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Note-taking Software for Unix?
donniejones18 asks: "I've been trying to find note-taking software for my university classes, work, etc. but all I can seem to discover is Windows-based software, such as OneNote or GoBinder. I would like to know what software Slashdot readers use for note-taking in Linux? If not, would anyone be interested in working together on this project? Ideally the software would support the insertion of PDFs, images, and other documents for handwritten annotation from a tablet PC, PDA or by mouse from a PC."
I use KNotes, it's an upgrade to the "Post-it Notes" solution.
PS: Please don't sue me.
Previous note software topic5 8
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/21/21182
Being a recent undergrad myself ... What the hell is wrong with the good old fashioned 3 ring binder? Using a note book or PDA is way over kill for the over priced joke of an education that you're getting.
Use openoffice so you can add pictures, spreadsheets and crap as well as being able to save them in a PDF format for printing on campus. I have used OO for 3 years of uni note taking, happily.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I take my class notes in LaTeX using vim. I stick to paper and pencil for math (can't remember LaTeX math bindings fast enough), and other drawing type classes.
Makes for readable notes when I have to go back to them.
See e.g. here
Use tools such as mv(1), mkdir(1) , ln(1) and grep to organize,
It seems to me like you're making a mountain out of a molehill. Just suck it up and write in a notebook. You'll spend more time on the solution to your contrived problem than paying attention in class, which is what you shoulda been doing in the first place.
http://notecase.sourceforge.net/ is really nice.
especially the tree view on the left.
Also if you dual boot, then you can use the same dat file.
if
Freemind is a mind map tool written in Java. I use it on Linux and Windows. I can live without it for my day to day work... http://freemind.sf.net
Precisely. If you want to do well, reading the relevant chapters before lecture is key. Take notes while reading the textbook (I only use this as an aid to concentration, but it can be very useful if your professor follows the textbook closely) and do the problems. Go to lecture with a decent understanding of the material. The notes you take should only be a rough outline to refresh your memory, plus details about difficult concepts.
Taking copious, multimedia notes seems like a waste of time to me. Anyway, that's just my strategy; I'm sure it won't work for everyone.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
On one hand, I agree completely. I used my PDA to take notes for about a year while I was in college. My stated reason was because my handwriting had gotten so bad that I couldn't necessarily read my notes after class, while on Graffiti I can write almost as quickly as I can with a pen and paper, and my accuracy is damn near 100%.
However, I gave up after that year because it was impossible to draw little diagrams and such. I just improved my penmanship. Tablet PC's never excited me for a few reasons - most notably, they struck me as a device that costs a few thousand times as much as a notebook without providing much added functionality, while also weighing more and being much more fragile. That, and there's a reason why my good ol' quadrille grid notebooks didn't run Windows or Linux.
On the other hand, I'm actually writing note-taking software as we speak. (Sorry, Cliff, it's OS-X only, though if I ever release it, a GNUStep port might not be too hard.) But the focus is decidedly not to take notes in class. It's meant to be a tool for organizing massive amounts of more research-type notes, keeping PDFs of journal articles organized, keeping everything indexed and cross-referenced, blah blah blah. It's really more of a personal wiki. So I think there is room for note-taking software, just not in the classroom.
(Heck, if I were a professor, I would probably ban laptops from my classes simply because I remember what a distraction they were to the entire room from when I was a student.)
I've been using LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) to take research notes for quite some time. It has all the advantages of Latex (it runs latex in the background to generate the PS, PDF, etc..) combined with a sexy GUI with floating menus for the math stuff (so you don't have to remember all of those "crazy" names) as well as letting you directly type the ones you do know by heart... All in all, the best thing since sliced bread... at least for note taking (notes in sliced bread tend to get mouldy after a couple of weeks!)
Just use a lightweight wiki on a local-only apache server.
I personally use roWiki, mainly because it's easy for me to hack new features onto.
But I just blew my last mod point.
43 folders just ran an article about making one big text file, which followed up on an O'Reilly post on the same topic. Bottom line is that one thing all productive geeks share is that they stay organized by just adding stuff to a plain text file. It is a good life hack, which is intrinsically cross-platform & easy to use & small.
Yes, Vim for taking notes.
:S
:help browser
He mentioned mkdir and ln as a way to organize stuff, and insert multi-media, or any kind of elements.
Vim can conveniently be used as a file browser, try:
(that's an uppercase S), then walk around with cursor keys, use enter to edit a file or enter a directory.
Use
for more info.
One of the problems with normal pen-and-paper you can't do keyword searches on your notes. I have messing writing sometimes and cannot read what I wrote. And notes get easily disorganized and even when well organized it can be hard to find the right information come study time. As well, I always end up making a study sheet and it would be nice to just copy and paste what I need while speed reading though it.
;) ... not practical anyways only one page at a time and then I'd have to shake everything off!!!).
.. I think they purposefully inflated the system requirements so the OEMs could sell more expensive systems), I would have bought one for university.
Some of you guys (and gals!) in computer science (prob most of the audience here) might find it practical to type away on a laptop. Or you don't have to worry much about "keywords", thus the pen and paper.
I'm in 4th year in a Liberal Arts program - and I know of several business, communications and other majors as well that are dying for a better digital notetaking alternative. Since I have a nice desktop system (iMac G5) a laptop is not practical and affordable used ones are either missing things (ethernet), are in need of replacement parts (old HDD), or I don't feel like lugging it around on the bus back from university. And there's no warranty. Overall, though, I don't mind useing a note-pad like program to type in notes.
I'd like to know if there is a small monochrome display that you can simply write-on that will save all your notes. I've thought of scanning in all my notes but its too tedious. (Please don't suggest an etch-a-sketch, I've already thought of it
Someone's mentionned the Ace Cad (http://www.acecad.com.tw/eng/application.htm) notepad. To me, the usefullness of this thing is self-defeating. 1) You need special ink and finding it is hard; 2) You still end up wasting paper; 3) it only works on Windows; 4) You can't easily clean up the file digitally afterwards; 5) its $150 CAN. I do like the fact it uses Flash memory as storage. But it loses some of its appeal.
IMO, Microsoft missed the boat on the Tablet PCs. If they had lowered the system requirements (I'm sure they could have
A PDA isn't a half-bad idea with a keyboard attached I supposed.Any other suggestions?
I've been using FreeMind for a couple of years to take notes, and it's brilliant. You need to subscribe to the Mind Maps approach to note taking first, but having done that ~10 years ago, I haven't found a commercial product to touch FreeMind.
More and more, I use it in preference to Powerpoint for presentations. Being able to drill down on points while retaining the context of other points onscreen, is a really powerful way to keep audiences interested, and also lets you change tack mid-presentation if you've misjudged the prior knowledge of your audience.
Free, rock solid, export to XML, link to other documents and Web sites, simple interface that stays out of the way. What more could you want?
Much of the reason why I did better with Graffiti in class is that Graffiti is very easy to write without looking, because it's all in one place. With paper and pen, I couldn't watch the professor and chalkboard as much, because without looking at what I was writing I'd end up with a jumble of letters overlapping or the text wandering up and over other text and stuff like that. So the advantage isn't Graffiti itself, it's just the idea of one letter at a time, all in the same spot.
If you have a unixy laptop, installing a local wiki might be a solution.
There are many different wiki sistems, from very simple, to very very extensive. Im sure yu can find soemthing you like. Take your pick here http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines
Many will have plugins to draw simple diagrams, can attach files etc.
The one I use extensively is TWiki : http://twiki.org/
Both for note taking and group collaboration in my university department.
Complexity is a measure of our ignorance...
All of the above recommendations clearly illustrate a common problem with a lot of Linux users. It seems that although they are quick to deride Microsoft and their software, they don't actually have the slightest clue what the software is or what it can do. Certainly they have never actually used the software so they are completely unqualified to make ANY statement at all. But, that doesn't stop them for even one second. Here's a news flash, Microsoft has advanced beyond Windows 95, which you like to use as a benchmark. Microsaoft is about to release its fourth operating system since Windows 95. It is called Vista and it is amazing!
The Microsoft OneNote software that the original poster referenced is a wickedly cool piece of software that came out in 2003. There is nothing like it in the Linux world. Nothing like it! OneNote goes far beyond recording quick thoughts in a text editor. OneNote can store, organize, format, and search notes(more accurately, information) of any kind including
OneNote is a KILLER application that Microsoft hardly even talks about. Here is a Flash demo of OneNote 2003 for the unwashed masses.
While I support users of Microsoft systems, I use Linux exclusively and resent the fact that there is a plethora of really amazing software out there which there are no Linux equivalents for and worse yet, no one working on the problem. OneNote is a great example of this. But, the zealots would rather blindly mouth off against Microsoft than realize that while they are mouthing off Microsoft IS innovating. Microsoft is creating wickedly cool software that the Linux community isn't even aware of but, is quick to deride simply because it comes from Microsoft. The original poster even went so far as to ask if someone wanted to work with him to develop something like OneNote if nothing else existed. No one has offered or commented about this. All the posts have either been flames or recommendations of software that are nothing like OneNote.
Microsoft IS innovating. You, and me, are being left behind! I am sick of it and after six years of using Linux exclusively, I am considering switching to Microsoft Vista and leaving all this BS behind. How sad is that?