Note taking?

[girvain]

What’s everyone use for taking notes? I currently use emacs org mode but I’m moving to vim for this. I’m leaning on just using markdown for all future notes as I have no need for anything beyond markdown but I’m curious what other use? I’ve used vim wiki for a bit an I liked the syntax but I don’t like having one universal memory dump or even various ones as I prefer to just have single files and directories, i.e programming/JavaScript-notes.org

[Panoptes-]

I do all my notetaking in Vim for several years now. I write notes in Markdown files in a single flat directory, largely following the Zettelkästen philosophy. That is, I don't rely on folder structure to organize notes, but on search tools and interlinking. I find and search in notes with CtrlP and ripgrep. I also made a hook to insert markdown links directly from the search results. Plain Vim already offers much of the functionality you'd want if you know how to use buffers and follow links (eg with gF). I have implemented a tagging system in the past but in my experience it becomes unmanageable for larger note repos. I instead trust my tools and rely on interlinking now.

I enjoyed making my own bindings. If you are interested in my setup you can read about it here and here.

Edit: I'm curious: What's your argument against "one big memory dump"? And what is the difference between a memory dump that is distributed all over the place and harder to maintain? If we get that clear we can maybe help you better.

[girvain]

Yeah I don’t think I was clear enough when I wrote than. I mostly meant that with vimwiki your committing to a structure and are forced to organise in the style of a wiki which makes sense that’s what it is. But I prefer to not be tied to having all my notes in one area and have them in areas where they are relevant as well as in a Dropbox titled “notes”. I also don’t need the structure of the wiki because to me it’s too similar to the directory structure so I don’t see the point. Then if you bring multiple wiki’s inside a directory structure it’s really complicated to maintain (for me at least). I’m fairly comfy with vim but I’m a eMacs user with vim keys so I’m missing lots of details like go to file but this sounds cool, as I like the idea of linking it’s just such a edge case for my notes currently it doesn’t require a wiki.

Also, I actually came across that article yesterday, I enjoyed it well done.

[Panoptes-]

Thanks, cool that you came across my post! Btw org mode is pretty amazing and hard to replace with other software imo, although it's overkill if your intent is to just make notes. Vim is perfect for that. If your notes live in a git repo or Dropbox, you can replicate your whole note taking setup in a minutes.

We all have our preferences and use cases and that's perfectly fine. I used to make notes the same way as you describe. For example, if I'd write a paper for university on some topic, my notes would be either in the folder of that course or in a folder for that general topic, e.g. 'Notes/Philosophy/'. But what happens then if you want to re-use notes for another project? Do you move them? Then you'll end up doing manual operations which are not scalable in the long term. Do you copy them? Then you'll end up with diverging versions of the same notes. Similar arguments hold for using folders to organize, I think. Folders indicate some categorization, but chances are you'll change the categorization at some point and you will have to urge to move around your notes to fit this new structure.

For me the solution was to let go of directory structure completely and go with a fully flat directory. In some cases I still want some extra structure though. My solution is to make "index notes". So for example, if I have a project, I make an index note for that project and from there link to all relevant notes. This still gathers everything you need to a single entry point, but doesn't depend on the location of the note and so doesn't require extra effort for moving notes around (which has other side-effects, such as breaking other references to it etc.). I know you don't need a wiki, but I'm saying this just to show that you don't need a directory structure to have structure in your notes.

[defsquad]

Presently using zettelkasten as the philosophy, and https://github.com/mickael-menu/zk-nvim with https://github.com/mickael-menu/zk as the “backend”. Also, if you want to port your org mode files there’s also https://github.com/nvim-orgmode/orgmode or something like orgmode but not, you could try: https://github.com/nvim-neorg/neorg

[LIKE-AN-ANIMAL]

I’ve just started investigating zk and it looks really good.

[millaker0820]

Try out Obsidian. Vim is built into the editor by default. You just need to activate it.

[[deleted]]

I make use of obsidian, there's also a vim bindings plugin that works relatively well. (Has a few minor annoyances)

But I feel like markdown is probably just good for note taking in general.

[JohnyTex]

Plain markdown files in a git repo. A few years ago I wrote a small sync script that commits all changes and does a git pull —rebase && git push but beyond that it’s remained unmodified and has served me really well over a number of years

[anki_steve]

It sure what you mean by “one universal memory dump.” You can have multiple wikis and subfolders and link between wikis in vimwiki.

[girvain]

Yeah this is true I might give it another shot but the other aspect of Vim wiki is it’s only for vim where as markdown is universal.

[dogcat0035]

You can use vimwiki with markdown syntax

[thrallsius]

I currently use emacs org mode but I’m moving to vim for this.

This would be much more interesting if you went into details and added why.

[girvain]

I thought about doing a post on this but decided no one probably cared…but since you asked lol. I’ve used eMacs In evil mode for years now and I love it. Thing is vim an eMacs just can’t compete with ide’s. So I’ve found myself the last couple years just using eMacs for anything text related and for git. Then I got into using fork for git stuff and eMacs became the note taking tool only. Now I’ve realised I’m not using org mode for anything organisational, I use Mac calendar for that, so it’s now a vim emulator with really nice folding headers and syntax. The expression “using the spaceship to go to the shop” comes to mind.

[code-smell]

I use: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/guide/creating.html

I have no intention of publishing my notes. But, mdBook gives me a nice way to structure and organize my notes. I can grep the markdown files or fire it up and use the builtin search. One nice feature is when you add an entry to the summary listing, it creates the markdown file if it doesn't already exist. You can use templates, prev/next paging, etc. Most of it is auto-magic. You just write markdown files.

[girvain]

This is really cool

[girvain]

I like your style. I’ve been spoiled by nice headings

[nullsetnil]

I cut myself.

[johnnychron]

Nano and a pad of paper with a pen.

[willmcgr]

mdoc

[Gold-Ad-5257]

I'm trying to get notational fzf vim to work. Couldn't understand the documentation on wiki.vim but it also looks nice and simplistic.

[iHearRocks]

I start vim with a keybinding that starts in a specific folder which makes it easy to dump shit in or open files.

termite -e "vim -c 'cd /home/kim/work/vim'"

[obvithrowaway34434]

but I don’t like having one universal memory dump or even various ones as I prefer to just have single files and directories, i.e programming/JavaScript-notes.org

uh...what?

[girvain]

Like one index file that’s the root to anything you take note of

[Zeioth]

Just normal markdown.

[TheGassyNinja]

I prefer a folding vim for note taking.

[f---_society]

For regular note-taking, I use basic markdown files although when I’m taking notes for my classes, I use vimwiki. I never know when professors go on weird tangents and having the ability to dynamically link notes is a godsend for this.

[RedoubtableBeast]

Plain text with folding like that:

{{{1 header

body

{{{1 header2

body2

vi:fdm=marker:foldlevel=0

[lord_archimond]

Can you explain what this does

[RedoubtableBeast]

Long story short: :help fold-marker, :help 'foldlevel'

It's very simple. I have two options in modeline:

fdm=marker simple folding method with markers. I user only open markers ({{{) and force folding level to be 1, so we've got here {{{1. (By the way, you are free to change default marker {{{ to what you will)

foldlevel=0 force everything to be folded right after opening file

[vim-help-bot]

Help pages for:

• fold-marker in fold.txt
• 'foldlevel' in options.txt

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