My General Philosophy on Notetaking
I'm the kind of person who writes things down all over the place. I'll take a note on my phone, or spend a special day journaling on a legal pad, or make a voice note to myself about a movie which I later convert into a letterboxd review. Essentially, I write first, and organizer later (if at all). The goal of my notes is to increase my output, not to spend time thinking about how to organize it.
So really, I rate how ‘good’ a tool is by how much it gets me creating. A tool that automates organization for me is all the better. I can type faster than I can handwrite, so I usually favor typing. Though handwriting and doodling can help make more memorable and fun notes for me.
Tools I currently use
Trilium (Lots of use)
It's very good for my use case, and I really like it. See Do I Like the Notetaking Program TriliumNext? (Yes)
Google Keep (Moderate usage, mostly only on phone)
My primary way of keeping notes on my phone, for things like shopping lists, voice notes, and other one-offs. It's also just easier when I have to quickly type something. It's essentially a glorified sticky notes app.
I don't write substantial stuff on here (remember, I'm typing on my phone). Although it does have almost perfect voice dictation tool. The only problem with dication is that it'll stop and save if you stop talking for more than 2 seconds (I use recorder instead, see below).
If I want to get the note into trilium after, I use trilium sender. It creates a child note under your daily trilium note from whatever you shared.
A weakness of keep is that the organizational tooling isn't that great. There's search, basic tagging, and custom note colors, but there's not much else.
Now I'm remembering I've used keep since about 2014(?). It used to be my primary way of doing everything because it worked well on my phone and desktop / laptop. It was okay but has a lot of organizatonal shortcomings if it's your only way of notetaking. And it was totally not extensible as there wasn't even an api you could use.
Overall, it's not the best if it's your only notetaking tool, but it's good for jotting stuff down on the go.
Recorder (By Google) (Occasionally)
Good for voice notes on android. It auto-creates a transcription as you talk. I'm sure there are other tools like this one.
Methods I Used to Use
Raw markdown file
I used a homemade note.py command which appended to a long single file named like 2022.md with a header of the current day like ### 2022-01-01 Sat type stuff. Running note.py in my terminal would then open my editor at the bottom of that long file and I would write whatever. It also ran a sync.sh script upon closing which uploaded the folder to a private git repo. This let me read notes from my phone through github
I actually used this method from late 2020 → late 2023, so it had a good run and I got a lot written down in it.
Advantages
- Very fast to open a new note
- Fun to type notes in nvim
- Extensible with tooling. I made a movie review template inside of it (video demo).
Disadvantadges
- Syncing is only possible with exetrnal tools like syncthing or some git auto sync to private repo thing
- No way to take notes from phone.
- No way to make some note public without making every node public.
Boox Note Air 2
Fun for drawing, but now I just use it for reading ebooks. If you really like drawing / handwriting you could go for some tablet.
https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
This one was kind of similar to my note.py idea but it all happened in vscode. It was pretty cool and certainly gave me ideas about what I wanted from my notetaking going forward. But it basically had all the shortcomings of the raw markdown file problems.
Obsidian
I tried it but I didn't much like the interface. And you had to pay for the official sync service. There is, however, a rich ecosystem around it due to its popularity.