(2021-10-26) Shipp My Notetaking Process

Scott Shipp: My note-taking process. Markdown generally looks okay as plain text, but elements like tables, links, or images don't work. Converting to HTML is how I pick up the power of these features.

My choice: TextMate combined with Maven site

I've already adopted TextMate as the primary text editor on my system

The Markdown bundle for Textmate includes a "preview" feature that renders Markdown as HTML. But there were a couple things I wanted to add to that.

actually build a full site out of my notes folder, and I used the Maven site plugin with the Fluido skin to do that.

On top of all of this, I wanted a single interface to these tools, so I created a cli that I use. For now, I call it Noted: Lightweight CLI for taking markdown notes in a journal-like (time-seried) fashion on macOS.

Let me walk though a contrived example of my note-taking process

On my terminal, I type:
$ n 'Going through email and slack messages'

If it's October 26, then it looks for 2021-10-26.md and if that doesn't exist, it creates it.

It appends a Markdown template for the new entry into the file

By typing nv (alias for noted view) in the terminal, I can launch TextMate with today's notes file should I then need to edit or add to the entry. The TextMate Markdown bundle has a feature called "Preview" which renders the Markdown to HTML in a separate window.

The habit of simply recording tasks as they happen provides the first benefit of my system

Now let's say that I am researching HTML client libraries for work

In my terminal, I'm going to type something like this, and notice that by leaving the ending quotation mark off the first line, I get a multi-line entry:

At this point, I start to add a table to compare the options. Since tables are slightly more complex, I type this within TextMate.

Besides the ability to preview notes within TextMate itself, I have a markdown generator (Maven site plugin) wrapped around it, so I can also type noted build (or alias nb) to generate that quickly

The ability to search through old notes is the most useful when confirming what was agreed upon in meetings. I am usually the secretary of meetings because of my note-taking habit, and what I like to do is take notes within my system during a meeting. I clean them up after the meeting and then send a copy to all participants. (technography)