The Grumpy Editor's guide to note-taking applications [LWN.net]

Stay tuned for the sequel

Posted Feb 15, 2007 10:48 UTC (Thu) by xyz (subscriber, #504) [Link]

One other option, is kjots that comes with kdeutils package (at least in
Fedora).

It is a simple program.

Stay tuned for the sequel

Posted Feb 15, 2007 14:56 UTC (Thu) by munozga (subscriber, #26290) [Link]

And if you like the whole Gnome vs. KDE thing, don't forget GJots2 :)

Stay tuned for the sequel

Posted Feb 15, 2007 19:48 UTC (Thu) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

I would like something like Gjots2 for browser bookmarks.

Stay tuned for the sequel

Posted Feb 15, 2007 15:41 UTC (Thu) by thyrsus (subscriber, #21004) [Link]

Please, please do the "mind-mapping" sequel. I recommend Leo as a top candidate in that space, but I'm not sure if it fits the bill as a random note taker - although I never acquired the habit of using random notes other than e-mail, so perhaps I don't appreciate Leo's prowess at something I don't do :-).

Stay tuned for the sequel

Posted Feb 15, 2007 16:15 UTC (Thu) by stevan (subscriber, #4342) [Link]

Tuxcards should come into this - www.tuxcards.de

I must agree with your well-expressed comments about Tomboy. This isn't
entirely a religious comment, but I wish it wasn't based on mono. It does
what it does really well, but just isn't worth the system impact.

Stay tuned for the sequel

Posted Feb 17, 2007 20:04 UTC (Sat) by BradReed (subscriber, #5917) [Link]

and if you like tuxcards, you might also like notecase. I like it better in fact, but they are similar. It can be found at sourceforge.

Stay tuned for the sequel

Posted Feb 16, 2007 22:20 UTC (Fri) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

You might consider throwing one wiki in the running for comparison purposes on the followup article. Sure, it's a different class of application, but for taking notes it does a swell job.

I've used five wikis in the last year. They are:

The wiki at Work.
My personal wiki.
For my band (recordings, lyrics). Very little use but it's handy... ...has made a nice place to put audio files and lyrics. We'd probably lost some sound and lyrics somewhere if it weren't for a place to store everything under one roof.
Wikipedia (for facts)
Uncyclopedia (for lies)

Of the above, #4 and #5 are the only public ones. #2 is used pretty much as I'd imagine I'd use tomboy (haven't used it).

There's a variety of advantages to the personal wiki:

Same basic working environment that I have in the other places. Sure there's a learning curve for wiki syntax, but as long as the wiki used has the same basic syntax everywhere, it's cake.
Does the job reasonably well for one person
Searchable (in the case of the ones I use)
I had to go on a cruise and was able to take my personal wiki with me on my laptop. I was able to put the content back on the server when I came home very easily.
If it's on the web, you can add info to it from somewhere else. I got a phone number for a relative while over at the parent's house and was able to add it to my personal phonebook with ease from their computer. No need to worry about losing a piece of paper.
I can be on any computer in the house and my notes are there. I can be over at a friend's house and look things up readily.

I look forward to the future article on wikis.

-Brock

Stay tuned for the sequel

Posted Feb 17, 2007 0:42 UTC (Sat) by raytd (guest, #4823) [Link]

I'm largely unimpressed by "web based" applications; However, I'll swear by TiddlyWiki (http://tiddlywiki.com/) and its variants. I've been using MonkeyPirateTiddlyWiki (http://mptw.tiddlyspot.com/) since some kind soul here on LWN commented on it.

TiddlyWiki

Posted Feb 18, 2007 16:26 UTC (Sun) by Brenner (subscriber, #28232) [Link]

Whow, I must say that TiddlyWiki is very impressive, and it looks quite good as a note taking solution... Thanks for posting the url here !

TiddlyWiki

Posted Feb 19, 2007 4:46 UTC (Mon) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

I have been using TiddlyWiki for about 8 months now, and I am glad to say I have finally *settled* on this as my one-and-only note-taking environment.

Works exactly the same anywhere because it is browser based, and very fast and easy to use. I've even stopped using delicious for my bookmarks after discovering "tiddlysnip", which is a firefox extension to insert snips into a tiddlywiki file, so all my links (with my annotations) go into a "my-delicious.html" file and all other notes go into a "my-notes.html".

These two files, each weighing about 350-400 KB, are basically self-contained, code+data, containers that any (r|d)ecent web browser can handle. And it grows very slowly so size isn't really an issue. I mean it's less than half-a-meg still!

TiddlyWiki

Posted Feb 22, 2007 17:57 UTC (Thu) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105) [Link]

I've been using it since 9th March 2006 and am very happy with it too. I used to collect notes in text files in a directory structure. Then I started putting them into info files (!) and I am very happy that Jeremy Ruston created such an elegant application. As things stand the only issue that I'm a bit unhappy with is that I have to manually clean out backups (I have autosave turned on so each edit creates a copy)