org mode

The best note taking tool is the one you use. Just use whatever works for you.

In practice, though, I find that the less I need to rely on proprietary software and services the better. They often create “lock-in” by using weird file formats or abstracting you away from the data entirely. I also don’t trust cloud services, especially proprietary ones, to keep data safe and secure. They disappear all the time.

My advice: store notes in plain text (.txt) files and use whatever organisation system or applications you like just with the files and folders. If you find you need something a bit more structured; check out markdown.

Plain text is good because it’s minimal, lightweight in terms of resources, and there are applications to interact with it on basically every platform for desktop and mobile. This means your notes become portable between systems and you can use whatever application(s) you want with the files. If you’re just starting out, I recommend a basic text editor with a good sidebar to navigate files. Pulsar is quite useful and user friendly especially for people just starting to migrate away from proprietary apps (even if I don’t like the underlying technology it’s built with). It is derived from the Atom text editor which was recently discontinued. It is free, and also open source and thus public property. On mobile, use whatever apps you like. I like Markor, for Android.

There are lots of ways to take notes and organise them using plain text files. I like to keep notes related to each other in the same file and then date them in reverse order, so the newest is first. Some people use “one big text file” for everything and just create a decent organisation structure within it for dividing up notes. Some people just create a new file for each note and name it with a good title. A good resource for all things plain text is The Plain text project. The author has ceased updating the blog because there’s not much more to add without repeating themselves, but it’s really a goldmine. Find whatever note taking system works for you. Need tags? Literally just write tags: a, b, c underneath a note’s title. For me, a combination of dates and tags helps me find things just using Ctrl + F in my text editor. If you go down the route of using dates in file names, I recommend writing the dates in the format of YYYY-MM-DD e.g. 2023-02-03. This means if you sort the files by name they’ll be in the correct date order.

For saving useful articles; honestly just hit Ctrl + S on your browser to save the article’s HTML file on your machine. Mileage may vary between sites depending on how they load content; if the content is loaded by JavaScript, the article content may not load on the file saved on your machine because it’s trying to run a script it doesn’t have access to. In these cases I recommend just copy/pasting the text into your text editor and saving the file. Links might need to be copied separately.

To sync and back up your machine; there are lots of cloud solutions and magic sync services like Dropbox (proprietary), Nextcloud (open source) etc. But I recommend not relying on this infrastructure being around forever. Get two or three cheap USB pens and regularly copy your entire notes/articles folders onto them. Alternatively, keep the main copy on a USB pen and regularly copy to different machines as well as back up to other USB pens.

I don’t generally need to sync notes between my main computer and my phone. I treat my phone’s notes as like a pocket notebook for snippets of stuff I can then return to look at later on my main computer. If you really need to sync between these, I am sure there are solutions out there. If you keep a backup of your notes folders on your phone, you may use whatever text editor app you’ve chosen to access them. I tend to do this just to create another backup, but treat the notes as “read only” because I don’t want to have to handle manually reconciling them. There are ways to do this using some software engineering tools but I am presuming from your question that you aren’t really exposed to these, and I think they’d confuse and irritate you if I introduced them in this reply.

I hope this has been helpful comrade, and happy note taking.

I really like keeping simple markdown files in organized folders, synced with syncthing to all my devices. You only have to set it up once, then you’re all good. Markdown is pretty versatile and fast… people even write books in markdown nowadays.

Markor for android is a good markdown editor, and Typora works for desktop (although typora isn’t open source unfortunately, and its a bloated javascript app, but it does work well).

For bookmarks / favorites, it really makes sense to keep them stored in a markdown file too, that way you can easily search for them and organize them under headings, and you’ll never lose them with any browser changes you do. Its annoying to have to load up a text editor, but at least you’ll always have those.

For habits, loop habit tracker for android is a good way to gradually build daily / weekly habits. Its based on that seinfeld “don’t break the chain” method.

For tasks / todos, the tasks.org app.

Everything I suggested above is open source, offline-capable, and secure. Using things like evernote, google, or dropbox means they’re aggregating that data.

If you need cloud syncing like Evernote, good alternatives are Notesnook or Obsidian. If you just need nice local (no cloud needs) note app for Android, Standard Notes or Joplin work fine.

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