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I looked at Baskets, but it's way too complicated. Tomboy seems cool, but I don't know if a wiki-style note system is well-suited for CLASS notes. What is your experience?

This is for typed notes (not handwritten, nor on a tablet).

Clarification: A lot of people seem to be posting links to wiki-style note taking applications. I already have tomboy if this is what I choose. My question is whether wiki-style note taking applications are a good fit for class notes.

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Being a personal and subjective question, I'd suggest marking this Community wiki – AnonJr Aug 22 '09 at 16:13
I guess it depends mostly on the words used, it's not really a "must have" question, rather asking for a program for this usage, like some are asking about a program to synchronize files. But true that parts like "what is your experience" call for dialog and not for precise answers. – Gnoupi Aug 22 '09 at 17:16
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Are these going to be typed notes, or handwritten on a tablet? – Babu Aug 22 '09 at 18:07
I marked it for community wiki, and edited the post to clarify that I am talking about typed notes. – Matthew Aug 22 '09 at 19:15

9 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

I usually take my notes nowadays with Emacs Org mode. (And with remember mode, for quickies...). Would be interesting to see how does it fit with school.

As far as I can remember I did pretty outlined notes during school (when I felt the need...) so for me it would fit.

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I've had a lot of luck with org-mode. It's a fantastic way to capture and organize notes easily. – dulaneyb Aug 27 '09 at 0:22
+1 for Org mode – Ryan Thompson Sep 7 '09 at 5:00
up vote 2 down vote

I used TeXmacs quite a bit. It's basically a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX built on emacs. Once you get the hang of it (it only took me a week or so, and I didn't know much about LaTeX or emacs at that point) you can produce nicely formatted notes with little overhead vs. a plain old text editor, and easily convert them to PDF for later reference.

It was excellent for classes where my notes were basically in outline form with some math thrown in; for classes with a lot of complex graphs and diagrams it was often easier to keep a sheet of paper handy.

I can't say whether a wiki-like system would be better, though I found that whenever I had to cross-reference or search my notes, it was easy enough to just grep the LaTeX (even for math) that TeXmacs produced.

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+1 for keeping a sheet of paper around. – dulaneyb Aug 27 '09 at 0:20
up vote 2 down vote

Have you though about mind mapping? I've used sometimes both on college and work, it's very good method to take notes.

I've used Freemind and liked it. There is also a list of mind mapping software here

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up vote 2 down vote

Try TiddlyWiki for an offline browser based solution. You will need to tweak your browser's safety settings to allow this page to write to your filesystem.

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up vote 1 down vote

If your school has WiFi (or [you|your parental units] can afford a decent data plan) you might want to look into one of the many online note taking apps. That way it doesn't matter what platform you're on, or what computer you're on.

Barring that, theres a multitude of programs, and while you'll get a decent list of options here, you won't have the answer you want for your note taking style until you start trying them in classroom situations.

For instance, I thought OneNote wasn't going to cut it until I used it in a week-long training seminar my company sent me to. Ever since I've used it for most all of my note taking needs.

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"your parental units"? Is that supposed to be politically correct? Because, I find it quite offensive to refer to my (or anyone's) parents as "units". – hasen j Aug 27 '09 at 0:12
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I assume it's intended comically, since anyone using that to be politically correct is quite obviously a turd - and I don't think there's anyone quite that turdy out there. It just fits better in the context of computer talk (since saying "parents" there just has a sort of out-of-place tone) and I can't imagine that anyone using that phrase genuinely considers their parents nothing more than units. You, sir, seem to be out looking for things to offend you - don't make such a brash statement without considering the possibility of jest, or you'll offend far more people than he ;) – Matchu Aug 27 '09 at 0:23
I believe the reference to "Parental units" is from the movie "Coneheads" - imdb.com/title/tt0106598 You are perhaps too old, or not old enough to get it. – SuperJames Oct 6 '10 at 18:42
up vote 1 down vote accepted

Update

I settled on Tomboy as my note-taking application. I chose a desktop application over a web application for a couple of reasons:

  • It is much easier to have many windows open in a desktop application.
  • The UI is simpler and more flexible--it is not stuck in the browser's chrome.
  • Faster and more lightweight than running in a browser.

Not only this, but a web service for Tomboy is currently in the works, which should give me the best of both worlds.

Pros:

  • It seems a wiki-style editor is very well-suited for class notes.
  • Very simple and intuitive interface--I can focus on my note-taking.
  • Very lightweight
  • Syncs with a folder in my dropbox.
  • Web service in the works.

Cons:

  • Sometimes too simple (i.e. missing keyboard shortcut to make text fixed width, or increate font size)
  • Because of simple formatting options, not well-suited for mathematical formulas (including simple things like exponents and subscripts).
  • Sync is not yet automatic (allthough this is in development)
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up vote 1 down vote

Why not try NEVERNOTE - an Evernote clone for linux? Nice application that syncs with your Evernote web client... You can download a .deb package for easy installation. http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/

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up vote 1 down vote

For my personal notes and for my daily admin job i use the zim wiki to organize and find my thoughts on the desktop. Zim is also capable of using the apache webserver and can convert sites in different formats, such as html.

http://zim-wiki.org

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And is available in Windows, and most importantly, stores everything in text files (I keep the Zim folder in Dropbox, and it gets synced automatically). – Syzygy Aug 5 '12 at 20:09
And you can use it with git or bzr ;) – l1zard Aug 10 '12 at 14:13
up vote 0 down vote

Take a look at wixi:

Wixi is a multi-platform wiki application for the desktop. It is written in python/wxpython and uses txt2tags to generate text to many other formats. The goal is to provide a simple wiki tool around the txt2tags document generator and also be multi-platform.

enter image description here

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