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I've tried a lot of different note taking solutions, org mode, vimwiki, apple notes, etc. etc. But at some point I became dissatisfied with them all. My distaste for digital solutions lies in their lack of flexibility: at the end of the day, there's as of yet no digital means of note-taking, that I'm aware of, that achieves the same degree of flexibility and tight feedback loop offered by pen and paper. Are my thoughts better captured in words or in images? No problem, with pen and paper I can switch modes seamlessly, and, furthermore, mix them without any hassle. Should I come up with tags and some appropriate naming convention so I can find my notes later? No need—when everything is stowed away in a compact notebook, I can quickly flip through and find a multitude of phrases or doodles that indicate what subject I've explored. There's something charming, too, about flipping through the musky contents of a forgotten notebook that I find lacking when I peruse old digital files. Plenty of people find digital solutions more appropriate, and sure, they do eliminate some of the hassle of carrying around a notebook and pen, they make notes easier to share with collaborators (this is where they excel!), and if you have a large number of notes it may serve for better organization, but at the end of the day, note-taking is one domain in which I've found newer tools aren't necessarily better tools. Something about the tactile and fluid experience of taking pen and paper notes still gets my neurons firing in the right ways...I think the persistence of whiteboards in the workplace also attests to the value of analog means for capturing our thoughts. |
So, I thought "Why not both?" For the last 5 years I've used a Samsung Galaxy note 8.0 with pen(the old tablet, not the phone). And the best app I found to take notes on is the stock S-note app.
I can put ideas into their own 'book'. It has shape recognition (draw a crappy square or line and it converts it into a nice clean one). Lots of customization options for pen shape, color, transparency and size. I can take or download photos to paste into the notebook.
But the killer feature for me has been the ability to import PDFs and write over them. Not only do I use this feature for reading textbooks and keeping my notes in them, but I can make custom "paper" backgrounds - think different grids - dot, hex etc.
And last year when I started journaling, I found no journal system worked for me exactly. So using Scribus (an open source DTP solution like InDesign) I can make custom journals (think daily, weekly and monthly organization pages) as PDFs to import and scribble on.
So now I have all my notes with me, able to scribble and doodle when I need, backed up and easily searchable and importable to my laptop. Win-win.
S-note doesn't quite do everything I need it to, so I may try to create my own solution - but it's 90% there.