Notetaking solutions I've tried

· Tom van Dijk's blog

As a former high school student and soon-to-be college student, I have been struggling with note-taking. It's the 21st century, the digital age; note-taking should've never been easier... but the rabbit-hole is deep as the Mariana Trench and the possibilities endless, so being the tech-savvy guy that I am, who likes to experiment with new tools and software, I have, as of now, tried a grand total of 15 digital note-taking/task-taking solutions and/or combinations.

In this blog post, I will try to sum up all the note-taking systems/programs/editors I've tried to this date, what my experiences were, and what I think about them. Some entries in the list I have written less about than the others, because I either (i) haven't used it for an extended period of time, (ii) don't have much to say about it, or (iii) has been covered extensively in the "note-taking" media space before.

Beware: this post will probably not help you get off the productivity treadmill that you are probably on right now (you clicked on this after all), since I am also still very much on it and I like playing with software.

Beware: this is a bit of a ramble. Forgive me for my sub-par writing skills.

Obsidian #

The one I've used for the longest, and which has carried me through high school. It's killer for making notes for school, quickly jotting down stuff and then later iterating on it until you have something usable which you can link to, export, print out as a PDF, you name it.

Obsidian is a rabbit hole in and of itself, with plugins, themes, "systems" to organize it all, template vaults, you name it. There's even a plugin to run SQL-like queries on your notes and tasks, and it's one of the more popular ones...

The one and only big downside doesn't come as a surprise: it's an Electron app. They all are, at least, the "mainstream" ones. That's a bummer, but I can live with it. If I want to use something more lightweight to edit my notes I am free to do so.

The problem is that Obsidian vaults are nearly interoperable with all editors, nearly. The linking and tagging doesn't translate over well to any other editor that tries to understand Markdown links, so your Obsidian vault can only come to its full fruition in, well, Obsidian itself. People talk about vendor lock-in all the time when it comes to note-taking, and I'd call this a little bit of vendor lock-in sadly...

4/5

Logseq #

It's basically an Obsidian clone, except it has some funky features:

The thing with Logseq is that in its current state it needs a lot of work (they are doing a complete "v2" overhaul at time of writing this), so it's basically Obsidian from Alibaba right now. So currently there's no point in using it. Obsidian is just less janky and more flexible. I like the ideas in Logseq, but they aren't executed as nicely IMHO.

3/5

Dendron #

This is a VSCode extension, which might sound good to you, but I promise you it isn't practical. The VSCode shell and extension framework only gets in the way of good UX. Sure, you can carry over your existing setup and extensions, and probably be really cozy if you were a regular user of VSCode anyway, but what "setup" does one need to edit markdown files? Maybe the YAML extension for the frontmatter?

They have a nice philosophy where all notes are in a single flat directory and structure is added by "namespacing" notes like:

world.flora.grass.md
world.flora.tree.md
world.fauna.elephant.md
space.planets.mars.md

Then, one optionally could add YAML schema's that dictates the contents of a given subset of your notes. Say, you want to put all your notes under daily, where then they are nested by year first, then month, then day. You'd get notes like daily.2025.08.21.md. And every time you create such a note, that template will get assigned automatically, like QuickAdd in Obsidian and org-capture in Emacs.

Overall, nice idea, but it doesn't work for me. It's a bit too rigid and explicit for my taste. It's like writing GitHub actions: you don't want to be doing it, and it feels like unneeded boilerplate code (because YAML it Turing-complete now...)...

3/5

Notion #

This one looked cool at first, for NORMIES!!!

I'll keep this one short, there's been a lot of critique on this one for it's cloud-onlyness, corporateness, slowness, you name it. Although I've heard the tech behind it is impressive, or something ("How notion handles 200 billion notes without crashing", by Coding with Lewis on YouTube).

Neovim + Neorg #

I didn't dive to deep into this one, because it felt way too convoluted, and my Neovim config was dangerously close to 10kLoC at the time, so I got rid of it quite quickly.

The problem with this one is, it might sound like org-mode for an editor that isn't Emacs, but it isn't. It's an entire other ecosystem of its own; it doesn't operate on .org files, but on .norg! So honestly, that makes it go from a semi-widely-used format to a format that no-one has ever seen before, and I simply cannot "full send" all of my notes into it.

4/5

Neovim + plain markdown #

I know this is the note-taking system I should be using, be it with or without vimwiki. The problem with it is: it's boring. This is also the reason I know it's probably the best one on the list (simple and boring beats flashy and unreliable), but it turns out that my brain doesn't like to be productive, so even by writing this (in "the last note-taking system I'll ever need, trust me bro") I'm keeping myself on the "productivity treadmill"... such a bummer...

4/5

QOwnNotes #

This is one of the better ones on the list. It is foremost a QT app, but it works on basically anything, even macOS. It's basically a less bloated Obsidian. The surrounding ecosystem isn't as big, but there is a Script repository, containing all kinds of integration and/or export scripts. QOwnNotes does have its fair share of built-in features though, and most users who don't publish anything in blogs for example will most likely do just fine with the default OOTB experience.

But it's got something that Obsidian will never have: it's FOSS! It's licensed under GPLv2, making it one of the few desktop GUI solutions that doesn't want to steal your data.

For synchronization, it's got Nextcloud integration, making it perfect for people who are already invested in the self-hosted ecosystem. It also supports Evernote imports, and of course exiting Obsidian vaults work just fine with it.

In order to get the wikilinks/backlinks functionality to work though, you'll need to install the "Wiki links" and "Backlinks" scripts respectively, and for the wikilinks you'll have to disable the sanitization options in order to be fully compatible with Obsidian's wikilinks...

There's just one thing for me holding it back, and it's the jank. Just a few points:

4/5 because of it's jankiness

Emacs + Orgmode #

The OG note-taking system. It's been around since 2003, just a year before Markdown was invented. Since then, it's org-capture'd all sorts of note-taking gurus, Zettelkasten believers and GTD-ists. The reason why Orgmode is so good is not (necessarily) that it's an Emacs thing, or the way the formatting works. It's because the functionality on top is so nicely integrated with the underlying markdown. Think of the org-agenda, org-babel, org-capture, org-export-dispatch... It even exports to ODT and A Hugo blog!

I don't think I have much to say about Orgmode, as it has been discussed a whole lot already in the notetaking space. It's very cromulent for people who can take on the beast that is Emacs, and has stood the test of time.

One problem I frequently have is that generally it doesn't sync properly to my phone. With markdown, I could use Obsidian (Sync), and read and my notes inside of a proper mobile experience. Org has Orgzly, but it's just not there yet on UX. I've also tried the Emacs for Android port that has been recently released, but it's just jank galore since emacs is a keyboard-heavy piece of software (or menu hell).

5/5

Emacs + denote #

Denote isn't much of a piece of software or a system, but rather a way to name your files. It also stores relevant information in the notes' frontmatter, but it can work with any filetype, like videos or PDFs, since it's just a naming scheme and nothing more in its core.

By default, it uses .org files though, making it compatible with the previous entry on the list. You can just replace org-capture with denote most of the time when you want to create a note for something.

While using denote, your filenames will take the form of:

YYYMMDDTHHmmss--slugified-name__tag1_tag2.{org,md,txt}

This way, you can search for -name-part, since every "name part" starts with a dash (or whole name like -whole-name_), and you can filter by tag with _tag1, no regex required! If you are using regex though you can for example filter by year and month, like ^202208.

This, IMO, is the only one that has zero vendor lock-in, because it's just a way to name files. You could probably do something similar in 10 lines of bash...

When you don't use org as the filetype though, you lose some org-builtin linking features, and hence you'll need to rely on "denote-style" links, like [[denote:YYYYMMDDTHHmmss]], which, well, doesn't get picked up by most editors.

If you are interested, I highly recommend that you watch Prot's own demo video to Denote.

Also, I admire how Prot committed to his Emacs journey and Denote, he seems to have been slowly but consistently working on Denote for the past 3 years, judging from the GitHub history.

5/5, very much subject to change because I haven't used it a lot yet

nb #

This tool is a single, huge, feature-rich, probably Swiss-cheese-shaped, BASH script that probably only the author and God understand, for managing Markdown files and their attachments.

It's also a Swiss-army knife: it can do any note format, encryption, tagging, searching, wikilinks, tasks, workspaces... Hell, it even has its own web UI through nb browse.

It's really cool that someone has been able to make this, and I have a lot of respect for putting in the effort of actually building this, but it's just not for me.

3/5

BONUS: Task management #

This last section isn't really about "note-taking" apps, but more about managing your tasks list. Currently, I'm not really using either one, I just schedule "events" in my Google calendar when I want to do or think about a task, which isn't really a proper, coherent, "system", isn't it?

todo.txt/ntodotxt for Android #

Same as with the Neovim + plain markdown case. I know this is the one I should be using, but it's the most boring, so my brain refuses to start using it for all of my task management.

The ntodotxt app is really nice, since it could also in theory be used on Linux, since it's a Flutter app. It basically provides a shell over the todo.txt file format, so that your fat fingers don't need to type everything perfectly by hand (like datetimes, for example, can be input by the handy datetime widget in Android).

The only problem to me is synchronization: I could use something like Dropbox or Syncthing to hand over the file, but it isn't as nice as Google Tasks or Taskwarrior's built-in syncing, for example; Dropbox and Syncthing don't have any clue what to do when a conflict arises, that is, when two devices haven't talked to each other yet, but they've both made local changes to a file at the same time. This happens all the time if you're like me and don't use your PC at the same time that your laptop is turned on, for example.

4/5

Taskwarrior #

This one is really cool. I'll just list some of its features off the top of my head:

It's all inside of a single C++ CLI, which runs on Linux, macOS, and even Windows (through WSL2, but what Windows user that's nerdy enough to think about taskwarrior doesn't have that setup already?)

4/5

Google keep/calendar/tasks #

I know that I should be degoogling, and I want to, but the Google "workspace" ecosystem has been way too convenient for me. Is this what Apple users feel like all the time when they feel like this "need" an iPad to go along with their iPhone and MacBook???

I don't use this as much anymore, but it is just a simple, cromulent way to store your tasks and events. The Android apps are one of the best in the entire ecosystem.

4/5

Todoist #

This one might seem like you are finally being productive and finally getting your life together and organized, but it's not: it's just adding a lot of noise and extra features you now "have to use" before you can actually do the thing you want: input tasks and then later read them back in a list...

Also, it's centralized in the cloud and big corporate, so they'll probably screw you over in the future, with a high subscription fee for example. If you want a calendar, deadlines and room for more than 5 "projects" you'll need to pay €4/month, which might be respectable right now (although charging for such basic features seems a bit too greedy to me), but it might become more and more as time goes on, and VC money needs to make some ROI...

(and it has AI, so count me out anyway lol)

2/5

Obsidian again #

Obsidian for task management is kind-of a mixed bag for me. I just don't know how it's supposed to work. The only thing in Obsidian that would come close to the Orgmode agende I've found so far is the following, slightly convoluted setup:

Notwithstanding the amount of time and investment required to come up with "the perfect template" for your daily notes and "the perfect query" for your tasks. I've tried, and at the end of the day it just means you're procrastinating. With Org I just (setq org-agenda-files (list org-directory)), write TODO's anywhere, and do M-x org-agenda a, and I'm in. It isn't magic, just a good todo system. Obsidian just doesn't have that AFAICT...

Still I am able to find the utility in storing your tasks inside of Obsidian, and it's the same as with storing your tasks in Orgmode: it's unification. When you have unified your notes and tasks in a single workspace, you are able to link to your notes from your tasks and back. And generally that's really for documenting context.

2/5

BONUS 2: AI in note-taking #

There has been a new hype (a sub-hype to the general AI hype if you will) to incorporate LLMs and decision-making-algorithms into note-taking and task management respectively. I have a more general opinion about LLMs that then should be used as little as possible, but alas, people just can't resist handing off their (creative) thinking and research to a clanker, can they?

Take Supernote for example. It's basically ChatGPT for your notes. It can summarize videos, recordings, documents, etc. But it also generates content from your other notes, like flashcards, for example. To me, this just defeats the entire purpose of note-taking. Not only are you handing off all of your data and notes to these AI companies, but you are brutally destroying your knowledge retention.

The purpose of taking notes is to accumulate knowledge. You're not creating another Wikipedia, but you are using your notes to learn, in your own head. Writing can be a useful means to get a good understanding on a topic, and it's a form of active learning. What you are doing when you let an LLM do all the hard work is turning that into a passive learning experience, as all you can do with notes that were handed to you is, well, read them. But you aren't interacting with the subject matter in any meaningful way. The entire point of taking notes is lost.

To anyone considering buying a subscription to these platforms: please think twice, do not waste your money. I cannot stress it enough.

Conclusion? #

I hope that, if you are still looking for the "perfect match" for your notes/PKM, this post has helped you a bit with choosing your next (and definitely last) one. In the end, just use whatever works, I guess.

My problem is that I feel like I've tried everything and none of them actually "work" or stick with me... so I am at a loss. Currently trying Denote (this is my first note with it). Fingers crossed that "this is it"...

Maybe, just maybe, I'll get off of this treadmill for good someday. Probably when I get a full-time job 🤣...

#denote #emacs #neovim #notetaking #obsidian
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