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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

It is really interesting how different people are in their preferred solutions. The thing that I've learned makes an application good for note-taking is a lack of features. Simplicity is key for this use case for me. Even on the desktop, my "note-taking" app is just notepad on Windows, kwrite in KDE, and a very bare-bones text editor on my phone.

None of this is even remotely a criticism of your effort. I was just pondering how different people can be in their needs.

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> The thing that I've learned makes an application good for note-taking is a lack of features.

The best featureless app I've ever used for taking notes is the pen and paper sitting next to me for the specific purpose. Admittedly, it's not convenient at any time other than sitting at the desk and focused. There are plenty of studies about the process of writing notes vs typing notes when it comes to long term retention. There are times where I'm wrestling with a problem that is just a bit more data than my L1 cache (my head) can remember and need to offload some of the data to RAM (scratch pad), but I can just jot down the data without actually looking at it. Even being able to try to sketch data has helped. I have yet to ever find an app even remotely as effective to the point, I'm stopped trying anything else. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

> The best featureless app I've ever used for taking notes is the pen and paper sitting next to me for the specific purpose.

True! At work, I carry a pencil and small notepad for this reason. But outside of work, I don't always have one at hand and so other methods come into play.

Thank you. I can relate to the importance of simplicity. When there are too many features, I find it distracting and difficult to focus on the content I’m writing.

There really are so many different needs when it comes to note-taking apps, including my own. This discussion has highlighted that for me once again.

> Even on the desktop, my "note-taking" app is just notepad on Windows, kwrite in KDE, and a very bare-bones text editor on my phone.

I've done this years ago in my .bashrc and use it almost daily:

      alias todo='vim ~/.todo'

I suppose I should change `~/.todo` to `/.todo.md` for syntax highlighting, but the list is already quite large and I'm not adding in anything that isn't absolutely required.

I take notes in emacs with org-mode. It is not simple at all, in a way, but there is nothing that gets in my way either. No distractions since all features are hidden behind keyboard combos (I disabled the menu). Never felt like I had to switch to a simpler editor for certain tasks. And it runs on my phone in Termux (syncs with git) so I just use org-mode as my note-taking app.

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