Ask HN: What do you use for you personal note taking activity?
So, fellow hackers, how do you take notes? What do you use?
I envision a platform which is very accessible (on phone/ laptop), easy and lightweight to jot down things (like sublime tabs, they are very light and I end up using them more than Evernote files, even when I am a premium member).
At the access side, those notes are easy to search, they follow some graph-like data structure, super smooth to add new updates (like if I have a movie node in my db, and I see some interesting movie somewhere, it should be super easy to add them in my list). If I am reading about some new topic, I can create stories out of them and should be able to add notes to it, like adding tweets in a tweet conversation.
I am thinking to make something of my own which cater my needs but meanwhile, I am thinking I will make what already is there rather than not using anything at all.
Also Firefox add-on to copy open tabs url.
Multiple Tab Handler – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-... Zim - a desktop wiki – http://zim-wiki.org/ cherrytree – giuspen – https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/
1. tomboy desktop wiki. Realistically, this is usually a write only repository for me to get ideas out that I never follow up on. But I like to think the exercise is beneficial, or at least thereapeutic.
2. rocketbook wave + frixion pens. Phone calls, meetings, random engineering diagrams, and the occasional Nikoli puzzle go in here. I just went through my first scan-in and heat erasure cycle, seems to work? These notes I do occasionally refer back to, with I'd imagine an exponential decay model. Needing to know the name of the recruiter I talked to and what they said is more important in the week after than the month or quarter after. Some day I'll try adopting bulletjournal's note style. But for now, meh.
Edit:
I don't even think of these as notes, but I do use a lot of todo lists. I have a Trello board for my video game collection, to track what I have, whether I can sell it, and where i've listed it for sale (and at what price). I have another Trello board for general todos, a caldav server that I've been ignoring lately, and some tasks in google cal that I've also been ignoring.
I tried to bespoke notetaking things (evernote, google keep, trello, orgmode, et al) before I figured out I was just dumping bits of text and never actually used the organizational/tagging/convenient features.
I guess it would be nice to have quick and easy ways to search and archive notes on my phone but I can live without it.
Workflowy (https://workflowy.com) is worth a try.
It's still very lightweight. You have one doc which has one master root. Then, you can create arbitrarily nested lists of things and zoom in and out of the overall list. You get a daily email of your delta from the day before. There's an okay mobile client but the desktop one is much better feature wise.
I've been using for it everything from an inbox to blog post ideas lately (I just start drafting the post inside Workflowy).
I start jotting down my notes in Sublime tabs too. If I choose to save them, they go into an Evernote notebook. "Your second brain" defines Evernote's purpose well, it functions as a long term memory for notes.
Search is simply Ctrl+Q and it also goes through images and docs as well if I'm not mistaken.
<Leader>ww to open Vimwiki and <Enter> to follow (and create) links and <Backspace> to go up one level. Works like a charm for me.
For quick meeting notes or todo notes at work, I send myself an email.