DEV Community

5 Best Free Note Taking Apps for Programmers

AlbertoM on October 13, 2019

Originally published on my blog. Check out my blog for more articles or Github for my free-to-read JavaScript Ebook that covers all the new featur...

Read full post

bretthancox • Oct 14 '19

Emacs org-mode. Take notes, create actions, track time, plan work, view agenda, view to-do list, and all in text format. The single greatest change I've made to my productivity is keeping my brain in emacs.

Gayan Hewa • Oct 17 '19

The biggest reason that made me do the switch to emacs :D

mochsner • Oct 17 '19

I've been using org mode for about 2 months at work & couldn't agree more. Still working on a way to try to edit files from mobile - do you have a solution for this?

Raphael-Duchaine • Oct 17 '19

Never tried it but maybe something like Orgzly would do the trick : play.google.com/store/apps/details... . It seems to be the most talked about.

bimlas • Oct 17 '19 • Edited

TiddlyWiki

I came from the Vim era: it's a popular text editor, mostly used by technical people. I tried out different ways to store my thoughts, for example: plain text (Asciidoctor) files, Jekyll (blog platform), Boostnote (note taking software). Whenever I tried out new ways, these was my most important requirements:

Offline first I don't want to depend on companies - when it's closing its doors, my notes are gone
Export my notes easily If I ever want to change to another tool, I want to move my notes into that easily (at least with minimal modifications)
The best would be to store as plain text I'm using Git heavily, thus I like to keep my "backups" in a repository - for this job the text format is the best Besides this I can batch modify the notes via Vim
Be able to read my notes from everywhere I would like to read my notes from any computer without installing the "editor" itself
Be portable It has to work on Linux / Windows (Android is not reuired, but it's good if it works) - the best would be to use exactly the same GUI on every platform
Require as few as possible external programs For example compiling Asciidoctor files to HTML require Asciidoctor itself, which is written in Ruby -> needs that too
Tag feature My habit is that write a note and add a lot of related tags to it - I don't have to think where to put in the ToC, because I can find anything by tag intersections

Whenever I tried out new stuff, it turned out that it doesn't have some of these features, thus I switched back to old, but good plain text (Asciidoctor) format (because it's the most flexible) + Vim editor (syntax highlighting, search and replace, basic file navigation).

The problem with file based note taking is that

You are forced to use hierarchy You have to place your files somewhere in the directory tree, but it's not clear that a note about "NoteTaking" should go in to "TextEditing", "Software", "Practice", because it belongs to all of these "categories"
You can drop every note into one directory, but in this case looking for them is hard You can store the tags in the filename and use file searching, but if you want to share your notes with others, he/she will not know what to do
Hard to search for tags and tag intersections With regular searching tools (like Grep) you cannot do fuzzy match, but you can search for regex, like "tags:.Software.TextEditing", the disadvantages of this is that you has to store the tags in predefined (maybe alphabetical) order You can use fuzzy file searchers (like FZF or Everything), but you cannot get the list of tags to pick from that
Cannot include images and other media types into notes

So I continued searching for The Notetaking Software, then I found TiddlyWiki and fell in love with it, because it knows almost everything that I want, besides this it's incredibly hackable: you can turn it to any kind of software, not just notetaking (todo list, book, GTD, project documentation, family tree, photo gallery with categories and tags, etc.)!

For a better understanding of what is the real power of TiddlyWiki, please read Joe Armstrong: My Eureka Moment with the TiddlyWiki then have a look at these examples:

Badass design by h0p3
Managing D&D and similar table top games (just download and open the HTML file - it's the entire wiki itself, all in one)
Include videos, images, music, etc. in to your wikis with RichLinks plugin (see Demos tab)
TiddlyMap for mindmaps
Cardo for project and task management, Getting Things Done (GTD)
Zork like game

If you have additional questions, look for the TiddlyWiki mail group, there are very helpful people (seriously, this is the best community I met on the net).

Victor Dorneanu • Dec 3 '19

Amen! :) Great to see you here as well :) And really awesome sum-up of Tiddlywiki's capabilities.

Talha Mansoor • Mar 30 '20

@bimlas I was going through comments to see if someone has mentioned TW5. Your comment deserves to be a post in itself.

BTW, good to see you here. I use a few of your TW5 plugins.

Bharat • Oct 14 '19

Emacs org-mode and sync with private(encrypted using git-crypt) github repo.

Termux and decrypt on mobile and view in orgzly.

Granted this is not easy to setup and has manual step to push and pull on mobile but everything is encrypted end to end and free 😄

mochsner • Oct 19 '19

Were you required to root your phone to clone the repo in a directory accessible to orgzly? I looked into this a few weeks ago, but recall running into hurdles with security restrictions

Bharat • Oct 19 '19 • Edited

No I have not rooted. Just install Termux and then run termux-setup-storage in termux to access device storage. Now you can install git, openssh from termux command line. Navigate to sdcard and you can clone any project and access it in Orgzly. I wrote two functions in .bashrc to push and pull to my private repo. That is the only manual step I was talking about.

Hemanth Bollamreddi • Oct 14 '19 • Edited

Joplin
Open source, markdown, sync, encryption, dark mode, cross platform.

AlbertoM • Oct 14 '19

It looks very interesting, thanks for sharing

Andrew (he/him) • Oct 14 '19 • Edited

This is what I use. It's great, and really easy to get used to

Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Oct 15 '19

I'm replacing Markdown by Asciidoc.
Markdown is broken, it's sad
It has all the right ideas to start with, so everybody starts with it, and then everybody notices it's not enough and do its proprietary extension of Markdown.
There are so many Markdown to choose from that after getting once too much in that rabbit hole, I decided to switch to Asciidoc.
Asciidoc is basically markdown done right.

AlbertoM • Oct 15 '19

I never used it, could you elaborate more on daily use cases where you found markdown to not be enough/be broken?

Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Oct 15 '19 • Edited

Well everyone has a different Markdown.
GitHub has its extensions, some of which makes sense for everyone, others only on GitHub.
Dev.to has liquid tags. They are great but again not part of a standard format.
Static website generators have a yaml front end matter. Why not?
What if you want a table of contents? Just add another external tool.
What if you want to use variables? Nope.
What if you want to structure your work by including another file, or a part of another file? Nope.
The syntax for inserting an image is mostly worse than plain HTML.
Ever tried to maintain a table in markdown? That sucks as lot.

Common Markdown tried to find a common ground, the Markdown Creator was not happy about it, but also it turns out it's not possible.
Everyone use a different Markdown plus something.

Asciidoc is my Markdown++
See here and the comparaison with markdown

asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#...

AlbertoM • Oct 15 '19

Oh yeah, I agree with your points. I'll give asciidoc a try, thanks.

Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Oct 15 '19

The key is to find a converter Markdown to Asciidoc, to start with what you already know. I am doing this in IntelliJ idea but there is probably a lighter alternative 😃
Pandoc comes to mind.

Amin Mohammadi • Oct 14 '19

what about google keep??

AlbertoM • Oct 14 '19

It's good to quickly write down ideas, but I don't see it as a good option for proper notes

Paul • Oct 14 '19

Keep tops the list for me because it allows collaboration. I use it for code snippets, blog posts, links to check out later. My wife uses it for notes and grocery lists. It's easy to add each other to notes we want to share.

Michel Renaud • Oct 14 '19

I use Microsoft OneNote.

Aravind Kothandaraman • Oct 14 '19

Cant speak for markdown support from MS Onenote but another great tool with lots of features and obviously easy sharing, sync etc. It does have password protected tabs or sections.

Michel Renaud • Oct 14 '19

It’s not the greatest for code, but usually gets the job done. I could use something else, but I have a lot of stuff in OneNote already and don’t really feel like adding yet another piece of software.

Aravind Kothandaraman • Oct 14 '19

Exactly. I use trello plus OneNote to typically lay down my priorities of tasks, personal projects, learning etc.

Anton Rusak • Oct 14 '19

Simplenote by Automattic.

Has a clean interface
Works everywhere
Supports markdown
Is able to publish markdown documents as webpages

The clients are open source though they use a proprietary cloud to store data.

AlbertoM • Oct 14 '19

I like simplenote too, it didn't make it in my top 5 though

Anton Rusak • Oct 14 '19

May I ask why? :)

AlbertoM • Oct 14 '19

No syntax highlight mostly. I still use it to take some quick notes, but not programming stuff, mostly recipes lol

Humberto A Sanchez II • Oct 17 '19

I work exclusively on Mac OS-X. My favorite is the built-in Notes app. It syncs across the iPad and phone IOS apps (through the iCloud). It has just enough formatting and the ability to categorize notes. Just enough and not too much.

Ted Bergeron • Oct 17 '19

I use VS-Code because I like to write notes using AsciiDoc. I used to use Markdown but I've switched because AsciiDoc is a lot richer. There is an AsciiDoc extension that lets you preview your notes side-by-side. marketplace.visualstudio.com/items...

I love the side-by-side previewer. I like to link my notes together. The Markdown previewer allows you to click links and browse to your other notes within the previewer.

Clicking links in the AsciiDoc previewer doesn't work, so I browse them in Chrome using the AsciiDoc live preview chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/... (also available for FireFox)

Hibs • Oct 16 '19

You can also take advantage of a GitBooks to connect your repo and have your notes published online, available privately or publicly.

My team tried this workflow, and we had a lot of trouble getting GitBook to consistently sync to our repo (plus the error reporting wasn't that great), so much so that we abandoned it altogether :/ It was nice while it lasted, though.

AlbertoM • Oct 16 '19

Oh that sucks, do you know of other solutions similar to it?

Hibs • Oct 17 '19

Unfortunately not for that specific workflow. We ended up just building a custom solution where we edit our docs using custom markdown in any code editor with Markdown preview (most of my teammates just use VS code but I use MacDown), push that to a Github repo, and then deploy that to our live site.

Adrian Matei • Oct 20 '20 • Edited

I don't really use notes per se, if then google keep (not very happy sharing any data with google), but for things that need to stick I use bookmarks.dev to manage my dev bookmarks and code snippets.

kelvinkoko • Oct 26 '19

Great article in comparing different note taking solution!

I am also the kind of dev that "take note in VS Code'" because i like the simplicity and the syntax highlight (because some time, i will use it as a temporary space for checking log and server response)

But lack of sync and mobile access really bothering me.
With that concept in mind, I am working on a note taking app for developer. (get.stashany.com)

I would love to hear more feedback from experience note app user like you and hope it can be something that really suitable for developer :)

Nandini Sharma • Oct 18 '19

Great list AlbertoM. I'd like to suggest one more tool in your list - ProofHub. It helps you create notes, organize them, collaborate on them, and work smarter. You can create notes, select colors for them, subscribe people to them, keep them private, attach files, collaborate on them smarter, and store them in notebooks at one place. Please visit this link (proofhub.com/features/notes) to know more.

Wilfred • Oct 14 '19

I use Evernote for note taking but I don't think it has markdown. Thanks for sharing the resources

Suzanne Aitchison • Oct 15 '19

I used to use Evernote and recently switched to Notion - it's so much better for drafting notes that can be copied to markdown or keeping code snippets! The best part is you can import any existing Evernote notebook into it, so if you do decide to switch it's super easy 😁

Wilfred • Oct 15 '19

Thanks, Notion looks really good!

AlbertoM • Oct 15 '19

Yeah, writing notes in a format that you can easily copy paste on different places is great.

AlbertoM • Oct 14 '19

Thanks, glad I helped!

Neville Franks • Oct 14 '19

Our free Knowledge Base webapp, Clibu maybe of interest, clibu.com It works on Desktop Browsers, Tablets and Smartphones.

I'm working on Clibu Notes which will have Markdown support, full offline capabilities, a streamlined UI, built using Web Components. Early demo's and more information on our Blog blog.clibu.com

Emmanuel Raymond • Oct 16 '19

+1 for Boostnote, that's what I use on my Linux machine.

Ben Sinclair • Oct 15 '19

I use Vim or a physical lined notebook. In vim, I tend to write notes in a kind of pidgin markdown, with headings as hashes and so on but not bothering with link wrappers, etc.

Brett • Oct 14 '19

I enjoy Standard Notes although you need a paid subscription to use the extensions, which their are a lot of. standardnotes.org

Jacob Weimer • Oct 16 '19

The encryption is the main selling point in standard notes for me!

Yonas • Oct 14 '19

I have been using Boostnote and it is awesome!

Si • Oct 14 '19

Ulysses - I write everything using it.

AlbertoM • Oct 14 '19

I like Bear, but in order to sync between devices you need to pay and I think there are free solutions that are just as good

Marshall Unduemi • Oct 14 '19

I have not used any of it, but am a programmer, thanks, let me lay down 👇 my hands on your recommendation

Bilal Elreda • Oct 15 '19

I like Workflowy.

Mauro Garcia • Oct 14 '19

Good tip! thanks

Guillermo • Oct 21 '19

You should check out Tiddlywiki. It is an awesome serverless note taking one-page app. It can run on a server, it has a npm package. It is totally customizable and programmable

Alan Solitar • Oct 15 '19

Boost note for sure!

Nucu Labs • Oct 17 '19

You forgot giuspen.com/cherrytree/, which is actually free and open source not unlike the first one on the list. I just clicked the link and saw a 'Pricing' page

Kamal Joshi • Jul 17 '21

I am also building a notes app specific for software engineers.
Just released the initial beta.
upnotes.io

miku86 • Oct 16 '19

Does anyone have a suggestion for a tool with all of these features?

Kanban or Scrum Board
Timer
Runs on Linux/Browser & smartphone

Ynoa Pedro • Oct 18 '19

Notion is an really awesome app

eLefTrick6 • Oct 18 '19

I love using BoostNote

💾 bun9000 • Oct 17 '19

Inkdrop!!

Rickard Engberg • Oct 17 '19

I checked out Notion and think I really like it. It's like a cross between an editor and WorkFlowy, if you've tried that.

Jim Priest • Oct 16 '19

Notable github.com/notable/notable

Is free but recently he's indicated this has become his full time job so may not be free in the future.

Duy K. Bui • Oct 17 '19

boostnote.io/ anyone?

Luka • Oct 16 '19

Notational Velocity for life

Abduraimov Mo'minjon • Oct 17 '19

Microsoft OneNote

Stuart Luscombe • Oct 17 '19

Our team uses OneNote for pretty much everything, keeping quick notes, meeting minutes, project ideas etc.

It could definitely be better if it supported code formatting, but it does the job.

Ivan Iraci • Oct 15 '19

Emacs org-mode + orgzly + (dropbox|github|rsync|ftp|whatever) are all I need for all my daily note taking needs (both work and everyday life related).