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Note-Taking

Few of us could live life without jotting down our thoughts somewhere. Throughout the years we have developed some sort of note-taking system, either cobbled together slowly by ourselves, or something off the shelf.

I use electronic notes primarily as they are more accessible compared to paper notes and can be backed up easily.

Previously I used a Word document synced on Google Drive. However, this came with several limitations:

  • Formatting issues
  • Not editable over command-line e.g. with Vim
  • Not searchable unless opened
  • Inability to see backlinks (other notes which link to this note)
  • Limited categorization ability (only headings/subheadings possible)

I have since decided to move to Markdown, the main reasons being:

  • Open, widely adopted format (important for the future)
  • Can be edited in almost any application
  • Can be searched easily (e.g. with grep)
  • Can be linked to/from each other

The choice of editor I am currently using at present is Obsidian. In comparison with VSCode, Obsidian:

  • Supports viewing backlinks natively
  • Updates links when notes are moved
  • Supports image/video drag and drop1

However, Obsidian is not FOSS, and for that reason, I avoid (as far as possible) using its non-standard Markdown syntax. At present I only use wikilinks and tags.

Backup and Access

The folder with my notes is stored on my server, which is itself in a RAID-1 configuration with backup.

Foam is a great VSCode extension with backlink, graph view and other cool Markdown features which I host on the web with code-server, allowing me to edit my notes anywhere.

I access my notes on my phone via the Obsidian Android app.

With my laptop, I access my notes with SSHFS.

Local access is over nfs.

  1. VSCode generates incorrect links for images when connected to a remote host (all the generated links start with remote://) ↩

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