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A Simple Note Taking Software - Which One?
pxlpushr asks: "I am a EE major turned CS major who never got over the habit of maintaining a log book. Lately I have been obsessing over the idea of moving all my log books (yes, I have many of them: one for each Computer at home and work, and a couple for my work) to electronic form. I have searched and searched and found nothing interesting. My needs are simple: I would like HTML format so that when I am viewing I can use a browser. It it is available for both Windows and Linux systems, that would be great. I am definitely not looking for something real heavy duty like 'Go Live'. It is too heavy for quick, frequent use of jotting down notes. It should be WYSIWYG software, should allow reasonable formatting options for the text and figures (gif/jpg) I include in the notes, and should provide facility to load up a template for the log and fill in the details into the template. The closest I came across was the freeware Keynote . But two problems: it supports only the RTF, no HTML support and no Linux counterpart. So my question to Slashdot denizens is, which note taking software do you use?"
I run a Wiki on a personal web site. So long as there is a netorked computer nearby I'm in business.
www.wordpress.org
Tuxcards? Works well on KDE, I'm sure you could compile it on Windows if you really had to. Exports to html.
See here
Sounds like you're looking for a personal wiki. WikidPad is Windows only, but I've seen others that are multi-platform.
Why not a PDA?
As for templates, I see the word in one of the menus, but in 10 seconds I couldn't get it to do what you're talking about. Maybe it does, or you can simply create your own blank log file which you then open and save for your various needs.
HTH
just open bash at the begining of class and start typing: $ echo "The history of roman macaroni art originated with the rise of phillial nostalgics within those things in which amongst themselves were forever between the scrawled text of a man who should probably be saying 'foo' instead of all this...
just remember to say ">>notes
at the end of class
You know, like everyone else.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I mean, you want it to output properly formatted HTML, right? Why not just use a WYSIWYG HTML editor? There are tons to choose from on whatever platform you care to use.
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Perhaps it's due to the high use of Macs in education, but other platforms really seem to lag behind in this area. WikidPad is a Windows application that's similar in design to VoodooPad, while Tomboy is a very light-weight equivalent app for Linux. Unfortunately I have yet to discover an equivalent cross-platform note-taking tool.
Or notepad.exe if you are in front of a windows machine.
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I highly recommend PmWiki if you have a web-server. It is both Apache (Linux) and IIS friendly. Responding to your requirements:
* HTML format to view in web browser
Well, PmWiki is wiki software that relies upon a browser. The output will be HTML. The individual pages are in flat-files, and there are ways to retrieve the text without converting it into HTML.
* Available for both Windows and Linux systems
Works on IIS and Linux. Since it works in a browser, it should be cross-platform compatible. I have a script that tars up the source files so you can have off-server backups.
* Not heavy duty like 'Go Live'. It is too heavy for quick, frequent use of jotting down notes.
Wikis are ideal for writing. There are recipes in the PmWiki Cookbook that allow for a 'blog' type approach.
* WYSIWYG software
Hmm, almost. There is a "preview" tool. But, after you write wiki markup, it gets pretty close to WYSIWYG
* Reasonable formatting options for the text and figures (gif/jpg) I include in the notes.
Yep, and yep. You also have the ability to upload files, so you can archive documents and provide a link to said document on a page.
* Able to provide template (for log).
PmWiki allows for templates. PmWiki is different than other wikis in that it allows pages to be freely organized in groups. You can create a different template for each group. So, you can have "Logs" group that has a specific template. If you have standard reports, then you can have a similar group for them.
* Which note taking software do you use?
Depends. I use PmWiki when I want universal access (i.e., access from more than one computer). I use vi when I want quick writing for only one computer (I also use it to write up PmWiki pages).
I'm a law student, so right now I write a lot of notes. I tend to use PmWiki for them.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Just use that keynote thing you say you like, and have a cron job automatically convert it to html via the comamnd "rtf2html" periodically. While you are at it, index it with swig++ or htdig for searching.
Have to go with MS on this one, though I wouldn't normally. OneNote is solid, feature-packed, quick to use, and allows you to organise those notes so that you can find them again.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I tried, multiple times, to go electronic with my notebooks (I'm a grad student in astronomy.) It never panned out, mainly because paper and pen are just way more convenient and have that "scribble" factor: you can get things down without being quite sure what you're trying to say. Later, you can write things up in "proper" form (which for me is LaTeX.)
In my experience, having an additional layer between brain and note (the syntax of an electronic journal program, whether it's HTML or not) shorts out this process. (I'm reminded of the time I tried to use a tape recorder to record notes: I would just come up speechless.) Oh, and having your own clever electronic notetaking system really gets in the way when you meet your advisor and he wants to scribble herself.
But, if you don't want the benefit of my experience, here are the things I tried:
LaTeX. Easy, good looking output with simple math syntax (actually, I do something use LaTeX when I'm writing out complicated maths, instead of doing it by hand. Makes it easier to edit mistakes in a long formula.) My old college roommate does EVERYTHING in LaTeX (he's a mathematician now) -- all his notes, everything. He is also a little weird.
NoteTaker. Cute "metaphors" that seem to get in the way of actually doing anything.
omnigraffle. I thought I would use this to diagram various systems I was looking at. No go, too complicated to figure out.
In the end, I went with this. It's open source!
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NVU is avaiable for win32 and linux, and should be sufficient for your task..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
hnb, the heirarchical notebook.
http://hnb.sourceforge.net/
It's by far above and beyond all notebook software I've ever used. It runs in the terminal and is curses based. So you can do cool stuff like run it in screen to share it with others. It stores text information in a simple heirarchy, just like when you take notes. It saves notes in a simple, straightforward XML format and it is extremely easy to export to HTML or anything else. If you want to export to something new, writing an XSLT or such to translate the XML is not difficult at all.
It's really small and will run on just about any *nix even OSX. You can run it in windows with cygwin/mingw.
hnb
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Others have mentioned various web-based things like wikis and wordpress, etc. If you don't want to have to worry about a wired connection, then you could run a lightweight webserver on your laptop, with the wiki or whatever running locally. And you'd still probably be using less system resources than MS Word or whatever. :)
Why compromise? Use OpenOffice with the quick starter; you can be jotting a note (or using any of the OO applications) in 2-3 seconds. Just run this little script as a background process when you start your session on Linux:
#!/bin/bash
while true
do
ooffice -quickstart
done
On Windows, enable the quick-start panel icon. I'm not sure about Mac OSX; it probably will work with the above script.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
GoLive is a "note taking software"? an "electronic log"??!! wtf are you smoking aye?! i want some of this tree!
Leo is an "outliner" for programmers but it doesn't have to be used like that. On your screen it just looks like a Windows or Mac folder browser, only they're not called folders but outlines or nodes. Every outline has text inside of it, or you can "hang" other outlines under it for more organization.
.html files you could ofcourse keep notes identical by only organizing links as you would organise Leo nodes, every document you'd edit, even if that document would show it's link in multiple categories, would be editing the original document. So that way wouldn't introduce synchronisation difficulties either. It might be a little more cumbersome in exchange for gaining images and text with typefaces.
The reason I use it instead of folders to organize my notes is that I can "clone" a node (CTRL-`). This will duplicate a node and you can drag it into another part of your Leo document. The reason cloning is better than making a copy is because Leo will automatically keep cloned notes identical.
If you made a note about something and it's also helpful to have this information filed at another part of your notes collection, close to another subject, you make a clone. If you'd made a copy and you updated 1 copy, the other copies would be out of date. With clones, you don't have to worry about that.
As an example, I have a node with
"All my hardware"
and I also have a node called
"My FreeBSD server documentation"
One of my boxes is part of both categories of information. It's a cloned node ofcourse.
Now, everytime I change something on my server's hardware, I only have to update 1 of the cloned nodes and the other will automatically have the same update.
That's one of the good features about Leo. Unfortunately, nodes contain only text, not formatted text or images. However, because it's open source you could add that yourself when you can program in Python. Python is also the reason it's cross-platform.
I use it for both my to-do/task document and my general notes (as 2 seperate files).
However, with
It's just a suggestion, give it a try. Just put the word "@nocolor" in the root node and hang all the other nodes under that to supress Leo's programming syntax coloring.
For easy HTML editing I'd use Dreamweaver or the open-source clone Nvu, it's about to go version 1.0
- -- Truth addict for life.
...and you can read it in a web browser if you like. :)
I use the most basic text editors (nano, ee, etc depending on which system I'm using) for quick jots saved as text files. Super simple, quick and easy.
I like FreeMind for taking phone notes. It lets me put things down immediately even though I don't yet know the full context, then drag and drop later. It's Java, so it's portable, and the .jar is pretty small, if that's an issue.
Another good option is EverNote a more linear product. Quite snappy at what it does.
OneNote is worth a try, I have it but never use it, when weighed against the above two.
Hope it helps!
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Maybe Tomboy http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/ would fit the bill... Its written in mono, so maybe it would be portable to windows, and it serves as a wiki-like note organizer. I'm not sure if it stores its files in html, but it looks like it could.
In linux libertas
Really, why WYSIWYG? True, that's what the poster is asking for, but there are easier ways to do things. For example, one can write HTML. Perhaps the author is just spoiled, but it's a really easy language to master; he's a CS major and should have no trouble with that. Also, there's always TeX. Am I simply misunderstanding what he's asking for?
SubEthaEdit is good (if you have a mac). The best part about it is the ability to take notes in a group via bonjour.
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
I think it is called vi.
freemind is a good peice of mindmapping software I use. It exports HTML, and you can enter your notes in HTML if you start the first line with <html>
Wonder what the public key field is for?
get a www.livejournal.com account and just post there.
They'll even timestamp, HTML format, and get it all straight.
-Hey, I have a great log, it's called my livejournal.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
I'm not sure if it's been said already, but this works pretty well.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
What's wrong with using a regular old legal pad? I don't understand why notes have to be "digitized", or displayed in HTML. Every other student I know writes notes in notebooks or legal pads...
Really, though. Why?
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
I find that outline Mode in GNU Emacs works great. If you are wedded to the HTML output, consider Markdown: the syntax is easy to learn, you can write raw text and get decently formatted output on the other side. And, if you decide to move to a wiki later, some (like WordPress) can support Markdown syntax, so no reformatting is needed.
We've got some multi-user equipment with a shared log book which many people need to access, and a wiki on an internal password protected site seems to work fine.
We happen to be using plain phpwiki, because it's easy to deal with and including images in pages is simple, but any wiki backend should work.
One problem, though - if you anticipate needing the dated material in your logbook for some official reason (patent claims, oversight by a funding agency or supervisor, etc), then going electronic might be a bad idea.
The best outliners to user are:
........
... although some people do like windoze interfaces ... :]
OSX:
Omni Outliner
- Awesome Programmers at Omni
- Nice Outliner with very good config
NoteTaker
- Very good program full of many good features including:
-- XML file saves
-- HTML viewer (free)
-- Cross browser version expected hopefully this year.
Windoze:
Ecco
- Free PIM with excellent outlining UI
- No HTML support as it was written over a decade ago
- Has ton's of features but I only use it for my brainstorming, pseudocoding, requirements gathering todo lists, shopping lists
Linux:
There are quite a few *nix outliners but all that I've seen are very early in the development cycle and are best avoided for now.
For the time being, it would be best to just run Ecco over wine.
Rule - Avoid multi panel outliners as they are generally ugly abstracted interfaces. From a UI perspective, single panel outliners are the best way to go
JsD
I would certainly reccomendd TiddlyWiki, I've been using it here at work for the past month or so. It is an excellent way of keeping track of meetings and other pieces of information, and the fact that its a Wiki is ace (wiki words between documents...great).
Very easy to use, though not WYSIWYG, the markup is easy enough to pick up.
when i was in grad school (MA Education), I had to take copious notes and since my handwriting is awful, I ended up using my ibook (plus the wifi was nice to surf in boring classes!!). I tried appleworks but it is really bad. I don't like word and OO.org is too large, so I ended up using abiword (abisource.com). It runs on os x, linux, and windows, has great file compatibility, is small and runs fast, plus exports to html nicely. plus, the outline features are nice. it is open source too.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
If you want a WYSIWYG Wiki try Perspective - which is Open Source (GPL). Note: I am the author, I do use my own private instance for personal note taking.
I have a mac, and I looked at your links.
These don't seem to be gpl based software. Do you have any software suggestions with this kind of license?
I guess i am to cheap (still a student) to fork out money for software, but to honest to pirate it.
You could use GNU TeXmacs, it supports HTML export and import, is free (as in speech), is WYSIWYG, it also has good support for formulas and it is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
If you can access the net, take your notes in Gmail. Gmail is pretty nifty for that. Simply type up an e-mail (HTML formatting) and save it as a draft. One-click note-taking. Or, with a bit more effort, send it to yourself, and set up labels and filters to categorize your notes. :-)
Behold, the power of G's.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Made by the awesome folks at 37signals, http://backpackit.com/ is what you need. It's a wiki without the wacky. Use your browser to edit it and keep lists and notes with it too.
You asked what software we used... so I use vim.
Obviously it doesn't fit your criteria, (no WYSIWYG, etc.)
I tried a number of things and it came down to having a decent text editor. Organization is more important than the other fancy features in my situation, and being able to grep a years worth of notes to find something in seconds more than made up for the sacrifice of being text-only.
there are lots of free web hosts, I used to use Lycos for php+mysql , there are lots of wikis that you could use.
I'm not joking.
If it must be WYSIWYG-html, give Mozilla's composer mode a try and type away.
If you need portability, try using a Slashdot Journal or equivalent. Plus, it's instant groupware when you need it.
My personal favorite journaling tool is still Ye Olde Graffite Writing Styck and a few leaves of wood-based papyrus substitute.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Although it doesn't not support HTML or images,
notes-mode for emacs (or xemacs) was designed for research log applications. Its real strength is automatic indexing, so when you have 10 years of notes, you can find what you care about.
See http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/NOTES_MODE/
I've been using a Logitech Digital Pen for a while now. I'm pretty happy with the compromise between a real pad and having a digital copy of what I wrote. The recording made by the pen is of excellent quality. Feel free to check it out.
I run two copies of JSPWiki (jspwiki.org), one on my laptop and one on the server. When I'm offline, I put the notes in the local JSPWiki instance. When I get plugged back into a network, Unison syncs the two file systems up and I'm good to go. A wiki is the way to go. Easy formatting, search, page linking, etc. I think I've become about 50% more productive because I can find things.
Pimki is a wiki-based PIM which comes with a web server. Pop it on a flash drive and you can run the server and access it using a browser wherever you are.
(Based on Instiki wiki, Webrick web server, requires Ruby).
Knowit is one of those small, yet well designed and enormously useful applications- I've used it for taking notes on new subject matter. You can get it here. Once you have all your notes organized, it can export them to HTML.
My favorite note-taking/organizational tool is FreeMind (freemind.sourceforge.net). It's based on the concept of "mind mapping" which is undoubtedly familiar to you if you've taken a creative writing course.
Check it out, they have a real-time demo on the project's page.
I think there are electronic systems that are traceable enought for patent claims, but I sort of suspect a Wiki isn't one of of them.
A tablet PC would be perfect for the job. (If you don't mind windows). I find MS Onenote and Agilx Gobinder to be perfectly cable of taking handwritten and textual notes.
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