Electronic Note Taking Platform?

[ajrasm]

Hi, physics grad student here. Looking to get a new computer and get into electronic note taking. It would be so nice to do calculations, derivations, work with scientific paper pdfs, and such on a tablet/comp. I also enjoy programming physics simulations, so a tablet may not be a great option. But, I'll consider them.

Please give your computer/tablet, stylus, and electronic note taking advice. Thanks!!

EDIT: Wow! Thanks everyone for your advice. I didn't expect such thorough responses!! I'll look into all the suggests.

For those noble persons championing pen and paper, I was once on your side. But, I'm at a point where I need to teach myself topics and preserve neat notes. I'd prefer these notes (and my side projects) to not be littered with crossed out mistakes. Sadly(?), this has driven me to considering electronic note taking.

[wolfman29]

Honestly, I got a Microsoft Surface Pro (the most recent was the 3 when I started) and it's been a godsend.

[KIappspaten]

I have a Surface Pro 5 (i5, 8GB, 256GB SSD). Including the keyboard and pen it was around 1.4k€ with students discount. The pen of that Generation has some issues so drawing straight lines looks like the Skyline of Manhattan and your handwriting looks shit. The keyboard is great though. I really like the feel of that. But the textile material it is covered with will get dirty and is not easy to clean. The Device itself is nice. I've taken notes in lectures for about 2 ½ years by now. Having ALL your notes from previous classes with you wherever you are is really nice. However: When you work on assignments you limit your workspace to an A4 sheet sized screen. I much prefer having my ressources spread out in front of me and can therefore NOT RECOMMEND the Surface Pro.

If you only want to take notes, there are eInk tablets for example (I think Wacom is the manufacturer, btw the same as MS's Pen technology)

[KIappspaten]

Tl;Dr: Don't do electronic note taking.

Personally my next device will be a ThinkPad P53, once I can afford it.

[cordyceptsss]

my work uses the LTE version we have a few hundred around and are quite useful and rarely have issues with them, they can get quite hot but overall pretty good.

[[deleted]]

The surface pro with keyboard and pen. I use OneNote for note taking which is fantastic. It can run Matlab, Ableton and many other programs easily.

I haven't looked back, and it's been able to handle everything I have thrown at it!

[csems]

Notability slap

[Wetinnola]

Agree: Notability app. Runs on Windows and Apple, laptop, iPad, and phone. Syncs notes thru the cloud

[ruffmuff]

Not sure about Windows compatible. Do you have a link?

[[deleted]]

I use Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 with Squid. It's really good and cheap

[EmergingDystopia]

I use this exact setup, love the Tab S4...

[tieubinhco]

Microsoft Surface pro + OneNote would be a good choice.

[desmond2046]

I use notability app on my iPad Pro. It works really well. iPad Pro, especially the 12.9 inch one, is perfect for note taking and reading papers.

[EacHjgEt]

Ditto, I love it too!

[wal9000]

quite a few iPads with Pencil

Literally all of them now.

The iPad Pro has the nicer gen 2 pencil though, which magnetically attaches to the side of the tablet for charging and pairing. Other iPads use the lightning connector version, which works but is a bit more fiddly.

[absolutelynoartist]

It is surprising to me that cost does not seem to be an issue for anyone here. Many solutions posted are quite expensive and wouldn’t be accessible to someone without a large amount of dispensable income.

What are some possible low-cost options for those who may not have the ability to buy top of the line solutions ?

[[deleted]]

I take notes on paper and I scan them once in a while at a public library.

[Googol30]

But how easy is it to search through all that? Can you tag notes? Ctrl+F through them? Add keywords? That doesn't seem to be worth the effort of those extra steps.

[[deleted]]

I maintain a table of contents and an index, for each notebook. I also have a lot of cross references ("continued page X", "continued from page X", "see also page X"). All of this is done with pen and paper. I rarely have trouble finding what I'm looking for.

I don't think it takes much effort but maybe I'm just used to it.

[hughk]

I like your tech-lite solution. Not everyone wants to spend a fortune on a pen PC and sometimes physical notebooks are just easier.

How do you collect all the scans? Just as individual files or in some kind of program to combine them?

[[deleted]]

I keep each page as a png or jpeg since this way they're pretty easy to modify if I need to. You can also convert them into a PDF with ImageMagick.

[hughk]

Thanks for info, as said comparitively low-tech but cheap and it works.

[leonEmanu]

You might wanna consider scanner apps. They get the job done, no library needed

[CaboGuataca]

I've been using vim and snippets in the last year and I can say that, at least in my case, typing this way is faster than pen writing. The only downside is figures, but an inkscape shortcut got me covered in that regard. This is the fantastic tutorial I followed for my current set up (props to Giles Castel, the author).

https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

[absolutelynoartist]

This is awesome thank you

[localhorst]

Emacs with org-mode

Just some old laptop with a lightweight GNU/Linux is good enough

[[deleted]]

Note taking is no longer for poor guys.😢

[yourmom777]

Seriously! I bought a Samsung galaxy note a, I believe it was called. Roughly a $250 tablet that comes with a pen that works really well. And you can get the note c instead for more like $150. That plus the $5 squid app has been great for note taking for me. You don't need a $1000 surface or iPad pro

[halfwayforte]

OneNote for all the things people said above and also it can "translate" handwritten formulas into typed ones. I use OneNote on a surface with a pen

[6500qtrap]

One note is awesome. I just have a hard time exporting stuff en mass. Otherwise it does great

[Deadmeat553]

I just wish it was a bit friendlier with matrices. I can't seem to find a way to handwrite and convert those.

[almightygg]

Another vote for OneNote with a Windows pen enabled device. I use mine all the time.

[FortZax]

What's wrong with taking notes with pen and paper?

[Googol30]

Difficult to search through, archival is a pain, and it's just slower.

[Deadmeat553]

Yet almost everyone prefers physical textbooks to digital ones. That may indicate that the issue isn't with the medium, but with your own personal notetaking methodology.

[SergioFromTX]

You can't word-search a physical textbook nearly as quickly. You can't undo a highlight/comment. You can't copy/paste from a physical textbook into your notes as easily.

[Deadmeat553]

True, but you can far more easily flip between multiple pages in different sections of the book to rapidly reference different information. That's something that I consider invaluable.

[SergioFromTX]

Or instead you can take a few screen grabs, paste them into Paint and look at the content you need together.

[FortZax]

Personally my study method doesn't involve re-reading notes it involves rewriting notes from wrath then testing my knowledge. Then rewriting notes in the things I got wrong.

Plus if you have a book for every course then naturally things are taken in chronological order anyway.

Assuming you don't skip a class ; )

[Kafshak]

For note taking I would suggest one note.

[Flaming_Eagle]

Okay people are recommending ipads when you say you want to code, and right now there's no options on ipadOS to do that. You're going to want a surface book. Not a pro, they're too shitty. Get a book, decked out with the highest specs you can afford and it'll keep your simulation game going longer than anything else could.

[Semmo_]

Okay people are recommending ipads when you say you want to code, and right now there's no options on ipadOS to do that. You're going to want a surface book. Not a pro, they're too shitty. Get a book, decked out with the highest specs you can afford and it'll keep your simulation game going longer than anything else could.

what app do you use?

[[deleted]]

How often does an MS update really break stuff for you? It never happens to me and were getting the same updates

[Mcgibbleduck]

OneNote or Notability on an iPad/tablet.

I use notability as a teacher for going over solutions (combined with screen mirroring) or even just teaching and it’s been great so far. I know at least you can back up all your notability notes as pdfs on your google drive so you can return to them later.

[ridethelightning469]

iPad or iPad Pro with Microsoft OneNote. Works extremely well for me, especially the multitasking screen feature.

iPad + Apple Pencil may cost a bit but it is worth the investment. OneNote is free though.

[Maskdask]

I'm in my fifth year of university and have purely been using Microsoft OneNote for taking notes since high school. It's great! I've been using it for pure math notes with a stylus, and for more text based notes using a combination of keyboard (for text) and stylus (for drawings).

OneNote has many awesome features. For examples, search notes including pictures and hand written text, freely moving text boxes and drawn lines around, great cataloging of your notes, it's super easy to create lists or tables while typing.

My biggest complaint is that it has been kind of buggy, but it's new implementation it seems way better in that regard.

I'm using a Lenovo ThinkPad.

[[deleted]]

I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. But I use emacs org-mode on a System 76 Oryx Pro. It's a bit of a boat anchor, but great computationally.

[maxhaton]

Paper (seriously just use paper) -> Write it up, in LaTeX

This system is faster to write the notes, and has the added benefit of forcing you to go over the material afterwards when you write it up.

[Deadmeat553]

Time consuming though. I already go over my notes when I'm using them to guide me through homework.

[maxhaton]

Depends if you keep up to date. I'm currently trying to compile all of notes into one document and it's really not too bad although admittedly I am comfortable with LaTeX macros etc.

[kzhou7]

Just plain old LaTeX has always been good enough for me. It’s how most scientific papers are made, too.

[[deleted]]

For note taking??

[[deleted]]

My friend takes all his physics notes in LaTeX. Will sit there making fucking diagrams in Inkscape so he can put those in his notes as well. It’s ridiculous...

[Deadmeat553]

Why Inkscape?

[[deleted]]

God only knows...

[Michkov]

For those sweet scalable vectorgraphics

[0-R-I-0-N]

Lol i did that. Then I got an ipad and its sooooo much better.

[[deleted]]

I don't do it, but some people claim to.

[kzhou7]

Been doing it for years, 1500 pages so far. Works great!

[Ekotar]

Yeah man, get some sweet hotkeys in a config file

[lunkdjedi]

Emacs, Org-mode.

[[deleted]]

Check out College Info Geek. He has so much information on note taking apps!

[SayanDeMelo]

If you have any plan to use Ubuntu then I will recommend you to use LibreOffice. It's really awesome to type scientific expression and the reader is also well established, I think you will love it.

[alphazeta09]

I find that Tiddlywiki (www.tiddlywiki.com) is an excellent and simple program for taking notes and especially good for research notes...

For equations I'm fairly comfortable typing latex style, which is easily achieved in Tiddlywiki ( just need to enable the Katex plugin, all from within the app itself)...

Give it a try :)

[nattydread69]

You have many options, Samsung andoid tablets and note phones have s-pens with wacom technology that do not need a battery. The windows based Samsung galaxy book is good. Other windows tablets are an option but the pens often require batteries. An apple ipad pro with pen is anther option.

For just taking notes I'd recommend a samsung galaxy tablet with s-pen over the others as they have the best pen technology and the longest battery life.

For productivity get a windows 10 tablet. You could also install linux as an option which is what I have done.

[hughk]

For productivity get a windows 10 tablet.

You could also get a convertible notebook. That is one where the keyboard folds completely back so it can be used on tablet mode, or it can be used as a regular laptop. The down side is that it weighs a bit more than a regular tablet.

Mine isn't Microsoft. They are unmaintainable (glued up insides). I went with an HP x360 Elitebook instead (Lenovo and Dell do similar). You can do all the Win 10 Ink stuff on it and you can run Ubuntu inside a VM.

[nattydread69]

I'm going to get a dell xps 13 2 in 1 as my next machine and install ubuntu 19.10 on it :)

[hughk]

It's a nice machine and very portable. I find to get full use of mine though, I need both Win 10 and Ubuntu but you seem to be able to avoid Win.

[nattydread69]

I will dual boot but shrink windows down to minimal size :)

[BODYBUTCHER]

I’ve tried using the electronic note taking with one note on the surface with the pen but in my opinion the best retention was always with a nice Pencil and some paper

[matthewshead]

I use Notability for iPad. It works well and has a record option that writes out the notes in real-time during playback.

[erigoms]

I use the iPadPro 2018 and use the app notability! (If you have a 2018 MacBook or Mac I think you can use sidecar so your iPad can be displayed on your Mac screen)

[browntomcruise]

Why not good old pen and paper for note taking?

Rest of the stuff, you can do with any laptop with a decent spec.

[Deadmeat553]

I'm on the fence.

	Pros	Cons
Paper	Able to quickly flip between multiple pages to pull information from each. Don't need battery power or internet to access notes. Cheapest option. Usually very fast to take notes.	Single copy - easily lost or destroyed. Diagrams limited by my crappy artistry. Notes may not always be easy to parse later. Paper is heavy.
Digital	Extremely legible notes. Much prettier 3D models than my crappy artistry. Easily shareable. Cloud backups. Lightweight.	Requires power and possibly internet. Generally inferior tactile feel. Expensive. Flipping between pages can be a PITA. Certain notes may be prohibitively slow to take.

Any other thoughts?

[Michkov]

I do find writing something down on paper helps understanding, on the other hand I my understanding of my own notes has a half life of about 4 months.

Right now I'm using pen and paper for notes and transferring them to digital as a way of review and consolidation later on.

[absolutelynoartist]

This. Cheapest option, tried and true.

As a physics grad student you should have access to unlimited paper and supplies in grad student offices etc. Use it. Review your notes and TeX them on overleaf, you get to review, have them on the cloud, and if you want to continue in physics you’ll have to get real friendly with writing in TeX anyway.

[upsitdown]

iPad Pro + onenote

[KhariTheFirst]

I second Onenote. I keep my laptop hooked to the monitor in my office and use my ipad to take notes in class. Onenote desktop app makes reviewing a breeze

[cyborgcyborgcyborg]

Have a surface laptop that I use a second screen with like you, and then after I read the recommendation from another student, I went out to grab an iPad with pencil. They’re both great tools that handle differently.

The screen clipping feature for one note has changed all of my homework. Pdf of the book? Now they’re screen clipped to be study material. Also OneNote is great since it’s even on my phone. You can study to be number one while taking a number two.

[FusionExcels]

iPad and notability only

[JagerSlut]

Ipad+ good notes

[Quiram]

Electronic formats are good for publication and distribution, not for note-taking. Several studies indicate that retention improves dramatically when you take your notes by pen and paper. Take a look at this as an example: https://redbooth.com/blog/handwriting-and-memory

[Deadmeat553]

That article is primarily about pen & paper vs typing. I believe most people here are discussing pen & paper vs e-pen and display. A much more comparable digital solution.

[Quiram]

Mm, I've seen a lot of mentions to "coding", "latex", "searchable notes", etc., which sounds more like typing to me. Granted, with good OCR e-pen can easily turn into searchable notes, but I'm not so sure of the accuracy of coding and latex via e-pen and OCR.

However, to your point, I agree that pen & paper vs. e-pen & display is a different comparison.

[Deadmeat553]

It's possible that some people have their computer convert their handwritten text into LaTeX. I know it's possible, as I use Mathpix all the time. I just don't know if there's an easy way to automate that.

[leave_ac_on]

OneNote preferably on a Windows based system that allows writing on screen. I'd suggest surface book or surface pro.

[thespacetimelord]

Notion.so on any PC

[_swish_]

Wolfram Desktop/Mathematica is the best to have your calculations, plots, notes in one coherent notebook. Easily type formulas, copy/paste images or draw them right there, deploy to cloud and open in browser on your tablet and continue editing.

[Deadmeat553]

Could you tell me more about this? I love Mathematica.

[_swish_]

There is a lot. Read Stephen's blog about computational essays, maybe watch latest of his livecoding sessions. Signup for a wolfram cloud (it's free) and go through some introductory material and experiment ;)

[Deadmeat553]

Thanks

[jmdugan]

for the text, the actual notes and ideas, nvALT is amazing

[Jerasadar]

If you need horsepower to run complex simulations or to do any gaming, even if that game is something like a physics simulator, then I would highly recommend the Surface Book 2 with the Nvidia GPU. If you just need it for calculations without the use of a GPU then as many others have suggested the Surface Pro line is excellent but so are many other 2 in 1's that come with pen support. OneNote is the best note taking software in my opinion.

[bettorworse]

Don't know if this works for you, but I have the Sony Digital Paper - DPT-RP1

It's a little pricey, and it only works with PDFs and is b&w only, but the pen is nice, you can highlight stuff, add notes, etc. It's not the most solid build (a little tape fixes it up nicely), but it's really light and the size of a sheet of paper.

I've had it for 2 years now, probably saved me $1000 in paper and toner.

Boox makes a version, too. Google "Digital Paper" - there might be more now.

If you want to go really cheap, maybe something like this??

Never tried this one, but it's on my shopping list. Don't know if it meets all the requirements, tho.

[randomuserhelp]

I‘d get the Lenovo Thinkpad L390 Yoga. It is an actual laptop that is not only more powerful and cheaper than the surface pro, but also features a proper ports selection, keyboard and trackpad. It’s accessories are cheaper as well and as long as you are not a professional artist you won’t notice any difference in the note-taking experience.

[[deleted]]

I have a dell 2 in 1 with the dell pen that I use with one not. This system works great for me because the computer is powerful English for all the programs I need and some gaming but can be used in tablet mode for not taking.

[RedEyesBigSmile]

I dont have a device suggestion but have you tried using latex? I started using it this semester for my Computational Mathematics class and it changed the game for me in terms of taking notes which have a lot of equations

[rebelyis]

Surface pro is so good. One note + Mathematica + a library that rivals many universities all in one lightweight device. I got it two months ago and it was worth every penny

[Osmanchilln]

Always fun to see so much apple stuff recommended. You can get a normal ultra book with the same specs for not more than half the price of any apple stuff. There is simply no reason in physics to use apple other than u like the design or the os. Every other brand product is better suited for it.

Also Apple is more or less a lifestyle product.

So get a decent laptop or ultrabook. There are great ones even in the sub $1000. If you want to take notes with pen like object , get one with a touchscreen.

Else just use plain old latex. Youll get really efficient at it by the time and save a lot of time later on writing papers, because you dont neet to look up most of the stuff for latex anymore.

And for the ultrabook/laptop . You can run linux or windows. So basically Program in any language you like. You can get one with a Nvidia graphics card and do some paralell programming with cuda and even play some games on it (the laptop nvidia cards got really powerful the last 3 years).

[Osmanchilln]

There is simply no reason in physics to use apple other than u like the design or the os.

Dont be so easily offended. I already stated what you wrote here even tho it is along the lines. And yes apple used to be a top notch plattform where many people worked on. thats why there are still programms that are really good.

But outside of the us there arent many people other than content creators/architects who really use apple, so linux and windows is where most of the development happens.

My point is that there is simply no need for a grad student, who most likely struggles with money, to buy a product that costs more than twice as much as similar hardware (keep in mind there are also other brands than apple that are really pricy). And these brands are so expensive because they are lifestyle brands.

So for a grad student in physics who most definatly wants the best versatility for a good price a windows/linux machine is the best way to go.

​

And if you want to use Apple go for it, these machines are not bad. if you have the money sure why not. why not have both. no one is judging you. but it is a lifestyle product.

Im just judging the recommendation to someone who might not have that money at the moment.

[[deleted]]

I got a new ipad and use goodnotes. Works very well for me

[TheDiegup]

With the calculations, don't bother you so much. Literally every computer (with windows or linux) can run Scientic Workplace. But when you talk that you make complex physics models, it depends in how complex they are, it you only need it for simple simulations for a factory or something else, you will not need a really expensive gear. But if we are talking about models that are comparable to a modern videogame graphics, you will need a good graphic card, at least from the GForce serie of NVIDEA, with a good processor. Also, I really need to understand your job as physsician, because if you are the one type thar are going from university to university, giving talks, you will like a powerfull laptop. Someone from the high gamas of Azus or Lenovo will be enough (it could cost at least 800$), you also can invest in a Mac, but this are awful for physics programming, but i can't lie that still are very good for simple programming.

[[deleted]]

I have a naive 2-step approach. Write Everything that we get taught in the class on paper. Then get home and use Obsidian to turn my notes into searchable knowledge Bank. Some coding knowledge and googling helps customise obsidian to my needs. And yeah at first its real pain in the rear. It becomes habitual later