UbuntuFilter: Help me find a well-organized note-taking or notebook program.

February 12, 2009 8:07 PM

UbuntuFilter: Help me find a well-organized note-taking or notebook program.

I like taking notes. A lot. For a number of topics. And the good ol' text editor and file folders combo doesn't cut it anymore.

Here's what I envision: I make a notebook for a new topic I'm interested. Say, Movies. When I make this Movies notebook, I'll have a tab on the left side of my program window that has a tab for it, along with my other notebooks (maybe classes I take at college, Music, Beers, and the variety of other things that I like).

When I click this tab, maybe a little dropdown list will come out with the different entry titles on it. Say, Back to the Future filming locations, Movies Staring Keanu Reeves, and Grammy Award Winners. I click the title I'm interested in, and on the right side of the window the text is quickly loaded, I can edit it on the fly, and make a new entry or jump around to others if I like.

Does anything like this currently exist? I'm flexible on the asthetics of the thing-- I just want an efficient way to store information on the numerous topics I'm interested in, and hope to save some bookmarking/Documents folder space with it.

Other options that would be a plus: tagging, image functionality, maybe a to-do list, and printing of notebooks.

posted by nayten to computers & internet (9 comments total)

BasKet
posted by limon at 8:28 PM on February 12

BasKet will get you great flexibility with types of media and notetaking styles, but is heavy on resources.

I use Notecase for taking school notes, and it seems to do what you want. It's barebones graphically, multi-platform, search functionality, basic text manipulation. It sounds like, for what you want, you could basically keep one document file with all your lists in it. Exports to HTML or prints. As of the new versions, imports images. Also does tagging (if you right click on a node and hit node properties).
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 8:37 PM on February 12 [1 favorite has favorites]

Try zim. It's marketed as a desktop wiki. It may not be perfect, but you could make it work I think.
posted by valadil at 8:38 PM on February 12

Have you tried Tomboy Notes that ships with Ubuntu (under Accessories)? It seems to offer the basic funcionality you're looking for.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 8:55 PM on February 12

Zim looks solid, but not quite what I'm looking for at the moment. I like Tomboy Notes, but it just doesn't have what I need out of an app-- one window is the way to go. I do use Tomboy Notes as a more details To-Do list app though.

Basket looks great, and Notecase looks to be what I had in mind. I'll check these two out for sure. Thanks to all for the suggestions. If there's anymore, please keep them coming!
posted by nayten at 9:02 PM on February 12

Not an app, but I'll throw it out there: tiddlywiki. There's a little work involved for manually linking everything, but this pays back in flexibility, of course. The major selling point is the fact that you can make it live on a memory stick, and it'll work with any computer you ever encounter.
posted by 7segment at 9:32 PM on February 12

TiddlyWiki looks pretty neat, but just not practical for my style of note management. I can think of some situations and environments where that would be a great option to have though, especially with those GTD variants and USB uses-- so I'll keep that one bookmarked. Thanks for the suggestion!

I think for now I'm going with Notecase. BasKet is KDE-hungry, but I'm going to give it a chance as well.

Thank you very much, hive-mind! As always, if there's anymore suggestions keep posting them-- I'll still be checking them out.
posted by nayten at 9:59 PM on February 12

I have been using Evernote as a webapp in Mozilla Prism and like it a lot. (FWIW, I also use their Windows client and run it under Wine about once a week so that I have an offline backup in case I ever need it).

Evernote is pretty handy for grabbing things from the web via the Firefox plugin (clips, whole pages, pictures, audio clips etc) but it also works very well for writing out your own notes and you can do a fair bit of text editing in it too. You can store individual notes in custom notebooks and/or tag them. You can also view them as thumbnails or simply listed as titles.

By running it in Prism it feels and acts like a standalone local app, has no browser distractions, and uses far less memory than using it in Firefox would. Just a thought. I've tried a lot of the Gnome notes programs and this has been my favorite solution.
posted by quarterframer at 11:01 PM on February 12

I agree - Basket. Maybe only 85-90% of what you're asking for but damn it's a great notekeeping program.
posted by gbinal at 8:10 PM on February 19