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Comment by larschdk | Hacker News Reader

Is there a note taking tool that fully separates taking the note from the organizing (filing) and auto-archives everything? After using any tool, e.g. OneNote or even just a text file for a while, I get overwhelmed every time I open it to take a note as it is littered with stuff that I no longer need. I want a tool that only shows me what I'm working on. I don't want to build a collection of notes. I want to record my thoughts and be able to retrieve them later, optionally organize some things for easier access. The rest should be auto-archived by default. I use a college notepad this way, but found no tool that lets me just start on a blank page and ignore the history.

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I've used personal wikis for many years. It's easy to link between notes, it's searchable. I used camelcased words as hashtags. I had several thousands notes in it, personal and work related.

Then the smartphone came and took over, and there was no good wiki-app and in the browser didn't really work. Since then I've switched to Evernote. Again more than 1000 notes without transferring the wiki to Evernote. I can get lost sometimes, and then it needs some work to clean up tags and notes.

> OneNote or even just a text file for a while, I get overwhelmed every time I open it to take a note as it is littered with stuff that I no longer need

I don't understand your problem. Evernote can be sorted on date of last access, so you always see the most recent notes on top. You don't want a collection of notes, but you want auto-archive? Isn't auto-archive the collection?

> but found no tool that lets me just start on a blank page and ignore the history.

In evernote and probably any note taking app you can open a new note and start clean.

You could use Tiddlywiki.

You create entries (called tiddlers) and you can hide them. Then, you won't see them by default, but you can search for them.

You can also set it to show you a specific tiddler when you load the page.

Maybe something like devonthink? It’s not really clean slate every time, but it links notes automatically through use of word vectors and similarity.

DevonThink doesn’t really do it for me. I’ve been using it for the past few months and find it immensely useful for organising documents and other media, but it’s a very average note taking experience.

There are too many things like folder structure, tags, and even the format of the note (plain, MD, rich) to consider during the note taking experience. There’s also an annoying separation between note editing and viewing.

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