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Organizing Notes
Describes how I take, store, and edit various notes.

https://unsplash.com/photos/5bYxXawHOQg
Data should be easily updatable (this is the input) & easily accessible (this is the output). Currently, my notes are stored on a GitHub repo. That means:
This can be broken into 2 scenarios, depending on sensitivity of data.
To have them easily accessible, I want them to be full-text-indexed and searchable.
- I want the insensitive data to be searchable online, so that I can have access to my notes without access to my computers.
- Existing solutions: Are there any? What are they? How good are they?
- GitBook (Figure 1)
- pros:
- Has URL form -- e.g. https://tslmy.gitbook.io/k/?q=typora would give you search results in my Wiki with the keyword "typora".
- cons:
- Search is dynamically loaded -- slow to render.
- An online service -- does not work offline.
- GitHub (Figure 2)
- pros:
- Has URL form -- e.g. https://github.com/tslmy/know/search?q=typora&unscoped_q=typora would give you search results in my Wiki with the keyword "typora".
- Statistically loaded -- renders faster than GitBook.
- cons:
- An online service -- does not work offline.

Figure 1: Search UI on GitBook

Figure 2: Search UI on GitHub
- Existing solutions: Are there any? What are they? How good are they?
- OneNote / EverNote / Notability
- pros
- robust functionalities
- cons
- walled gardens
- macOS Spotlight
- pros
- really easy access -- integrated with the OS
- cons
- does not support notes in walled gardens (not even Zotero references)
- not portable -- different OSes offer incoherent experiences. This actually resembles the "walled garden" critique from the previous option.
The best option for now I've found is GitBook. It's got a decent webUI editor (although it has a list of quirks -- see below -- and is slow on an old computer), syncs to your GitHub, and its syntax is interoperable with Markdown.
List of quirks of GitBook:
- aggressive undoing
- when you copy something from a list and paste it somewhere else, the whole list indention builds up again. e.g., if you copied some text from a 3rd-level nested list and past it on a 2nd, you will get a 5th-level result.
TODO: This section needs expansion.
Stick with GitBook for adding & updating public notes. TODO:
- Find a way to auto-update local copy of GitBook notes.
- Validate that I can conveniently search locally all my notes (that means private notes as local
md
files + public notes from GitBook) withripgrep
. - Add a custom search engine to my Chrome that searches the GitHub repo directly.

Classifications of my writings & notes, and where to put them.
Type | Updatable? | How Refined? | Can Made Public? | How valuable to others? |
Diary | Never | -2 | N | 0 |
Personal Journal | Daily | -3 | N | 0 |
Credentials / Passwords | At times | N/A | N | 3 |
Academic papers | Never | 3 | Y | 3 |
Various Essays | Never | 2 | Y | 2 |
Quick Notes | Seldom | -1 | N | 1 |
Reviews / Summaries | Maybe | 1 | Y | 2 |
Web Clippings | Never | N/A | N/A | 1 |
Translations / Transcripts | Never | 3 | Y | 2 |
N/A
means "not my own work, thus does not apply."- Numbers are on a 7-point scale.
Crossed-outs are what I used to use but moved away from (due to death of product, etc.).
- Course notes / meeting notes that better be hand-drawn: Notability (iPad)
- Diary, personal journal: Day One OneNote
- Course reviews and summaries: Evernote Notability, course-specific folders, and -- in cases that the notes may be shared -- my academic website.
- Scribbles, jots, etc.: A folder full of plain text/markdown files.
- Synced with Simplenote Dropbox.
- Read with Notational Velocity, nvALT fsNotes.
- Coding/writing temporarily - Sublime Text
- Quickly generating PDFs from Markdown - Mou Typora
- Academic writing (essay, things with a formula/equation, etc.) - LyX
- For language-checking - Hemingway Editor + SlickWrite
- Mind-mapping - MindNode
- (Math stuff excluded)
- (Office suites excluded)
- (Reminder and Calendar excluded)
- (Rare-format editors excluded)
- Mobile Syncing - Dropbox
- Google Office - Google Drive
- Microsoft Office - OneDrive
- Backup - Box
Last modified 2yr ago