Note-taking Apps for Command-line People

Save hundreds of hours, I'll show you which one to choose.

When I started my note-taking journey I was overwhelmed with the number of options that were available. Making decisions is one of the most draining tasks we can do as human beings. I spent several hundred hours trying out tools, tinkering with them, and switching between them.

Today I will save you those hours.

In this newsletter I will go over some available options. Then I’ll show you the tool I’ve chosen and used for several years now. I’ll share the reasons why I made this choice and why I recommend you do the same.

What are we looking for?

Google “note-taking apps” and there will be a wall of blog posts about different options. Let’s define what we are actually looking for.

There are two categories of note-taking apps:

• Simple apps to store small notes (Like Apple Notes).

• Apps that go beyond storage: making links between notes, visualization, etc.

Although you can do incredible things with simple apps, we want to build a system where we can store our notes and retrieve them with lightning speed.

We need these functions:

• Ability to link notes

• Search

• Visualization of links

• Accessibility from portable devices

As a command-line focused engineer, there are some more requirements we might consider:

• Locally available text files

• Run scripts on files

• Use our preferred text editors

• Customize your editing and reading experience

Notion

One of the most popular tools out there is Notion. It’s popular for a reason: it’s an amazing tool. I spent about 8 months in Notion and built my first systems there.

Notion is used to run entire companies, it’s very powerful. It can be a good place to start because it’s free and has a big ecosystem of free templates available.

What’s unique to Notion is that you can create relational databases. This allows you to do incredible things with your notes, but on the other hand, it also has a huge potential for distraction and hours of needless tinkering.

For this reason alone, I don’t recommend Notion anymore. There is simply too much productivity YouTube available about it, and I fear you’ll make the same mistakes I did when starting out: watching videos about note-taking systems instead of actually taking notes in a simple system that works.

The main problem with Notion is that your files live in the cloud. You cannot access your files on your local harddisk, which means you can’t run scripts on them, back them up as you want, or open them in your favorite text editor. cough vim zettelkasten cough. And there’s the issue where Notion employees can access your notes at any time if they need to.

In summary, I think Notion is a great option for people who are used to doing everything from the web browser and don’t care about privacy or locally available text files.

Evernote

If you are looking for a tool that allows you to build a second brain, consider this option. Evernote combines task management and planning with note-taking.

However, we are not building a second brain, we are building a note-taking system.

This is an important distinction.

I like to keep my note-taking system as a separate entity in my productivity setup. We will look into building a complete second brain in the future.

Roam Research

I briefly considered Roam Research. It looks like a very powerful tool which also has a great ecosystem around it. It allows linking of notes and visualization, so we are getting closer in our search for a tool.

Unfortunately, it did not make the cut.

Firstly, Roam is also cloud based. You can’t access your files on your machine.

Secondly, it’s not free. Although they offer free plans, you will have to pay to get the good stuff.

Enter Obsidian

After years of experimentation, I found that Obsidian is the best tool for the job because it literally ticks off all of the required and desired features we established earlier.

Obsidian uses markdown files which are stored on your machine. An Obsidian Vault is nothing more than a collection of markdown files. Yet, the Obsidian editor allows you to do very powerful things with your files.

Firstly, we can link notes by simply typing the title in [[double brackets]]. When a note is linked, the connection between the notes is visualized in Obsidian’s unique graph functionality.

When you collect notes for several years and diligently link them to other notes, an impressive graph emerges which you can use to explore your notes visually. This is what my graph looks like with over 3100 notes:

Search

Secondly, Obsidian has great search functionality. You can search by filename, note contents, tags, and even path based. This enables you to find your notes with lightning speed.

Sync

Thirdly, Obsidian offers functionality to sync your notes between devices. This satisfies our requirement to access our notes from anywhere. I use Apple iCloud to sync my Obsidian vault to my iPad and iPhone. You can also use Git to back up and sync your notes between devices, or you can use their paid service Obsidian Sync. I used that for a year and it’s an outstanding way to sync between devices, and a wholesome way to support the Obsidian project.

Command Line

Finally, as command-line focused engineers, we get to do what we like best. With Obsidian, we can open our files with the editor of our choice and customize our editing experience.

Because everything is stored in markdown files, we can do anything we want with the files from the command line.

My note-taking system is built around the concept of the Obsidian Vault but remains fully compatible to use with (neo)vim. You can find more information about my Neovim Zettelkasten in this article: My Neovim Zettelkasten

We stay in full control of our files. We can back them up however we like, modify them however we like, and we can build our own custom editing experiences, while still keeping everything compatible with Obsidian.

This is important: there will be situations where you are on a system where you can only use Obsidian. Or there will be situations where you can only use the command line. Your note-taking system is the basis of everything, so you should be able to use it anywhere.

Stop watching videos, download Obsidian, and start taking notes today. It’s not important how you take notes, we will get into that. It’s more important to get started and to begin building the habit of taking notes during any activity you do.

Next week, we will look into note-taking methods and how to actually start taking notes.

If you want to get started already, you can consider joining my Skool community where you get unlimited access to my note-taking courses.

Alternatively, you can purchase the courses individually on Udemy where they are receiving 5 star reviews every week:

Full Obsidian Note-taking System in 1 Hour

Zettelkasten in Obsidian

Mastering Goal Setting in Obsidian

Updates

A huge milestone was achieved last week: my YouTube channel reached 10k subscribers! I hosted an AMA live stream where I shared knowledge for 1,5 hours straight:

View the livestream here

Working

Last week I handed in my leasing car and received my final salary, and now I am officially completely detached from traditional employment. It feels amazing, but daunting at the same time. It sounds dramatic, but my survival is now dependent on the income I can generate from freelancing and my online teaching work.

I’m working hard to provide value to my free and paid communities, and then the rest will sort itself out. Hard work will always be rewarded.

As I’m working on a course on Online Presence & Social Media, I’m also growing my own presence, and it’s working quite well so far.

All of the analytics are pointing up. Here are my Twitter analytics for the past week:

Reading

During my daily walks I’m now listening to the Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It’s rare to find so much wisdom and value compressed into 5 hours.

Creating

Feeling frustrated with the increased volume of obviously AI Generated content I see on the internet; I wrote the following article:

Waking up one day with a mass of tabs in my browser due to a very busy day, I felt inspired to create this video on the Importance of Digital Housekeeping:

And finally, in addition to a 10k subscriber giveaway announcement, I created this video to inform about the new direction of my channel:

That’s all I have to share for now, hope to see you in the next newsletter, dear reader!

Are you convinced by the advantages of Obsidian? Or are you choosing something else? Let me know in the comments.

And if you found this valuable, please subscribe and share this post to your favorite social media channel. It really helps.

Yours,

Mischa