maryrosecook

I use a single app, Bear. It's a nice notes app (think Evernote but with a really refined UI).

My main goal is to have everything in one place: My journal entries, minutes from meetings at my job, project plans and working notes, book/article/film summaries, quotes, reflections. (Bear has both a Mac and iOS app which means I can note things down from anywhere.)

This enables a few things. Search across all my information from one search box. A strong incentive to take good notes because I know I'll be able to find them and reference them later. A 15 year chronicle of the things I've done.

The older blog posts I've written aren't in Bear. This is kind of dumb because they're some of the deepest and most hard-won knowledge I have. Long term, I want to move them into Bear. More recently, I started a new blog that I publish from Bear. This feels much better.

As for learning, I have a few processes that relate to recording:

1. Highlighting useful/interesting passages in books and writing notes in the margins with my thoughts on the material. For really good books, I'll pull out the highlighted passages and notes and organize them into a summary of the book in a note in Bear.

2. I have a note for each skill I'm working on (e.g. designing software architecture, estimating time frames, getting buy-in on an idea). As I practice it I'll write down things I've figured out or reflections on my application of the skill or relevant notes from books/articles.

3. I'll sometimes reference my notes about books/articles as I'm working. E.g. For some reason I've referenced the note that contains a summary of an article I read about the React lifecycle like a zillion times.

Sadly, no. Sorry!

I had a different experience to kabdib: customization made me able to actually use emacs productively.

I joined a company where most of the devs used emacs, so I kind of needed to adopt it too. I started with very little config and it was very hard. Because many operations were different to the GUI editors I'd used before, I had to waste 20% of my brain power to consciously do things that should be unconscious (save, cut, paste etc). This made it much harder to program!

The first step was updating the config to make emacs more similar to my old editor. For example: make it so pasting text when text is selected replaces the selection. Turn off branching undo. Install a plugin that gave me an autocomplete list of every file in my current project. Make it so that if I copy text in emacs, it appears on the OS-wide clipboard. I'm sure your list of things will be different.

Another important step was getting my emacs theme to look nice. This really made me love the program a lot more. It's silly, but there we are.

The third important step was finding things that emacs does better than other editors. For me, a big one was having a terminal inside my editor (lots of editors do this now, but back then it was rare).

Hope you end up loving emacs!

Hiya! Author of the article here. I used OmniGraffle.

OmniGraffle. I really enjoy using it.