[linhat]

After playing with various (note-taking) applications/apps I found all of them severely lacking (for several reasons). I was always for the lookout of the one-size-fits-all application, which I obviously never found.

Realizing that there is no such system/app I split things out:

* Important Stuff as well as trivia -> CalDav... believe it or not, but CalDav beats most other systems/apps out there, it's accessible on almost any device and you usually have a wide variety of applications to edit your "calendar events", use different calendars for important vs trivia

* Stuff you read on the internet -> obviously (synced) bookmarks (firefox, chrome, opera and others have builtin sync)

* Ideas, plans, drawings -> A5 pen and paper notebook (most people will advocate moleskine, I prefer Leuchtturm notebooks (to each his/her own)

* Research, papers, references -> good old text files, index + txt + pdf + bib (vim + vimwiki + git + some zsh alias like wiki="cd ~/wiki/; git pull; vi index.wiki; git commit -a; git push; cd -")

So far, this works quite well, although I have to admit that while separation is king, it also hinders creativity at times, so I'm slowly starting to integrate other things into the wiki (write firefox bookmark and caldav importer/parser, thinking about scanning/digitizing notebooks...) to be able to cross-reference things. The long term goal is to create a visualization that allows me to visualize (duuuh) all this data in different ways (especially useful for research and connecting the dots).

Hope this helps and I would really be interested how others manage this, especially regarding research, papers etc (Mendeley and others just aren't flexible enough for me...).

[intractable]

I use Gitit [1] as my personal wiki for notetaking. I've been pretty happy with it so far, as it uses the excellent Pandoc as the backend. I have not heard of Vimwiki until now - can you tell me your favourite features?

[1] http://gitit.net/

[linhat]

Favourite features:

* plain text edited in vim ;-)

* links (to other wiki pages and content), move cursor over link and <Enter> will open wiki page, link in browser, image in image viewer, pdf in ... all from your console

* manages todo lists (including status indicator auto update for sublists: [.]->[o]->[O]->[X])

* headers (mostly useful when exporting to html)

* table creation and management

Overall a very lightweight and tightly integrated vim plugin, but gitit looks quite interesting, might give it a try.

[rm445]

After years of writing everything in casebound A4 notebooks, I am currently experimenting with B5 size (in between A4 and A5). It's a bonny little size, still plenty of space on the page and fits on shelves better.

[patrickdavey]

Yip, I tried out vimwiki a while back and have stuck with it. Pretty simple to setup and yes, a git commit generates the html files and rsync's them up to the internet. Pretty bombproof.