Looking for a light weight note program [duplicate]

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• How do you manage your knowledge base? [closed] 29 answers

This might belongs on superuser but for me it's part of programming so i will ask it here. I find I use notepad to keep chunks of data that are important but not important enough to keep in my head. The one problem with this is I end up with a lot of files on my desktop that I don't know what they are for, or I don't save the file and my computer gets rebooted for some reason.

So that big ramble leads to the question. I am looking for a note taking system that is light weight and easy to manage. I would rather it not be a huge application like onenote but if that is what you are using and is is working well for you could you explain how you are doing it?

Thanks

Erin.

Answer 1

I like ResophNotes. It's a very simple plaintext wiki with tags. It also syncs with Simplenote, so I can access my notes from a web browser if I need to.

I find that it fills the void between Notepad and a full-fledged wiki quite nicely.

Answer 2

Notepad++ is what I use that has tabs, keeps track of what is open and has lots of other functions should I need them. I use it for looking through the source on a web page, keeping notes of which bugs I fixed, what changes are there to requirements that I just want to keep all on one page somewhere, and a few other things that aren't quite big enough to merit opening Word or making a PDF.

Answer 3

Win7 Comes with Sticky Notes.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/sticky-notes.aspx

Personally I Like OneNote.

Answer 4

I love tiddly wiki, a personal wiki with taging, searching, history and easy plugins all in one html page. When combined with dropbox it is great to synchronize notes over machines.

Answer 5

I prefer Evernote. I can access from browser, desktop app, smart phone. Text is searchable, has tags, and separate notebooks for organization. Images can be uploaded from phone. Text in the image is recognized by OCR.

All devices can be kept in sync. There is an API.

Probably the best data capturing application I've ever seen. The organizational and sharing features work very well (Some of these require the fee based version.).

Answer 6

ActionOutline - very small, instant to respond, with tree-layout, note keeping program. I've put mine on alt-A to open, and on alt-S to close and save. Since then it has became one of the first things I install on a new machine.

Answer 7

Have you tried using the onenote online app. I use mostly the web app via office.live.com for note taking only using the Desktop app when I have to work with multiple notebooks at the same time. And with support for iphone and windows phone, I have access to it at most times.

Answer 8

I don't know if OneNote fits your definition for "lightweight", but that's all I use nowdays for note taking/management. The only downside is that I can't see OneNote notebooks hosted on SkyDrive from my Android phone.

Answer 9

I tend to use the same tool, I have used for the last 7 years, Textpad, available as shareware at textpad.com.

I have my daily to-do list, that I use to keep track of things to do, and not to do, and what things I have been working on.

I use to plan my day, as well to do all my coding in.

You can use the shareware version practically forever.

Powerful subfolder/regex searching, macros, syntax highlighting, very fast loading.

That's how I roll it old-school :P

Answer 10

I used to use Notepad++ until I needed to do some serious regex work. So I got vim - gvim, actually, which has a nice gui for Windows, the OS I work on.

I keep lots of logs of ad hoc projects on text files, and for me, text editors are great for tracking progress of projects, etc. And, whenver I write code, I typically comment the heck out of it, for my own reference months down the line.

In that vein, one solution would be to use a powerful text editor of whatever flavour, post stuff in existing text files, and then add 'tags' at the top of posts. For example, if you do a lot of work in C++, and you want to paste a snippet of code that would be relevant to potentially several projects, you might add "C++, " at the top of that post. Then, some time down the road you'd just search for 'C++' and some other combination of tags using the search feature in any editor and go to those parts of the text file. You could allow this file to get almost arbitrarily large and still be able to find what you need effectively in it.

Answer 11

I am finding RedNotebook to be an invaluable resource.

I discovered it while looking for a daily journal/diary program and find it works well for keeping notes about any number of subjects, as a todo list, as well as a diary.

Answer 12

I have been using AtNotes - http://atnotes.free.fr/ - for many years now.

It lives on the desktop and in the tray. You can color notes, resize notes, and hide notes. It's extremely light weight and doesn't have any silly border or title bar that would make it take up more space than necessary.

Answer 13

I've been using Workflowy for notes for many different projects. It's a really simple list making program where you can focus in on different levels of your list (hiding all of the other noise).

I use it to keep track of my todos on projects, notes on future ideas, as well as notes on knowledge base style items.

And it truly is lightweight. The only "feature" it boasts is exporting to a plain text list. They have a smartphone-friendly view, but right now it's read-only for mobile; hopefully that's not a dealbreaker

Answer 14

I also find RedNoteBook invaluable. I have been using it since November. I have pretty much abandoned my paper journal in favor of it. I really like it because I can use it on both Windows and Linux.

Answer 15

QuickFox Notes https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quickfox-notes/

As a web developer i have firefox open most of the time anyway. Combine this with Xmarks and you can be sure you aint gonna lose your notes:)