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Comment by wharvle | Hacker News Reader

I use Apple Notes and don’t bother to organize anything unless it’s a whole bunch of related material that I’m going to use together—notes for an rpg session, say. All the rest, I just make sure that I give it a title that I’ll recognize when I see it, and include words that I’ll likely use if I go looking for it with search.

Been doing this for years, haven’t lost anything yet. It works so well that time organizing it would have been wasted.

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Over the years I realized that the best tool for that is the one that’s easy to do it both on my phone and computer. That’s why I’ve stuck with Apple Notes for more temporary stuff or unorganized stuff and Notion for more structured concepts.

Idk how long these tools will exist but at least Notion allows exporting to markdown or PDF.

Having trouble with Apple notes syncing too slowly. Wife can update the shopping list but I won’t see it for 24+ hours. Unfortunately my life runs on it. Problem may be that my Notes file has become a 15G monstrosity?

I use reminders for shopping lists. They can also be shared. Hopefully they are not the same database as notes!

Have you tried using Notion?

For things that are mostly lists I prefer using Microsoft To Do though (I use it ever since it was called Wanderlist)

Like it but I use all the features of Apple Notes. Notion has only a few of them. Thanks though

“Reminders” is better for things like shared shopping lists (not to say Notes shouldn’t be working better for you for this use case, but Reminders is another option that’s specifically for that kind of use case)

[edit] in the latest version it’ll even organize your grocery lists by category, for easier shopping.

i've been doing the exactly same thing. Some risk is the data safety - years of log is attached to the icloud account is concerning.

There exist programs to export them to markdown or what have you. Dunno how well they handle embedded media. I do a lot of copy-pasting screenshots or embedding PDF pages… or entire pdfs.

[edit] “why screenshots?”

1) To record gui workflows, walkthrough-style.

2) to record whole screens of values from guis while preserving formatting perfectly (think: cloud dashboard vital stats screens for various resources)

3) to record short message exchanges from ephemeral messaging with all the formatting intact with zero extra effort. (Think: feature discussion in a periodically-cleaned chat channel; I can always turn it into text later if I need to, recording with screenshot is fast)

4) plus now that it’s almost as easy and reliable to copy-paste from images as from regular text, on macOS and iOS, why not?

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