". Useful to take pictures of the papers. It auto-corrects the positioning of the frame.

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by criddell on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:50AM (#13550440)

How is OneNote's OCR? I also use Evernote and it does a great job of recognizing and indexing text on photos of whiteboards.

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by dhd415 on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:57AM (#13550472)

I've heard that it's good, but I never tried it myself. I think OneNote is free now, so I'm pretty sure you could try it without having to buy anything.

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by criddell on Thursday February 02, 2017 @09:28AM (#13550682)

I just created two image files. One is a handwritten list of provinces in Canada and the other is a screenshot of some text in an editor. I uploaded the files to OneNote and Evernote. Both programs indexed the screenshot perfectly but only Evernote can find text in the handwritten note.

You said you chose something lighter weight. What did you end up going with? I've used Evernote for years but am unhappy with the direction the program has gone. The new CEO seems to be refocusing on the core purpose (capturing and remembering) and so I'm contemplating sticking around for a bit.

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by dhd415 on Thursday February 02, 2017 @09:51AM (#13550858)

Ah, that's an awfully nice search capability. I posted elsewhere in this thread that I use SimpleNote. It's not perfect, but >95% of my note-taking needs were text-only and SimpleNote was less hassle than Evernote.

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by richardboegli on Thursday February 02, 2017 @09:07AM (#13550534)

I second OneNote, been using it for years.

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by jansenv on Thursday February 02, 2017 @03:26PM (#13554322)

Atom has an extension that allows you to mouseover a base64 string and see the image output

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Re:Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them? by osullivj on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:38AM (#13550383)

asciiflow.com is great for rendering simple schematics and diagrams as plain text.

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