Note-taking is something I haven't really done in a while, and a blog post I read reminded me about it
Reading a blog post from isa with her thoughts about reading notes made me realize that I haven’t really taken any, in years.
I remember very clearly how I used to be a complete Google Keep fanatic, late in high school and when starting university. It was awesome at the time, having instant access to all my notes on every device I logged into.
The app was quick and simple, the website was light enough. I used it for some time and I had a blast doing so. I recommended it to family members and schoolmates alike.
Eventually, free and open source software ruined my innocence I opened my eyes and realized Google was data mining every detail of my life, and I decided to look for alternatives.
Obviously, nothing was quite close to Keep’s simplicity, but I ended up landing on Joplin, which came quite close, and had Markdown support!
Joplin is pretty good to this day, and I used it for a long time for most of my time at University.
It became a true life saver to take my notes during online classes, due to the covid pandemic. LaTeX support, which I used heavily for equations and formulas during math related courses for my mechatronics engineering degree, was a fantastic feature I used a lot at the time.
I took notes during lectures and lessons, while watching videos or searching information on websites and books online.
Once I learned to use Vim, and realized that Joplin has a Vim mode built-in, things were even better than before—although I decided to use Neovim as my external editor for it sometimes.
Eventually suckless ideals ruined my innocence I realized that Joplin was built on Electron, and it needed way too many resources for what it did, and so, I ended up not using it as much, eventually removing it from my devices.
Later on, I landed on Doom Emacs, and Emacs itself. I learned and fell in love with org-mode for a bit, and I remember using it for documentation during some of my programming courses, such as Embedded Systems, where I used code blocks that could be executed directly from my org files, and it kind of rocked.
I had the best notes in the whole class, and I am sure half of my classmates would not have passed if it wasn’t for me. Let alone the Linux knowledge I already had, which made playing around with raspberry pi’s a delight.
Of course, that very same suckless mentality made me feel like I didn’t actually need all of that Emacs functionality just for some plain text files, and once University was over, it turned out that I really didn’t, to be honest.
Nowadays, I barely take any notes, I still do, but only for the most basic tasks or things I don’t want to forget.
I use Note to Self on Signal, and sometimes Markor, to write whatever notes I may need on my phone.
At work, I just use a plain text file and markdown format for any substantial info I may need to remember. I have dabbled with todo.txt a few times, since Markor supports it anyway. I like how quick and simple it is, but I end up forgetting and falling back to writing whatever I want to remember.
Sometimes I feel like I should take way more notes for things, especially those I learn at work. I do have a file with some documentation I wrote for myself, but I haven’t updated some things in a while. I feel like some day I’ll end up shooting myself in the foot for not taking more notes at my workplace, but well, it’s fine right now.
Here are my notes and media consumed from June 10 to 16, 2025! Family visits continue, video gaming esssays, progress on the same games, and some work shenanigans.
