Hacker Remix

Ask HN: What note taking app do you guys using as a developer?

7 points by rahmansahinler1 1 day ago | 26 comments

As a developer building my own product, I take a lot of notes—code snippets, Linux commands, and general technical info. I've tried many apps, but none feel just right.

Here’s what I think a good note-taking app must have:

A note section where I can add text and images Easy organization with sections A quick search to find related notes A bonus would be the ability to retrieve answers from my notes.

Right now, I'm using MS OneNote, which works well for the first two. But as my notes grow, finding the right one becomes a challenge. Do you guys face the same issue? What methods or apps do you use?

3 hours ago

epirogov 5 hours ago

On Windows I have notepad++ for me and on Linux Kate is the best. I know, this just text editors but in a couple with Visual Code and annotation plugin to this is a scalable way to find needed Linux commands that works, categorize important notes :

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Artifici...

Previously I used OneNotes, but git is better to works from 5 my workstations with collisions.

mejutoco 1 day ago

Obsidian.

All markdown files that you control. You can always sync it with Dropbox or any other if you choose to. Markdown files will be readable forever, and it is free.

rahmansahinler1 23 hours ago

I will try Obisidian for sure. But can we interactively do something with taken notes, like dragging them etc?

CER10TY 16 hours ago

Late to the party, but there's a "canvas mode" in Obsidian where you can sort of group notes together and drag them around. Other than that, it's also got a graph view, so provided you tag and link notes properly, it will show you related notes in the graph.

mejutoco 23 hours ago

It is based on markdown files and you can link them by writing "[[my new note]]". It also supports tags etc, all text-based.

What is the purpose of the "dragging notes" flow you mention? I am sure it can be done in the text-first way that Obsidian uses.

blobfish01 23 hours ago

I evolved from pencil and paper, to text files, to minder. I stick to text and it works good for me. It is simple, fast to use, search works good, basic organization is there. Files are local and xml, so data is easy to extract if needed, backups and distribution are just file copy operations. https://github.com/phase1geo/Minder

I think it easy to get trapped by formatting and publishing. IMHO: Notes are fast and not pretty. If/when I come to the situation where I want to share, then formats like markdown or latex etc are a better fit. When I have to start 'coding' my notes, it becomes a time burden and I end up skipping it. In complicated situations, I will go the other extreme and fire up inkscape.