Note Taking in 2021
This is going to be one of those threads where everyone rattles off their own note-taking setup, which is great and all. So:<p>There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and (2) sync --- I need my notes mirrored onto my phone.<p>For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good, in fact, because it doesn't feel much better to use than does TextEdit. Both search and sync work fine. I don't have to think about what I'm writing or how it fits into the scheme of things because I'm guaranteed to be able to find things with search. I can drag screenshots of lecture videos in and write short sentences about them.<p>I had Bear.app for awhile and was initially skeptical of it, but it has now replaced Notes.app for me; it's a better writing environment, it has sticky notes (pinned to the top of the note list) which turn out to be really valuable, does native Markdown, and search and sync work reliably on my laptop and phone.<p>So, Notes and Bear.app are my two recommendations.<p>I'm interested to see if anybody comes up with something macOS-supported that outdoes Bear.<p>I'm an Emacs person, I've written a couple thousand lines of elisp, and I have never, ever been able to get into org mode.