[Philipp__]

Org-mode. I won’t be wasting any words at it since I think it is well known thing here.

Besides that I use Apple Notes. They sync and work flawlessly between iOS and Mac devices.

And lastly, pen and paper. I like writing things down.

[palmy]

Then I will! I've always preferred taking notes on a computer due to how much easier it is to

- edit

- organize (heck, you can even search!)

But I'm a maths student and I never came across anything where I can efficiently write equations and formulas, before Emacs + Org-mode.

I have now been using Emacs + Org-mode + Yasnippet for a year, and it's bloody amazing. When it comes to efficiently including latex-expressions in my org-notes, Yasnippet is an absolute must.

And because this is Org-mode, I can export all my notes to HTML, PDF, etc. Adding a bit of customization, you get something like this http://www.retiredparkingguard.com/notes/. If you go to one of the note-pages with a bit of maths on it, e.g. mathematics/geometry.html, you should see a bar on the right displaying the notation used in each section. This requires javascript.

I also make heavy use of customized named blocks in my note-taking, e.g.

#+name: def:schrodinger-equation

#+begin_definition

...

#+end_definition

And then, using org-ref, I can do a `M-x org-ref-insert-ref-link` anywhere in the document and I can search through all these definitions, theorems, etc.

These blocks, when exported to HTML, are also given CSS classes, hence you can easily give these styling, making the reading experience into whatever you want.

Finally, I would also suggest org-ref by John Kitchin (https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref); it makes organizing papers and the corresponding notes so incredibly easy.

All together this makes note-taking such a breeze and lowers the barrier for me to re-read and edit my notes significantly, compared to handwritten notes.

[wodenokoto]

My main reason for preferring paper over keyboard is that I like to draw example graphs of everything. These don't need to be exact just give a visual idea of how a function acts.

I also heavily annotate equations (color code, add description, etc)

How do you get around this?

[palmy]

The flexibility you get with pen and paper, e.g. draw arrows between arbitrary words / equations, you can't really beat.

But for the specific use-cases you mentioned:

- Org-mode allows you to integrate code into the document, hence to draw a function you could easily write a small snippet of code outputting a plot, which will be embedded in the document.

- I actually do this sometimes too! For the color-coding, Org-mode allows you to embedd arbitrary LaTeX such as "\textcolor{red}{\alpha}". I've set up a Yasnippet which lets me type "color + [TAB]" and expands to "\textcolor{}{}" with my cursor inside the curly brackets. I type "red" and hit TAB again, and then type whatever I want to be coded in red. For descriptions, I'm unsure why you couldn't as easily do this in a document. In my documents I usually have a larger body of text deriving/explaining the equation, and then I simply put the equation into a definition-block for further reference. Then I know that I can jump to its definition, and I'll find a more thorough explanation of it.