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Notes 2025-07-27 by hkon

Over the years I have used some note-taking apps: Evernote, Onenote and Google Keep. I don't like any of them. For me notes are temporary, related to something I am working on or something I must keep within my "extended working memory" for about a week. Instead of dedicated note-taking apps I have two basic approaches.

1. Signal
2. Textfiles + Notepad++

I use Signal for my personal notes, if I need to remember something for a few days or to buy something specific from the store etc. These notes are also the only ones I sync on my devices, a feature you get for free.

In my daily work I use a basic system of text files. I write stuff down in a text file, then when it becomes saturated, I simply make a new text file. The same text file might contain some meeting notes, questions, some thoughts I have about implementing a specific solution, some pseudocode for algorithm design, requirements I can think of, test scenarios or other things I find necessary to write down. These notes are more for mental clarity than they are for remembering things. Given that these are just text files you can easily make your own todo-list like so:

[ ] Item 1
[X] Item 2
[ ] Item 3

I do this on days when I have a lot of tasks to complete which are not really closely related to each other.

I use Notepad++ as a text-editor, it keeps all the files open until you close them. I have enabled the document list in Notepad++, so that open files are shown on the left side, this makes it possible to have many documents open at the same time without losing the overall view of things. Since it is a very capable editor it's also used for everything else which does not involve coding C#. (For C# coding I use Visual Studio and Rider)

If I ever need to find some notes, which might happen, although extremely rare. I just grep for some relevant strings in my notes folder. I find myself grepping for URLs more than anything else. If you need grep, you can download GrepWin. It's awesome. A search in all open files in Notepad++ also does the trick, but I might close some files, although rarely, it happens. Which is why I default to GrepWin.

So there you have it. A system as old as the text file itself.