DEV Community

Plain text note taking system using markdown for technical notes

Gaurav Singh on October 19, 2019

Hello there, As an engineer working in tech, one of the most important habits to develop over time is your knowledge base. With each passing month...
Collapse
 
prateekmathur1991 profile image
Prateek Mathur

That's a wonderful post. I was frantically searching for an online note-taking application after my corporate network blocked Notion, and found this approach of using markdown and VS code for note-taking.

What I am missing here is the capability of a notion-like WYSIWYG editor, where for example I type '/' to enter the command mode, and add a new first level heading, instantly adding a heading, instead of using # to indicate a first level heading.

Collapse
 
hakanu_ profile image
Hakan Uysal

Hey great post and actually I'm on the same mindset for my notes after trying so many different options.

At the end I ended up building my own: github.com/hakanu/pervane

Any feedback is welcome!

Collapse
 
vskand profile image
vskand

Good read.

Lately I have been using hackmd.io which you can link to GitHub.

Of course you are relying on their servers (and not that long ago they had some issues but they were/are in beta) but you can have everything synced, live preview on the side, export to HTML, PDF, etc and a straightforward list layout.

They lack search functions, as you can only search for notes names/titles though.

Overall highly recommended.
Believe it or not, I was using plain .txt files and Google drive. Yes, I am ashamed. Since I found this (and markup in general) life got a little bit easier!

Collapse
 
subbramanil profile image
Subbu Lakshmanan

Great article, Gaurav!! Good to see another mind thinking like the same :)

I switched to vscode-markdown-github solution a couple of years ago. I love it and have never gone back to Evernote/OneNote.

My Dev Notes

One thing I would love to have is to have a private 'website' of notes that I can browse(no editing) from a mobile/iPad. Tried to integrate 'Gitbook' with GitHub, but the integration failed due to the rate limit on GitHub. But that was when I tried to integrate three years of notes. Not sure if the rate limit is due to the number of files/commits over the years.

Would love to hear your thoughts on 'Gitbook'.

Collapse
 
ottovanluchene profile image
Otto Vanluchene • Edited

Onedrive with all my markdown notes (Typora App) is the best thing ever.
Windows Indexes the files so I can find them quickly ( You do have to turn off files ondemand feature of onedrive )