Ideal note app - From Notion to Emacs, back to Notion
Here I am going to discuss my ideal note-taking application.
I have used some different applications for this: Joplin, Notion, Obsidian, and Emacs.
I am going to discuss an interesting journey of going from Notion, to Obsidian, to Emacs, and then back to Notion.
Notion
I started using Notion since it is easy to organize things through Notion databases.
It also seemed like it had a nice design. It was easy to organize things into blocks, and make everything look nice.
But Notion had some major drawbacks, which made me look for a new application:
- Nothing good for taking math notes with LaTeX
- Little chance to edit exported PDF files
- Few user-made plugins. All plugins were made by the producers. If they had not made a plugin, I could not have it in Notion
- Little flexibility in making functions and custom keybindings
Obsidian
These drawbacks made me investigate Obsidian, as it seemed to handle these issues.
Obsidian had an answer for all the drawbacks of Notion:
- Math notes worked very nicely with the LaTeX Suite plugin
- Lots of user-made plugins
- You can, to a degree, make functions for how the program works
Emacs
But then I became interested in Emacs.
Emacs seemed to improve on some aspects of Obsidian:
- Everything is done with functions and keybindings. I do not need to look through a GUI to find some button to do something
- Emacs works very well with vim-motions
- Large user base for making plugins
- Can, to a larger degree than in Obsidian, make user-defined functions
Reconsidering note taking
I considered some aspects of note taking. I thought to myself, what's the ideal note-taking application?
It’s a kind of application where you can do everything.
A major thing that I noticed all the note-taking applications were missing was the ability to not only see what you yourself put in, but also things from other people. For example, being able to search up any image, look through blogs, etc.
One boast of Emacs relates to this. Emacs is boasted for being able to do almost everything. You can use Emacs for note-taking, for Twitter, etc.
But there is already an application that can do all of this, even better than Emacs, and that is called a browser. A browser can do almost everything.
Using a browser for note taking
I reconsidered how I could use a note-taking app through the browser.
Instead of trying to pack all functionality into a note-taking application like Notion, Obsidian, or Emacs, I could do this for a browser, which already works well for this purpose.
It has different websites which can be considered similar to plugins in some note-taking program.
Mainly I would use Notion for organizing in browser mode, and then simply use other sites for other functions: like Overleaf for LaTeX, Matcha for math, the Outlook website for email, etc.
But how can I make everything flow nicely? For example, Emacs has nice functions and keybindings for quickly navigating pages and using plugins.
The nice thing about a browser is that it has a bunch of plugins for almost everything. So for keybindings and small functions, I use the plugin Tridactyl.
It is a plugin designed for being able to use vim motions in the browser.
I can fast and easily navigate a website entirely with a keyboard using this plugin.
I can also make keybindings for fast navigation to different sites. By pressing Alt-o, I go to Overleaf, Alt-y takes me to YouTube, etc. With the :open command, I can easily navigate to previous sites using keywords, for example go into a blog just by writing the blog’s title.
So instead of using a single application as before, for most of note-taking and organization, I now use different sites in a browser and easily navigate them through the Tridactyl plugin. And if I want extra functionality in the browser, there is most likely a plugin for it.
