OrbitalMartian

How I Do Digital Notes

📆 25 Jul 2025 11:30 UTC +01:00 📕 622 words ⏳ 5 min. 🏷️ #Notes

Hello everyone, I’ve seen a few fedifriends write blosts about their online notetaking. So, I decided to write about how I keep my online notes – including all my blog posts in writing.

First off I want to explain by online notes, I mean notes that are on a computer, not necessarily notes that are on the internet.

I only take notes online, I don’t use paper based anymore, I am much quicker at typing than I am at handwriting, also it’s much easier to read my writing when it’s digital (my handwriting sucks). I have had many different ways of keeping notes over the years. So for the ease of writing and reading, I’ll start off with my current solution.

For my notes, I use Obsidian for all my notes, across all my devices. I have a vault simply called My Vault. On my laptop, this is located in my ~/git/ directory (this basically keeps all my git repos in one place so I don’t have to remember which folders are git repos or not). On my phone this is just in the default location of On My iPhone > Obsidian > My Vault - iOS’ file management is horrible, but I digress.

To sync my notes between devices, I use a community plugin for Obsidian called Remotely Save. I haven’t got the infrastructure to host my own NextCloud instance so I’ve had to resort to using OneDrive as a place for my notes to sync through. Though I hope to change this in the future for something more private and open, like NextCloud. This is setup to save periodically every 30 minutes, although I also have the “beta” feature, Sync on Save, enabled which syncs everything that I type when I type it. I also sometimes manually sync it, just to be doubly sure that it’s all gone through correctly.

On my Arch laptop (or whatever distro I happen to be running at that moment, not right now though), I have it setup in exactly the same way. Sometimes I will use another text editor to create and edit notes, as each note is saved as a markdown file (Markdown is great! by the way and if you don’t know it already, you should definitely learn it). Sometimes it’ll be Neovim but sometimes I feel like using something like KWrite or GEdit as a GUI writing tool. Most of the time though I either write in the Obsidian app or in Neovim.

And that’s my main note taking setup.

I also have another way to make notes which involves a Gitlab repo, cloned locally and either a terminal text editor (in my case Neovim) or a GUI text editor (my goto is KWrite or Kate, depending on if I want to quickly edit a file or want access to all the files in the sidebar). This is where I make notes about my Linux system, mainly my window manager setups: stuff like, what keybinds I have setup, a list of things I want to do with my setup (rices, scripts, etc.) and anything else I really need to remember with it.

This is a relatively new way of doing it, although I started making notes this way a year or so ago, I revisited it recently making a bash script to attempt to make it a nice, easy and viable solution for making notes.

But this is just something I’m playing around with and not something that I have spent a lot of tome using.

So, with that all said, that’s how I make digital notes. Not at all fancy or anything but it’s functional and that’s what counts.