Introduction

These are my notes as I keep track of my note-taking journey.

My Note-Taking Journey

Early Days

I used to be an avid note-taker - in school I would write profusely with pen and paper, filling up my notebooks. And most of the time I rarely go back to those notes due to lack of time, or interest, or both.

Digital Tools

I started with Evernote, but then as I move between different platforms and devices, most of these notes were lost. Partly due to the fact that they were not as important as I thought they would be, but also my mishandling of them.

I have moved from Evernote, Trello, Google Keep, Samsung Notes, Email apps (notes that stay in the draft), Apple Notes, Standard Notes, and now iA Writer.

Plain text

The previous note-taking apps that I’ve used were apps. Apps lock you into their own ecosystem and make it difficult to migrate to other apps or systems. With iA Writer, the notes are stored as plain text in you device’s filesystem. The beauty of plain text is that the OS (Mac, Windows, or Linux) can index the files and can be searched by using existing tools.

iA Writer, by default, store its files in iCloud or Google Drive and it can automatically sync and make your notes available to your other devices.

Lastly, since it’s plain text, you can do further processing of your notes and feed it into other apps, document management systems, and even to your favorite LLM (if you’re into that thing).

Conclusion

My note-taking journey has been a continuous process of learning and improvement. I started with pen and paper, moved to digital tools, and eventually moved to plain text and a simplified system. iA Writer is a good text editor, but I can also use a code editor or whatever text editor that comes with my device.

Portability and simplicity is king.