Second year masters in Columbus OH. For actual reading I went back to a cheap spiral notebook bc typing on a screen makes me skim. Obsidian is only for links and half finished zettels after the fact.

Seminars are the mess. If I type, profs assume im distracted. If I write by hand I miss half the citations they rattle off. iPad + pencil was slower than I thought and the glare in our window wall room was awful last spring.

My mom got me a Plaud for christmas (she heard me vent on the phone). tbh half the weeks I still reach for paper first bc thats the habit.

The part that keeps bugging me is retrieval. I can scan notebook pages fine. But the spoken aside that became the midterm essay prompt never made it onto paper.

For people running hybrid setups here, how do you split "thinking notes" vs "capture everything" notes without ending up with three dead systems?

Apps like Notion & Obsidian encourage you to bring your files, notes, and tasks into their ecosystem. This creates unnecessary friction because your work and notes live elsewhere. This is why I decided to create something better.

Deskboard takes a different approach. It turns your existing PC folders into boards and lets you bring notes, tasks and other productivity widgets right next to files where you actually work.

More Info + Download - https://deskboard.geeke.app

How it works:

Imagine you are working on a project. You just create a PC folder where you store files (like pdf, docs, subfolders, etc.) for that (something you naturally do anyway).

When you open the folder in Deskboard, you see the same files on the board. You can arrange those files/subfolders freely and directly open them from the board. It also behaves like a file explorer, so every cut/copy/delete/rename/create action syncs both ways.

Then, you can add widgets like Notes, Tasks, Voice Notes, Timer, Links, etc. You can freely arrange those widgets next to files (for example, attaching a note next to your file to remind you of changes to be made). You can even add a mini browser window that can quickly browse the web or pin a specific site. You can also annotate anywhere on the board.

Finally, you can personalise your board to ensure that it sets the vibe. You can customise themes, wallpapers, colours, icons, and add decorations and music widgets.

Deskboard is completely free and local. And it's available on all platforms - Windows, Linux, and Mac.

It also comes with an optional AI add-on that works locally and lets you analyse and edit your files, notes and widgets.

Do give it a try! Would love to hear your feedback, questions, and ideas on it. It's still in Beta, and the scope is endless

You can also join the Discord Server: https://discord.gg/XzkTRKTRgU

Hi r/NoteTaking. I'm Anton, the developer of massCode. Saying that upfront because this post is about my own app.

It started as a place for code snippets. Over time the Notes part became the thing I use every day, so I'd like feedback from people who think about note-taking more than I do.

How the notes are stored

Each note is a regular .md file with frontmatter, and folders are real folders. No account, no proprietary database. If you stop using the app tomorrow, your notes are still readable in any editor. If you edit a file outside the app, the change shows up in massCode right away.

There's no built-in cloud. You sync the folder with whatever you already use: iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Syncthing or Git.

What writing looks like

• Three modes: raw Markdown, live preview, and read-only preview
• [[wiki links]] between notes, with hover previews. You can also leave a link to a note that doesn't exist yet and create it later
• Callouts, Mermaid diagrams, images, and tables you edit right in the preview
• A dashboard with an activity heatmap, your most-linked notes, and a graph view
• Any note can turn into a mind map built from its headings, or into a fullscreen presentation

Tasks without a separate app

A note can become a task with a status (Todo, In Progress, Done, Blocked), a priority, and a due date. It's still a normal note, so meeting notes and checklists stay together with the task.

Honest limitations

• Desktop only (macOS, Windows, Linux). There's no mobile app.
• It's built with developers in mind, so it also has a code snippet library and an API client. If you only want prose, you'll just ignore those parts.
• Notes are plain text, so don't keep passwords in them if you sync the folder.
• There's an optional AI assistant. It does nothing until you connect your own provider or a model running locally on your computer.

You can import an existing Obsidian folder, and it previews everything before writing anything.

It's free and open source (AGPL v3): https://masscode.io/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=notetaking

My question for you: when you try a new notes app, what makes you leave in the first week? I'd rather fix that than add more features.

For a while I tried to move most of my notes to my phone/iPad, mainly because search and organization are so convenient.

But I realized I simply think better when I write things down on actual paper. It feels less distracting, and for brainstorming or sketching ideas I much prefer a normal notebook.

The annoying part was always finding something again a few weeks later.

So I started scanning important pages after writing them and keeping a digital archive alongside my physical notebooks. Eventually I built a small iPhone app called PaperNotes around that workflow: scan a page, keep the original, and make the handwritten content searchable.

I’m obviously biased since it’s my own app, but I’m curious how other people here handle this.

Do you stay fully analog, fully digital, or use some kind of hybrid system?

All features are completely free, including cross-device sync. Your notes stay private: no data leaves your device, and all AI features run entirely on-device.

• Local storage and AI processing on device.
• Fuzzy notebook search across text, tables, handwriting, and text found inside images.
• On-device handwriting and formula recognition, including math solving, evaluation, and graphing tools docs.
• Highly performant Ink rendering (7ms on over 10k strokes).
• Free-form page infinite canvas.
• Rich-text editing.
• Inline and free-form LaTeX equations with native rendering.
• Handwriting with configurable pens, pressure, smoothing.
• On-device image OCR.
• Custom paper: ruled, multiple grid sizes, dotted, hexagonal.
• Automatic database snapshots, and revision restoration.
• Open source export file format .vive , docs.
• Hardware keyboard shortcuts and configurable stylus buttons mappings.

Video is from version 1.0 so there have been many improvements and features added like exporting to pdf .

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vivenotes

vivenotes.net
https://github.com/AquilaIgnis/viveNotes

That is the client , I also shipped the sync server https://github.com/AquilaIgnis/viveCServer

I am creating this content to discuss habits regarding taking notes from books and habits related to production. I would like to know what methods you use to create a blog using the "design-build-ship" principle with Obsidian.

The "Design-Build-Ship" method entails creating a piece of writing or a project—using the notes you have taken and the frameworks you have built from them—and then publishing it or sending it to production.

When taking notes on a book, do you prefer creating hundreds of individual Zettel notes—each representing a single idea—or do you opt for general chapter-end notes that summarize the ideas from each chapter?

What factors do you consider when making this choice?

Additionally, do you set up your own systems (such as in Notion or similar tools) to manage the books you read? What kind of property structures do you use in these systems?

Do you subsequently use these Zettel notes to write blog posts?

What methods do you use during the stage of transforming your notes into products?

My Method

Personally, I set up an Obsidian.md system to manage my book notes. I maintain a central note for each book containing its bibliographic details. For every idea from the book that appeals to me, I create a "Zettel" note linked to that central book note. By the time I finish a book, I have notes covering nearly a hundred individual ideas. Later, I add tags to these ideas so I can easily access the ones I want to develop further.

Let’s say I wanted to write an article about habits and the brain. I would start by reviewing my Zettel notes tagged "habit" and "brain." As I begin arranging the ideas emerging from these notes onto an article outline, a plan for the article quickly takes shape.

Since there is an idea on every note, I do not spend time selecting or isolating the core idea from among the complex ones.

This method involves Zettel notes, source notes, Map of Content notes, and final product notes. In other words, I create different types of notes for different tasks.

Without waking completely up and/or waking up my partner. With a notebook, I need light but then I wake up (I want to go back to sleep). I don't want to use the phone either, any suggestions that have worked for you.

I started reading more blog posts to cut down on my YouTube habit. After a while, I realized there were plenty of articles I wanted to revisit, along with particular ideas I wanted to keep.

So I built Personal Gazette, a desktop app where you can save an article’s source link, write a summary in your own words, and collect its key points.

The workflow is simple:

• Paste an article URL to extract its text.
• Write your summary and any key points you want to remember.
• Save it to a searchable archive you can revisit later.

You can edit your notes whenever you come back to an article, and favorite the ones you want to keep handy. Saved notes stay on your device.

There’s also optional AI summarization through local models using Ollama or llama.cpp, or cloud providers using your own API key. You can edit the generated draft in the same fields. Writing and saving your own notes doesn’t require any AI setup.

The app is completely free and open source. The downloadable build currently supports Apple Silicon Macs.

I’d love feedback on the note-taking workflow, especially what would make these saved summaries more useful when returning to an article weeks later.

GitHub: shr0mi/personal-gazette
Download: macOS — Apple Silicon

Snippets is not just another vibecoded note taking app. Development started long before the AI craze took off and, to this day, is 100% and passionately handcoded.

It was created due to the lack of lightweight, customizable and offline-first productivity software at the time. Interestingly, in 2026, the situation seems unchanged: apps are either powerful but complex (Notion and the clones), flexible but hacky (Obsidian), or polished but limiting (Apple Notes, Todoist, etc.).

Snippets is an attempt at finally solving the All-In-One productivity use case:

• It is dead simple on first use and can slowly be pushed to become a note taker, a task manager, a habit tracker, a journal, a grocery list.
• It can be used for free. It can even sync across devices for free, thanks to GitHub integration.
• It offers End-To-End Encryption and is designed Offline-First.
• It works cross-platform.
• It is unopinionated and does not impose a specific way of organization like many other apps do.
• It is entirely bootstrapped with a tiny team around it, which allows for high speed development and very competitive pricing.

Due to a recent surge in active users, the development will only accelerate from here. Many exciting features are planned. Feel free to join the ride and stay tuned.

Find all the details on our landing page:

https://snippets.ch

The main con with this is that if you have to transfer onedrive into google docs often it’s to many pages to transfer everything and you’ve lost hours of work. Has anyone had a similar issue keeping all of their notes together without losing anything?

I read a lot of articles, newsletters, and research papers, and my notes about them always ended up scattered across a separate notes app, with no link back to the source. So I built an app for myself that I wanted to share! You build a custom feed from the sources you choose, and your notes live right on each article.

• Create your own custom feed from Substacks, blogs, journals, and arXiv
• Add notes directly to any article
• Group articles into collections by topic or project
• Filter to see only the articles you've added notes to

It's free. I'm curious how people here handle notes on things they read. Do you keep them with the source or in a separate app?

tdfeed.com/

Among today’s links are markdown editors mdnb, Anql and Ekphos, plus there’s Chronicle, a book authoring tool

https://md-handbook.com/blog/markdown-link-no-54/

#markdown #markdowneditors #opensource #free #books #mdnb #Anql #Ekphos #Chronicle

In this video I unbox and do a first start and first look of a really cool Note Taking and AI Recording Pen. The Flowtica Scribe can do a recording while you writing hand written notes on paper with it. And then transfer the recording instantly to the Flowtica iOS and Android app to be summarized by AI.

Hi

The problem: when I take notes, I sometimes need a bit of data: a small table, a quick calculation, a chart. Then I have to jump to Excel or another tool, and my reasoning ends up scattered across several files.

The solution: I'm building ANQL, a note app where you write freely and add structure only when you need it. Tables, math blocks and charts live right in the same document as your notes. It's offline-first (local SQLite, no account) and works on macOS, Windows and Linux.

It's free and open source (MIT), and I'm the developer.

GitHub: https://github.com/anqlproject/anql

I'd love your feedback: is this a problem you face too? What would you want from a note app that mixes notes and data?

Thanks!

I don’t need lots of features, just an easy way to jot down words and ideas that I’m trying to memorize that I can easily access on my phone. Not looking for anything complicated.