Taking notes is a regular practice for many professions. I cannot imagine a computer-related work, especially programming and administrating, without taking notes.
Also, taking notes is a habit for some types of people. I’m one of them. I do take many notes throught my life, it took different forms and shapes, and here I want to analyse my evolution of note-taking by telling a story of how this system of mine evolved.
I feel that I can name it as the final iteration of this architecture.
I’m going to address the story chronologically.
Paper#
This story is mostly about software, but I’d like it to be complete, so it’s worth mention paper too.
In school, we’ve been taught to write and then take notes into paper notebooks. In my area those had 12 pages, A5 size.
We weren’t allowed to have some fancy ones for kids, instead we had boring very ugly soviet-style notebooks.
When I finished school and attended college and then university, nobody cared what medium we use for notes. So I bought myself just one A4-sized (twice bigger from A5) notebook for everything. I took all kind of notes there, regardless of whether it’s college-related or not.
I kept this habit of taking notes for a long time, leaving it behind about 10 years ago. Replacing it with digital notes only.
I don’t believe paper notes can be replaced by digital media completely, as it’s a very different experience and process. Yet, I believe most notes can be created in digital form only, and there’s no downside to that. I believe that can free the paper-noting for creativity, not technical notes.
Notepad#
By notepad, I mean pretty much notepad.exe from Windows.
I had two Windows at that time,
Paradoxically, I used notepad on my Windows Mobile smartphone more than I used it on Windows Desktop. But I did not use it much. It was just one *.txt file stored somewhere on the disk.
The smartphone was Motorola MPx200, and I had four of them. It’s a flip phone with no touch screen, so my notes were made using the 10-digits keyboard and T9. Typing was slow, yet I was able to type some things as notes.
I didn’t have any notes on my desktop computer, as far as I can remember.
- At that time, I had a popular online-blog (now gone), and I used it as a notepad sometimes.
- Also, later on, I used Google Notebook, but not heavily. It wasn’t present for too long.
Killed over 13 years ago, Google Notebook allowed users to save and organize clips of information while conducting research online. It was over 3 years old.
I don’t mention them separately, because I wasn’t a heavy user of Google Notebook, and the website part is reserved for the last, as the best.
Evernote#
Evernote came later, closer to the point in time, where I had my first iPhone and MacBook. It was one and only online note-taking tool that I used super-heavily, circa since 2009 till 2016.
I started using it on my Windows desktop, then my MacBook Pro, my iPhone, I had it everywhere. Technically, it was the best thing I used, possibly till these days.
I remember having these cool long conversations with one of my friends about this app only! We shared how we used the tool, and I remember his phrase that lies in me till today, that I’d like to avoid informational graveyard. ‘So you have to use tags heavily’ he would explain.
At some point it became an abomination and I stopped using it. It happened naturally, I just started using it less and less.
I still have thousands of notes as hostages there. I have no idea how to export it, as their client does not allow export of all my notes, only one-by-one and it’s deliberately hidden.
I tried to export them (through Notion), I tried to write heavy custom scripts, I almost written my own tool (with the help of ChatGPT and Google Gemini), but I gave up on that idea. This information have mostly no value for me now, to take this level of effort.
At this timeline, early 2025, I’d recommend avoid using this tool to anyone.
Just open their web client on your laptop, if it does not kill it, lucky you are!
These days, it’s a useless abomination at best. That is the tool that made me super disappointed once, and changed my approach to software, in a way.
Apple Notes#
Apple Notes came as a natural replacement to Evernote. They were lean and fast, and simple — too simple — and integrated into all the platforms I used those days.
I had only iPhones, MacBooks and desktops running macOS. Only one of my computers — at my mum’s — did not have Apple system on it. Basically because she never used it, and I was that infrequent visitor that Debian was enough for me.
Apple Notes turned out to be unreliable. Once we had this quest with my friends and workmates, across our travels through South-East Asia, we were sharing expenses by writing them down in plain text, and calculating them early.
It was like ‘Restaurant, 500 HKD, my part is X, N’s part is Y, V’s part is Z.’And this system could work, only if Apple Notes wasn’t too minimalistic. It would overwrite the note date the moment you touch it, even without any changes.
While it worked for us for a while, it was a disaster, when we needed to actually calculate those money spent by building some spreadsheet. We couldn’t generate the info. Sometimes, we forgot to enter the currency, and if the date is not changed, it would be all too easy, we knew when we were at which country. But with the unreliable dates, it would be just a mess.
That, plus tight integration with Apple-only walled garden, shadowed my experience of Apple Notes.
I use them till this day, but only for the things I can afford to lose. Mostly it’s for shopping lists, they’re disposable the moment they’re used.
Google Docs#
When I bought my first Chromebook, using Apple’s Notes wasn’t comfortable. So, it was a natural pick to switch to Google Docs.
I modified the overall look of my hardware, to make it more utilitarian. As I’ve bought my Chromebook to be a digital typing machine, for my notes exclusively.
You might like to follow the typing machine tag for stories about Chromebook, and my motivation behind it.
I’ve been using it for about two years, daily (more nightly), till it broke. I haven’t managed to replace it with anything else yet, because lack of the focus.
My MacBook Air 11" was doing the job, before it broke too. Now, my MacBook Pro does the job. I’m still looking for a cheap and light laptop for notes only, preferably rocking an ARM-processor. But it’s a low-priority thing at best.
Google Docs was actually very good for just writing without distractions, while I set it up to my liking. It had advanced features, like handling common mistakes. It did not allow me to effectively manage my notes, and work through it, reread it. But it allowed me to just write, which was super cool.
Unfortunately, upon Chromebook disintegrating itself, I realised I cannot use this work-flow any longer. Even my top-notch MacBook Pro does not handle Google Docs as easily as this underpowered Chromebook did. That’s when I switched for Notion.
Notion#
I didn’t use it heavily, as I brought my Evernote trauma with me.
These days, I can recommend Notion to anyone. If you’re okay with your notes living in the cloud, and you having no offline access to them from your mobile.
Why? I have no idea. It’s 2025 after all, storing your text files on your mobile is probably too difficult of a task.
For most people, I believe, the phrase ‘just use Notion’ would be enough. If you never kept any notes on the computer, just start with the Notion, seriously. You won’t get a better experience these days.
If taking notes is for you, you’ll find what’s next for you on your own. If you’ll ever be not satisfied with Notion. It does not take you as a hostage (so far), and allows you to export your notes very easily.
However, using Notion is a no-go for me, due to many factors. One of which, I learned I can actually control what is mine. Why would I delegate someone else having my personal and professional notes?
But not just that. Probably, I just have too much knowledge at this point, that using Notion is actually more work than not using it.
My Own System#
That’s how I came to having a plain-text notes, as files on my disk. I developed quite simple system that I like a lot, and I used it till recently.
The migration from this system and destruction of it motivated me to write this story.
The thing is, I thought that system would be the final one. I married to her, so sure I was about this. And turned out, I was wrong.
The system effectively organises any number of notes, far beyond my lifetime. It uses this simple sorting approach I invented. You see, we have years, months and days on our calendars. Why not using them? That’s how I invented this 2025/02/17/1541 structure for a note taken at 15:41 on Feb 17, 2025.
Personally, I don’t need more than that. One note per minute is plenty for me, even if I’d be taking notes very aggressively.
You can add seconds to that, for the system to become super-redundant, but I see it as not necessary.
Actually, I’d say I don’t need more than 24 notes per day, so I can just use hours here, but since I won’t take notes at night, and can take 5 notes during the lunch break, I didn’t want to make complex.
For the system to be useful, I combined it with my heavily keyboard driven Arch Linux installation. I use ranger as my (terminal) file manager, and nvim for taking notes.
I made a custom script that creates a note with the combination of keys (or just by pressing F1 in ranger).
Even if Notion or Evernote have this option (I don’t know if they have), then it’s just on par with my system.
What standed out in my system, it actually embraced this informational graveyard. When I wanted to note something, and I wasn’t sure whether I need it or not, I noted it. Text is the smallest digital form. My entire repository of notes was about 50 MB of text files. I have tens of thousands of them. Just think of how many it is.
That digital graveyard advice was both curse and blessing. While I agree, it’s better when your information is discoverable (to you), sometimes it’s just equally no problem if you have it lying somewhere indefenitely, and you forgetting about it. Because at some point, when you need it, you can find it. It’s not too difficult with text files.
It’s a curse, because I was too occupied with this. While at this point — having over twenty years of experience dealing with these text files of mine — I can assure you, you will never revisit most of your notes. Maybe some distant day in the future you will. And it’s okay. So don’t bother with organising something too much.
Just take your notes. That’s what matters. The form, you can find it later in life. At some point in life, you’ll appreciate having some scribbles from the past.
Markdown and Org-Mode#
If you paid attention, my cover picture for this story actually contains some meaning. And it has a unicorn (the logo of org-mode), and markdown logo too.
I haven’t mentioned that yet, because that does not matter, actually.
At some point, pretty quickly, I realised that there’s no point in having plain-old txt files, if I can have markdown files. It’s the same, only it has some markup. You can make text bold, or italic, or your header bigger, or, idk, have lists. You still have all the benefits of a txt-file, and you can open it with any notepad.exe-like application. Yet, if you want it, you can render it as an html page, very easily.
All of my notes are in markdown. There are other (better) systems available, org-mode, reStructuredText, Textile, and AsciiDoc being the most popular ones.
- You can explore Lightweight markup language Wikipedia article for more.
At some point in life, I realised org-mode is a million times better than markdown. I delved into its documentation, learned the new things and almost embraced Emacs, an abomination of a text-editor (for me).
- I was saved by SpaceMacs, which I was using, for a while.
Org-mode brought its challenges. One of which is being not-so-popular among normies. I won’t even call it too nerdy, yet it’s much less popular. You’ll find less software working with it.
More likely you need to be a emacs person, which I’m not. I’m a vim-person.
So at some point, with a heavy heart, I switched back to markdown.
Not for long.
HTML#
Half a year ago, when things at my city-farm became more relaxed, I came back to finish the developing of my own website (the one you read right now).
Upon doing that, I realised, I can easily split it into a constellation of websites. Now, I have this website as my primary blog, and I have others, satellite blogs too.
- To follow the stories for each of them, follow the tag projects.
Naturally, I realised, that most of my notes can easily be public. There are no secrets or private information. It’s mostly some topic-related notes. So I decided to actually divide them by topic, wrecking my previous monorepo architecture.
Turned out, it was the best decision for my notes. As with this new approach, I gave my notes priorities. This website is the priority number one. I expect that if someone searches for my name, they end up here. Also, I expect some online people who’d like to get to know me better, to explore this project first. I try to make it magazine-like glossy.
Other projects are less polished, yet they are of a tremendous value for me. They allow me to keep this blog clean and tidy.
- As the grand example is the links project. It’s a trash bin of links. They were actually making my notes repository polluted with the things I don’t need actually. Yet, sometimes, very occasioanally, I’d like to find something (either for myself, or to show someone else). And it’s there. For me, it’s the fastest way of managing bookmarks I don’t need at hands. I don’t expect anyone to follow that project, or even visit it. However, I made it public and not local, because I see no sensitive information there. It’s just a repository of various links. I can search them from everywhere, from any computer connected to the internet. Quite useful, right?
- Also, there is a counter-example of the project on the opposite side, imagination project. It’s not even a collection of notes. It’s my attempt at creating a series of entries with just one common topic, imagination.
All these websites have one common thing, they focus on something. As the example of focus, I’d highlight these projects:
- parenting is my public notes from my journey as a parent.
- fit is its counterpart, for my exploration of nutrition and physical exercises to keep myself healthy and strong.
- Parenting is an underestimated and exhaustive job. It mostly thankless, because you do it not for the sake of acknowledgement, or expecting something in return. You do it for yourself, mostly. And your kid too. And for the society, to a lesser degree.
[To be finished]
I realised this topic is so deep, I probably need more time and effort to complete it. As you may see, creating html websites is my preffered way of taking notes. Most of them can be public, so it allows me to manage the knowledge more efficiently.
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