Ask HN: What is your note-taking system? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your note-taking system?

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I prefer to have my notes in plain text so I'm currently taking Markdown notes and storing them in a disorganized way across various folders. I'd really like to store my notes in a more structured way.

One tool I've used is Boostnote (https://boostnote.io/), a note-taking app with tagging and folders (a plus), but I'm not entirely happy with it because it doesn't give me as much customization over file names and structure as I'd like.

I think what I want is a system of organization for managing notes in directories and subdirectories, though I'm open to software tools as well.

What do you use? Do you store notes as plain text on disk or use some other tool? Do you put your notes in version control? I'd love to hear what you all use. Thanks!

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I'd really like to see some kind of Slack-collaborative-notetaking-email-client-CRM-CMS-filesystem-hybrid that can hierarchically unify my view of any tag or sub-tag or cross-cutting-concern across all the ways those neurons in my brain fired. "Where did I put that thought" currently requires a search across a half-dozen apps and tabs. But even a unified search wouldn't cut it; sometimes you need that hierarchy (or multiple hierarchies) to take a step back and realize you need to drill down into something you would have forgotten to search for in the first place. It's the holy grail of UX problems, but whoever solves it will have a unicorn.

Notion.so comes closer than anything I've seen, but its lack of interoperability makes it difficult to be this ideal nexus of my thoughts. I still use Evernote actively as my main thought-dumping-ground and meeting-note-taker, though more out of habit than anything else at this point.

I hand write my notes, because often times I want to sketch something out, draw a diagram, draw a graph, or simply illustrate some interaction between things.

I keep an ipad with me all the time. I have a "daily note" notebook where Its sort of like a streaming calendar where I write down what I need to do for the next day, and things I didn't complete get bumped down, or crossed out if I decided I didn't need to do them. I also jot notes, thoughts, reminders etc in there.

Then I have categories for specific projects where I keep things organized per project.

I am like you, I want to write in markdown, store in plain text & organized in folders. I started with nvAlt. It is great but it doesn't support folders. So I jumped to iAWriter on Mac & iPhone. I have about 1500 files spread across different folders. I have been using this setup for about 8 months now. It seems to work pretty good.

I asked a similar question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16838093 There are some great answers. For me I started to have on my work project a directory called _notes ignored by git which contains simple text files.

I prefer to hand write my notes, I've found I internalize what I'm writing down much more. I then use the Scan Document feature within Dropbox to digitize the notes.

The downsides are the notes aren't searchable in their current state, but it's been the best system for me thus far.

Org-mode

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