I do this stuff with my notes in Emacs and it's really nice. Emacs is a graphical application and its notetaking facilities are really outstanding. It even supports syntax highlighted, executable, exportable code snippets, as well as all the basic text formatting, hyperlinks, tables of contents, tables, etc. It's a great tool for developers and sysadmins to use for notetaking.

If you know Emacs isn't for you, that's totally fine, but I wanted to throw this out there for bystanders that when someone suggests to build your notetaking workflow around a great text editor, the proposition is not at all to somehow confine oneself to an 1980s terminal.

Even custom hyperlinks and text notes that refer to chunks inside PDFs are easy to do.

I've had many well-intentioned but ultimately abortive attempts to get on board with Emacs.

So, are images 'possible' or 'trivial'? Not trolling, and I do note that you say it's not part of your workflow.

On the other hand: no, Emacs is not a WYSIWYG word processor. The need to support terminal as a display backend weights heavily on the pace of GUI improvements. That's because all interface elements need to be renderable on all backends (not strictly true, but the prejudice against GUI-only elements is significant). So if you hope to be able to easily and conveniently display something like this: https://klibert.pl/statics/vw-doc-view.png then Emacs is empathically not the best tool for the job.

so (out of the box) in org mode if you type [[./file/path/to.png]] it will turn into a link, if you hit Ctrl-c-x-v it will toggle between showing images as a link (which will open in a new emacs buffer) and just showing the images inline.

ALSO you can just drag an image file onto an emacs window and it will display it in a new buffer.

however getting it so that A) images are displayed automatically when you finish typing the [[path]] and/or B) dragging an image into emacs will result in a new link in orgmode... that's probably possible

This is the package you're looking for. Just drag and drop images into the org mode buffer and you're done. I've been using it for years to take lecture / book notes in org mode where I have to constantly take screenshots and embed them in my notes.

part A is still annoying though. if you have inline images toggled and type in a new image it still turns into a link instead of an inline image.

Thank you Richard

Why?

vim would not be what it is, without emacs to rage against.

Emacs is emacs because its extensible, between vim, neovim and vim9, im starting to think people might enjoy the extensibility seeing as that brings vim up to 3 scripting languages to write things in.

vim has become what it purported to hate

Yea, you will get a lot of Emacs and Emacs with Org mode answers here. To be fair they not wrong :) As a complete emacs newb, start with something like "doom emacs" ! It's brilliant for beginners.

>Emacs is a graphical application

Too few ppl know this.

Including me until now. I will examine this emacs of which you speak. No promises but I can at least attempt to run it.

Goodluck :)

Get used to the basic workflow for a little while and forgive the monospace-ness while you evaluate the workflow. I like taking notes in Gollum wikis, the wiki format used by GitLab and Github. The project management features enabled by default in Doom will kick in for that. Decide how you feel about those.

If you like the workflow, take a look at org-modern and take a few minutes to work out the proportions for variable pitch fonts. Then you can have Org text render in a nice, proportional font that you like and use monospace only for the embedded source code (including shell languages) blocks.

As an alternative to the using git repos to store notes collected into projects, take a look at Org Roam v2 for keeping a topic-based knowledgebase that you can work with without thinking much about the filesystem, and which offers mindmapping features.

That stuff works great for me, has required zero substantial elisp knowledge to get working, and has been natural for me to ease into. I hope you find a workflow you like!

Direct embedding binary data in the Org files would be cool for emailing Org files around, though. It looks like Org does support this kind of embedding on export, if you don't mind exporting to other formats when you send documents around.

For now, I've settled on GoodNotes because it's good enough at PDF Backup, OCR Search, and drawing. I have given solid tries to Evernote, ZoomNotes, Concepts, and Notion, and they each are amazingly better than GoodNotes in at least one major respect, sometimes multiple, but none of them are good enough on those zero-compromise requirements and GoodNotes is. FWIW.

EDIT: Oh, while I'm flamebaiting, I also use my ipad camera to take pictures of screens. Life is too short to schlep screenshots between computers, especially the ancient ones that run scientific equipment (lots of 68000, XP on some recent ones). Printer emulators and java applets can get bent. Runs everywhere, my ass. Moore's Law has given us gigahertz and megapixels, and if I can use them to eliminate painful asinine pointless busywork that's my god-given right and nobody is going to convince me otherwise. Sometimes I even use my ipad camera to take a screenshot of something on my PC and toss it into the mix. Sue me.

Paste on your iPad

Clipboards are synced through iCloud.

if i had to share a screenshot from my laptop/phone, it is a matter of taking the screenshot and "sharing" via kde connect. take all of 3-5 seconds and this workflow is now available to everyone

I swear I'm not shilling for Google Keep, but I've found myself using it more and more over the last couple of years; it hits a sweet spot between "limited enough that I don't get distracted" and "advanced enough that I can still express myself".

The biggest praise is its ubiquity. It's just there when I need it. Interesting article + my in-the-moment thoughts? Google Keep-ed. Want to add a reflection at the end of the day with a picture? Google Keep-ed. Need to remember an address in the car? Toss it in the Keep and open it on my phone.

  function qn ()
  {
    date_today=$(date +%F)
    year=$(date +%Y)
    month=$(date +%m)
    day=$(date +%d)
    FNAME="$NOTES_DIR/Work/journal/$date_today.md"
    #FNAME="$NOTES_DIR/Work/journal/$year/$date_today.md"
    echo "### $(date +%F' '%T)" >> $FNAME
    rlwrap cat >> $FNAME #
    echo -e "\n" >> $FNAME
  }

Thank you!

In the meantime, I'm using stylyslab write [0] which uses svgz and is a good replacement for OneNote and a compromise I'm willing to make to not be locked in but tbh the OneNote app is just so much better.

[0] http://styluslabs.com/

I keep having dreams of making a linuxnote for OneNote files since the file format is technically open specs, but as they are super complex and I've barely opened a hex editor before I just don't know what I'm doing enough to actually try parsing the bytes of an arbitrary file yet.

And exactly which one of them can't I do in asciidoc?

If it is more than step 1 cut, step 2 paste, the tool has too many steps for my workflow, which like other users have posted is mostly a braindump of knowledge or context around several tables, links, and images/screenshots, sometimes with digital ink if I'm on a device with an active stylus.

But for producing formal documents, I have checked out asciidoc before and have respect for its capabilities, I just don't consider it in the running for my particular workflow as I see it as a different tool.

I'm not after version control for my notes though I know many others like it.

Sowhat handles transactional data well, you could implement double-entry for example with relative ease. Other things include: links, events, quotes, tasks, formulas and a few organizational elements. I combine these elements in different ways depending on the problem.

[0] https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro...

But spreadsheets applications tend to be more useful than annoying. Doing tables with formulas in text docs are possible, but it seems more annoying than useful. In some instances I enjoy using jupyter notebooks.

Also sync is not that great for massive datasets: I tried to sync my 22k-ish Evernote notes to Apple Notes and it took days and I never got the same number of notes on all the different devices. If you are currently building your notes you will probably not encounter this issue, though.

I was considering obsidian, but the devs say that obsidian is designed for a maximum of 20k notes.

So, I'm already on the upper bound, as you are. Probably, obsidian would be slow if I import all my notes.

Evernote, on a Windows 10 Desktop, now works fast, at least for me. I think we undervalue this fact, we undervalue the fact that it is hard to make good note taking apps that can sync and search fast with more than 20k notes. I guess there are users with 60k notes!

They are currently still catching up to reach feature parity with the old native clients, but at least they are releasing more frequently --which means betting the house on Electron technology is paying off--.

I do not use Evernote any more (finally ended up with plain files in iCloud Drive and EagleFiler to top it off) but I am still following their releases as a paying customer.

I agree with you, though: Notes is really quite good. I'm not sure how Notes syncs, exactly, but for whatever reason it's not blocked by my employer.

https://wiki.c2.com/?CommonUserAccess

On my scale of highly upvoted uninformed opinion, this ranks high up there, next to Bill Gates microchip vaccines...

Is this comment auto-generated? What do you mean?

Maybe I'm just a weirdo. I love reading manuals and discovering interesting nuances in the things I use every day. Or picking some new software at random and learning about it just because it's fun and interesting.

Software is interesting and fun in different ways to different people; most people find tools accomplishing their goals with as little overhead as possible far more fun than reading technical docs. Not saying you’re wrong to like reading manuals, but it’s not a moral failure to have a cognitive profile, or heck, even a schedule that’s meaningfully hindered by your daily toolbox having reading prerequisites.

I don't get that allergy to reading. For a long time it has been accepted that you had to read a manual before using something relatively complex, as not everything can be expressed intuitively, and because intuition is not really universal.

Do you know how many pages of software documentation the average person will read in their entire life? Zero. Why? They don't have to, and imposing that requirement yields no benefit. I'm always astonished by the perennial hubris required to glibly assert chemical engineers or historians or teachers or physicists or lawyers or doctors or librarians or literature professors (or even other developers who want to concentrate on other tasks) only avoid software tools with prerequisite study because they're too lazy to read.

The purpose of software is to help people more easily solve their problems. The bigger the barrier to entry— prerequisite study for example— the harder it is for most people. That's acceptable if the complexity is genuinely necessary to afford or augment expert usability in purpose-built software, but it almost universally compensates for ham fisted interface design. Interfaces that stop expert users from doing things efficiently and only afford beginner workflows are also poorly designed. Expert vs dumbed down is a false dichotomy.

For many FOSS developers and users, tolerating counterintuitive interfaces turned into a badge of honor, and that turned into an aesthetic preference. It's not the default state of software, it does exclude non-technologists, and is why FOSS alternatives are still alternatives for every application not specifically designed to be used by technologists, even though they're free. Every single one. Every professional photographer on the planet who relies on Adobe Photoshop would jump for joy if Gimp even came close to being a sufficient replacement. That preference is also why developers don't generally make significant interface decisions in any professionally managed software project.

Not having a technologist's domain knowledge or priorities isn't a contemptible moral failure. Having it doesn't come with design expertise— learning design takes a lot of study and practice, but I'm guessing you have other things you'd prefer to concentrate on learning. Which is fine. Just realize that assuming documentation is sufficient to guide users through software is primarily informed by your not understanding software usability rather than everybody else misgauging the importance of software documentation.

Engelbart assumed people wanted an interface for "trained experts" -- the idea being computer applications were important enough for people to invest time in learning new concepts to make their work more efficient.

Larry Tessler and others argued you should present a beginner's interface based on existing metaphor. Larry eventually went on to work at PARC and Apple where his work inspired (and frustrated) generations of computer users.

Boarding noted that Tessler (and others in PARC) needed a raision d'etre inside the Xerox organization and partially used "building document handling systems for secretaries" to justify their budget. Kay was well known at the time for wanting to use computers in education, so it's no wonder the interface Jobs saw at PARC was one tweaked for beginners.

This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy learning apps anymore, I just have to guard my time more wisely.

Still, as front-end, I find myself mostly working through Windows VM's, on top of KVM. I pass through most of the hardware (usb controller, the main GPU), and get a native windows experience. Most work happens through Chrome, VS Code and Windows Termnal. I use PowerToys to get some kind of tiling window manager.

There are two reasons for this. One is that my workplace has security setups for Windows and Mac, but not linux. I can grant them full control over the VM I use for work, and can use the standard setup for vpn, etc, as well as ability to use all corporate resources with no pain or hacks.

The other is that a lot of things are more painless. Working across multiple monitors requires less setup, scaling 4k "just works", most hardware and front-end software I use behave as-well or better than on linux (particularly webcam + Teams, that I depend on heavily).

Also, as editor, I still use emacs for some things, when I just want to edit some file in a random directory.

But for development work, I've switched to VS code. The ability to ssh into any remote VM, container, etc, and be able to work directly on a remote server, complete with gitlens, debuggers, file browsers, shell access, etc, is a killer app for me. I also love the pane management, which provides the tiling window manager functionality I love from i3/Pop Shell. (Power Toys is ok, but not quite as efficient for me as i3.) Emacs CAN be set up to do those things, but that takes more effort, I feel, and still not the same user experience.

I was slightly disappointed by i3 and xmonad and built my own WM in lisp.

In the old days we used to write our own tools by extending and combining existing tools. Now people seem to just download python and use whatever library comes with it after a day or two of experimentation

This is especially true where there's a selection of tools that all work within a similar "market" space for X functionality - some are going to be less complex, some more intuitive for me personally, some fulfill a one-off need and their other functionality is duplicated by another system I know much better (and have put the time into learning).

That shouldn't take away from your enjoyment of reading through minutiae of various systems, but you can't reasonably expect a lot of people to match your enthusiasm for doing so.

It's entirely possible there's a community of people out there who don't mind reading about abstractions exported by tools. Especially if it means you'll save time in the long run.

The original post seemed to me to be a mild introduction to the concept that maybe you can get your job done more efficiently with extensible / combinable simple tools rather than waiting for someone to add a feature to Gnome.

It's totally fine if you don't want to do that. If the person in the cube next to you does that, how is this an insult to you?

Maybe you're not the audience for this article.