[atoav]

It is also something else: if you take a paper note you have to actively archive it in some way at which point you might come into contact with it again. Searching for a old note on paper is like browsing backwards through the history of notes.

All of that would be entirely possible with a computer, but it would result in an inconvenient interface, where you can’t just search for a word or tag.

I have tried many ways to take notes but I’ve found myself always to come back to simple text/markdown files and paper based notebooks.

I manually type the relevant paper notes into the computer to make them searchable and link back to the notebook (e.g. like 2019/01 P.92) if I like to revisit the full note with drawings and all.

This means your notebook should get a name and a date and you should use notebooks with pagination..

[beobab]

I suppose in this day and age, with OCR being as good as it is, you could take a picture with your phone, and be able to search on text in the picture.

Now I think about it, I seem to recall Evernote doing something like that a while back. Mind you, I don't know how easy it is to get the meta-data back out.