how-i-organize-my-notes-with-apps.md

description
Describes how I take, store, and edit various notes.

📝 Organizing Notes

Requirements

Data should be easily updatable (this is the input) & easily accessible (this is the output). Currently, my notes are stored on a GitHub repo. That means:

Easily Accessible

This can be broken into 2 scenarios, depending on sensitivity of data.

Insensible notes should be searchable online

To have them easily accessible, I want them to be full-text-indexed and searchable.

• I want the insensitive data to be searchable online, so that I can have access to my notes without access to my computers.
  • Existing solutions: Are there any? What are they? How good are they?
    • GitBook (Figure 1)
      • pros:
        • Has URL form -- e.g. https://tslmy.gitbook.io/k/?q=typora would give you search results in my Wiki with the keyword "typora".
      • cons:
        • Search is dynamically loaded -- slow to render.
        • An online service -- does not work offline.
    • GitHub (Figure 2)
      • pros:
        • Has URL form -- e.g. https://github.com/tslmy/know/search?q=typora&unscoped_q=typora would give you search results in my Wiki with the keyword "typora".
        • Statistically loaded -- renders faster than GitBook.
      • cons:
        • An online service -- does not work offline.

Sensitive data to be kept offline and still searchable

• Existing solutions: Are there any? What are they? How good are they?
  • OneNote / EverNote / Notability
    • pros
      • robust functionalities
    • cons
      • walled gardens
  • macOS Spotlight
    • pros
      • really easy access -- integrated with the OS
    • cons
      • does not support notes in walled gardens (not even Zotero references)
      • not portable -- different OSes offer incoherent experiences. This actually resembles the "walled garden" critique from the previous option.
  • command-line tools
    • resources
      • features comparison of several CLI regexp search tools: here
      • speed comparison of ~~~~: here
    • Looks like the best choice is ripgrep .
      • Need to do:
        • auto-exporting data from all sources to plain text and save locally.
      • pros
      • cons

Easily Updatable

The best option for now I've found is GitBook. It's got a decent webUI editor (although it has a list of quirks -- see below -- and is slow on an old computer), syncs to your GitHub, and its syntax is interoperable with Markdown.

List of quirks of GitBook:

• aggressive undoing
• when you copy something from a list and paste it somewhere else, the whole list indention builds up again. e.g., if you copied some text from a 3rd-level nested list and past it on a 2nd, you will get a 5th-level result.

TODO: This section needs expansion.

Solutions

Stick with GitBook for adding & updating public notes. TODO:

• Find a way to auto-update local copy of GitBook notes.
• Validate that I can conveniently search locally all my notes (that means private notes as local md files + public notes from GitBook) with ripgrep.
• Add a custom search engine to my Chrome that searches the GitHub repo directly.

(Deprecated) How Notes & Writings Can Be Categorized

Type	Updatable?	How Refined?	Can Made Public?	How valuable to others?
Diary	Never	-2	N	0
Personal Journal	Daily	-3	N	0
Credentials / Passwords	At times	N/A	N	3
Academic papers	Never	3	Y	3
Various Essays	Never	2	Y	2
Quick Notes	Seldom	-1	N	1
Reviews / Summaries	Maybe	1	Y	2
Web Clippings	Never	N/A	N/A	1
Translations / Transcripts	Never	3	Y	2

• N/A means "not my own work, thus does not apply."
• Numbers are on a 7-point scale.

How I Allocate Apps to Different Note-taking Purposes

Crossed-outs are what I used to use but moved away from (due to death of product, etc.).

Note-taking and Storage

• Course notes / meeting notes that better be hand-drawn: Notability (iPad)
• Diary, personal journal: Day One OneNote
• Course reviews and summaries: Evernote Notability, course-specific folders, and -- in cases that the notes may be shared -- my academic website.
• Scribbles, jots, etc.: A folder full of plain text/markdown files.
  • Synced with Simplenote Dropbox.
  • Read with Notational Velocity, nvALT fsNotes.

Editors and Word Processors

• Coding/writing temporarily - Sublime Text
• Quickly generating PDFs from Markdown - Mou Typora
• Academic writing (essay, things with a formula/equation, etc.) - LyX
• For language-checking - Hemingway Editor + SlickWrite
• Mind-mapping - MindNode
• (Math stuff excluded)
• (Office suites excluded)
• (Reminder and Calendar excluded)
• (Rare-format editors excluded)

Cloud Storages

• Mobile Syncing - Dropbox
• Google Office - Google Drive
• Microsoft Office - OneDrive
• Backup - Box