notes
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This is enough of a trigger for me to remember that day when I look back at it later. It’d be useless for anyone else reading it, but I write for me, not for a hypothetical person who gives a care about what I was doing in 2021. ↩︎
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Rhodia Webnotebook A5. Lamy Safari fountain pen, Noodler’s Baystate Blue ink. If I were ever going to enjoy handwriting in a book, I’m sure this is the setup that would have won me over. ↩︎
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None of this applies while on camping trips. I take a paper notebook with me to write in because I don’t have to charge it. ↩︎
Making Notes look like a Markdown editor, if you squint
I use Apple’s Notes app to, well, take notes. It’s the only non-Markdown I regularly use for such things. While I can, should, and mostly do try to use its built-in keyboard shortcuts to format text, sometimes I find myself looking at the screen wondering why ``` didn’t put it into a pre-formatted text mode. Today I decided to use Keyboard Maestro to indulge my Markdown muscle memory. The results are on my Gitea server.
It’s a collection of short little macros that let me type something like this:
# My title
## A heading
```
def hello():
print("Hey, world!")
```
---
And that's about it.
and have it render like this:
Hey! That looks and feels a lot like typing in a Markdown editor!
I don’t want to rely on this. It’s usually better to lean into an app and use it the way it’s built to be used than try to make it act like another. Still, if this reduces a tiny bit of friction on those days when I’m crossing my signals, I’ll be glad to have it.
Digital notes are better than paper
Techie people regularly rediscover paper and write about how they’ve created a good note taking system with it. I’m envious of them, as I’ve tried this many times but can’t do it. I keep thinking I’ll like writing on paper, but I don’t and likely never will.
A few years ago I started keeping a digital daily journal, not so much a diary with entries like “today I feel…”, but a record like “changed the van’s oil. Drove the kid to camp. Called Mom.”1 I was using Drafts on my iPhone as a sort of bullet journal, augmented with an action group I wrote. After a year of this, articles rhapsodizing on the wonderfulness of handwritten notes convinced me to switch to a paper journal and to get a nice fountain pen.2 I’ve used the physical process for about a year and a half now, and when I fill up this current notebook next month, that’s it. I’m going back to digital.
As I keep having to be reminded, pen and paper note taking is vastly inferior to digital in every way I care about. Other people love writing notes and that’s awesome, but I can’t escape the fact that I hate handwriting, and I often cut my thoughts short because I want to quit scribbling. Worse, the analog notes aren’t actionable. My Drafts workflow turns my day’s worth of bullet-style notes into a set of digital diary entries, new calendar events, and tasks in my task manager. I already carry my iPhone with me almost everywhere3 so I don’t have to remember to drag something else along. If I’m jogging and think of something worth remembering, I can say “hey Siri, remind me to…” and it records a note without me having to pause and jot the thought down. Paper would be nice for impromptu drawings, but since keeping a paper journal, not once have I drawn something in it.
For me, for my workflow, digital is vastly superior. Paper has its strengths, but none of them apply to how I want to use it. I mention all this for the benefit of other people reading articles about the benefits of paper note taking, and who feel vaguely guilty for not toting a notebook with them all the time. I think the important part is writing a note, not the medium it’s taken with.