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Ask Slashdot: Open Tools For Logbooks and Note-taking?
New submitter leonstr writes: I'm a sysadmin and I like to record my daily work in a logbook: technical notes, work progress, actions from meetings, etc. I started with the word processor on the venerable Psion Series 3a but for about 10 years I've been using Amaya. It's FLOSS, cross-platform and uses an open file format (XHTML). Amaya has its quirks but I really like it; unfortunately it's no longer being updated and I feel it's time to change. So I wonder: what do other people use for recording their work? What works well and meets your requirements?
Emacs org mode can do notes perfectly, comes with selective archiving, and you can even schedule tasks and even record what time you spend on what. It's free form, exports to plenty of useful formats, the table mode is plain genius, and, of course, it's Emacs.
Stephan
I would similarly also suggest Microsoft's OneNote for all the same reasons. It's probably the best Microsoft product that you're not using. Since I operate in pretty much a straight up Microsoft environment, that's what I use. Keep and OneNote are both fantastic products.
Back when I was in support I used to open up Notepad and put .LOG on the first line. When you do that, every time you open Notepad it puts the time and date on a line for you. It was quick and easy to do that while on the phone. I'd use this to make notes regarding things that didn't really belong in the customer log, or for semi-personal work related research kinds of things. I always figured that if it mattered to me or anybody, I could hack up a quick script to parse it into some other format. It never mattered.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Submitter here. It's got a crash bug I can work around to avoid and I think XHTML is a dead end. And yes, I wondered what else was about. I normally have one file per year so I thought if I was going to change for 2016, it was time to see what the options were. Thanks all for suggestions so far!
Well, if I *do* have to justify it: the latest release from 2013 is for Windows, Mac and Linux. I can't get it to compile on recent Linux distros, it won't run on new Mac OS versions, there are features I have to avoid to workaround crashes on Windows. Features that I'd like will never be added and problems I encounter will never be fixed.
Emphasis mine. Also note that it is present tense.
Emphasize away. Something can work and you can like it and it still doesn't meet your needs. For example I like GIMP and it works fine but I have photo editing needs that it simply cannot handle so I have to use Photoshop instead. I like plenty of tools that I no longer use for one reason or another. Might be lacking needed/desired features. Might be a security problem. Might be incompatible with a particular operating system. Etc.