Keeping notes
My desk is filled with papers. Small and large. White, yellow, light green, pink and blue. Written with different pens.
On my hard drive is the same. But I cannot find something suitable. It has to be managed by the filesystem. It has to be text, even if adorned with markup. It does not need encryption as EncFS does it far better and more uniform.
*What do you use?*
OpenOffice / LibreOffice: too big, nothing impressive to index many text files.
AbiWord: lighter, but so white! And no index for text.
Tomboy? It needs that huge beast Mono. Don't know much about its database. Looks like a single file in a precise location.
Basket Notepads? Too complex. The project seems dead.
Zim Desktop Wiki? Looks very promising. It crashes all the time on all platforms.
Xpad and other postit apps: rather messy with lots of windows and limited export - import capabilities.
Xournal: quite interesting. Mimics paper. But less good on indexing plain text files.
RedNotebook: cute. Seems to do what it says. But I can't find a way to click away all the other panels.
MyTetra: A nice portable app that does all I need, only it can't export and it's slow on development.
The guide: windows only.
Cherry Tree is my new favorite. But it wants to keep all the notes in one place. Yet it's flexible about it: either xml or sql.
Keep Note: seems to be the successor of KeyNote.
KeyNote: windows only
Gjots2: a clone of Kjots
Kjots: no oppinion
Lifeograph: no oppinion
Vim or another text editor? But how to track all the other notes and index them, do searches and link them together?
I use Emacs with org-mode, while I don't know how it handles searching
(there are commands for searching tags, I haven't used them). My notes
evolved into unmaintainable mess, except for periodically cleared parts
like homework to-do list (removed after finishing courses).
I've written a personal wiki implementation [0] for such uses, while
it's not ready yet. It has a Web interface, data in text files in a git
repo, tags, fulltext search, binary attachments/images, BibTeX metadata
export, browser bookmarks import. (It's designed for running on a local
machine, not an external server.) Some of the main reasons why I don't
use it is that it has no Emacs integration and that my workflow for
sharing data between my computers depends on Mercurial bundles, while it
supports only git.
I use something very simple: A TXT file. It can be opened with almost every text editor, of not with all.
I usually keep temporary notes inside a file containing pending stuff like contacts to be added, emails to be sent, medias to check out, software to check out, or other computer-related things to be made.
For my mostly consistent notes, I have a TXT file for each type, like cultural events/conventions, favorite sites, favorite free softwares, favorite free cultural works, non-free cultural works to check, hate (because I've already checked them), or like.
As for the contacts, if I were to say something about them, I would probably destroy the storage device first and start everything again. :D
Best regards, ADFENO.
Have a nice day.
Sure, that is the best method for 10 files that don't hold too much data. When you get over a megabyte of text things are starting to get complicated. Sure, you can be highly organized. But most of the people aren't.
I've been meaning to try a text based Personal Information Manager (PIM) combined with conky to display TODO items on the desktop. That sounds to me like it could be useful but I haven't yet tried it. Of course it could just be a simple text file to be displayed but I'd also like some kind of a calendar, compatibility with the iCalendar standard is a big plus.
/ramble
I use Org files, which are basically simple plain text files. The Org syntax is very simple and obvious. They fully readable by people who don't know the format.
Because they are simple plain text files, you can:
- Write them with any text editor, even if it doesn't know the format
- Easily search through many files with common programs
- Easily make backups with common programs
- Use common revision control systems
- Replace strings in all of them at once
- Send them to others by just copy-pasting the text
If your notes are tasks:
http://todotxt.com/
Todo.txt was my solution. One format many programs, plain text and easy to write your own program if needed. After jumping around tomboy, conboy, gnuboy xjoural and others i have beeb with this 6 months and happy.
--
Enviado desde mi teléfono con K-9 Mail.
I am a member!
could you post a link on this Org syntax? sounds very interesting!
There's a manual on Org mode, which is software used in Emacs. This manual describes the Org syntax, along with how to use Org mode.
I've mostly learned the syntax by just seeing it used. Here's how it looks:
* Section Title
You write some text. You may indent the text
with two spaces, if it look good to you. I do
it like this.
The line "* Section Title" may be showed in a
different color, if your editor knows the Org
syntax. GNU Emacs can collapse (hide) sections,
by pressing TAB on them.
** Subsection Title
This is text is within a subsection - a section
within a section.
I made the lines shorter in ordred to fit the
Trisquel forums.
* Lists
** Types
You can do:
* Ordered lists:
1. Using 1., 2. and so on.
2. Using 1), 2) and so on.
* Unordered lists:
+ Using "*"
+ Using "+"
+ Using "-"
Org mode can automatically order numbers in
ordered lists. It can also change the list type
with a key stroke.
** Spacing
When list items span multiple lines, you may
want to put empty lines between the items:
+ In lists, when you have really long lines,
you may want to write them like this.
+ Then follow them with another multiline text
block. Maybe with several sentences.
+ GNU Emacs will align things itself, but in
other editor you may have to do it yourself.
* Tables
Tables can be written like this:
| Text 1 | Text 2 | Nums |
|-----------+-----------+------|
| Some data | More data | 51 |
| Also data | | 51 |
| N/A | N/A | |
There's also syntax for table calculations, but
that's for some other time.
Org mode will can do calculations, put table
spacing, and make rows and columns.
* Other stuff
You can also do links, footnotes, definition
lists, tags, TODO items, metadata and other
things. You can make emphasis, like *bold* and
/italic/, _underlined_ and others.
An editor which understands the syntax will
display things in different styles. But even
when an editor to doesn't understand the syntax,
the text it's still very easy to read and
understand.
The Org mode manual is at http://orgmode.org/manual/.
You can look at some of the Org files I've made to see how I write them. Here are some of them:
- http://www.libtec.org/dev/notebooks/gpg.org
- http://www.libtec.org/dev/notebooks/hardware.org
- http://www.libtec.org/dev/notebooks/coding/javascript.org
- http://www.libtec.org/dev/notebooks/coding/c.org
- http://www.libtec.org/dev/notebooks/mercurial.org
- http://www.libtec.org/dev/notebooks/gnu/graphics.org
GNOME Panel Sticky Notes? If you are using GNOME, Alt+Right Click (Super+Alt+Right Click in Compiz, the super key usually has a Windows logo on it) on the panel, find Sticky Notes, then press Add.
I am a member!
Also, there's a notion of 'binders' which lets you group a bunch of files and easily make references among them. I think there's an available gedit plugin for easily turning markdown files into html, pdf, etc...
Could you expand on this notion of binders?