That sounds pretty great. I happened to get a free copy of OneNote 2010 a little over two years ago, and it’s played a similar role for me. It has everything you mention above, including the autocomplete search/jump which I agree is killer. I think linking and timestamp don’t come with keyboard shortcuts, but you can add shortcuts for any command [edit: see pjeby’s reply—thanks!]. A couple other features I appreciate: constant autosave, and a keyboard shortcut for taking screen clippings when OneNote’s running in the background. There’s even good math support, although I still use LaTeX for math/physics notes.
The downsides: It’s not free, open-source, or cross-platform. There are Android and iOS apps, although I’d need Android 2.3+, so I can’t yet comment on that. My least favorite aspect is that it doesn’t store things in plaintext, although you can get plaintext out with a little bit of work. (Probably easiest to save a notebook as html and go from there.) Maybe part of the reason is that there’s lots you can do that isn’t text (more flexible formatting than e.g. Word, recording and inserting video/audio notes, drawing, tags, integration with Outlook tasks) but much of that could at least be formatted sanely, and I don’t use it anyway. Zim Wiki sounds like a good choice if I ever get frustrated with the lock-in.
Ctrl-K opens a link-creation dialog (or converts existing text into a link)
Surrounding text in [[double brackets]] makes a wiki-style link, creating a new page with the enclosed title (or linking to an existing one) in the same section.
Also, any page or paragraph can be a link target, with its own onenote:// URL that can be launched from other programs that allow links to be embedded.
Yeah, if you happen to be on Windows and have OneNote 2010, it can be pretty sweet for this sort of thing.
That sounds pretty great. I happened to get a free copy of OneNote 2010 a little over two years ago, and it’s played a similar role for me. It has everything you mention above, including the autocomplete search/jump which I agree is killer. I think linking and timestamp don’t come with keyboard shortcuts, but you can add shortcuts for any command [edit: see pjeby’s reply—thanks!]. A couple other features I appreciate: constant autosave, and a keyboard shortcut for taking screen clippings when OneNote’s running in the background. There’s even good math support, although I still use LaTeX for math/physics notes.
The downsides: It’s not free, open-source, or cross-platform. There are Android and iOS apps, although I’d need Android 2.3+, so I can’t yet comment on that. My least favorite aspect is that it doesn’t store things in plaintext, although you can get plaintext out with a little bit of work. (Probably easiest to save a notebook as html and go from there.) Maybe part of the reason is that there’s lots you can do that isn’t text (more flexible formatting than e.g. Word, recording and inserting video/audio notes, drawing, tags, integration with Outlook tasks) but much of that could at least be formatted sanely, and I don’t use it anyway. Zim Wiki sounds like a good choice if I ever get frustrated with the lock-in.
Keyboard shortcuts for OneNote:
Alt-Shift-T inserts time
Alt-Shift-D inserts date
Alt-Shift-F inserts date+time
Ctrl-K opens a link-creation dialog (or converts existing text into a link)
Surrounding text in
[[double brackets]]
makes a wiki-style link, creating a new page with the enclosed title (or linking to an existing one) in the same section.Also, any page or paragraph can be a link target, with its own onenote:// URL that can be launched from other programs that allow links to be embedded.
Yeah, if you happen to be on Windows and have OneNote 2010, it can be pretty sweet for this sort of thing.