[thimabi]

I mostly write Markdown notes in VS Code. With the help of some Bash scripts, Pandoc and Calibre, they are converted into PDFs, ebooks and websites. When I need, I use Git to sync the notes between different devices.

I chose this method because VS Code is highly customizable (I make my own extensions) and because there are tons of other tools to work with Markdown and Git. I use those other tools as needed.

Being able to trust the longevity of my note-taking system is pretty important to me.

[sphars]

I've been working on configuring my VS Code for notetaking, I'd love to see more details of your setup if you'd be willing to share.

[thimabi]

I keep a root folder (VS Code workspace) and within it several folders, nested or not, with Markdown files. Anything that is not Markdown goes into “_assets” directories.

I’ve got certain scripts that iterate these folders and merge the notes into a single huge document that is automatically sent to Pandoc (to make EPUBs and PDFs) and to Calibre (to make Kindle-compatible ebooks). In some cases, separate documents are generated for specific folders.

These scripts also validate the notes with markdown-lint, proofread them with a custom extension, and remove all footnotes from them. By convention, my notes do not have any duplicated content, and all footnotes in them are secondary stuff that can be removed from the ebooks to maximize readability.

To use within VS Code itself, I’ve created some extensions. They enable things like reformatting text before pasting, clicking a single button to send a note to the printer, and validating that certain concepts and names are written in a consistent manner, to facilitate search.

I used to generate websites from the notes, but decided to stop doing that for the moment. It was like a rudimentary static site generator, lacking in features, so I decided it was best to integrate a proper SSG into my system in the future.

My goal is to automate anything that can be automated in terms of note-taking, so that I focus on actually writing notes and reviewing them periodically.

Hope this helps :)