What note taking app do you guys using as a developer?

Obsidian.

All markdown files that you control. You can always sync it with Dropbox or any other if you choose to. Markdown files will be readable forever, and it is free.

I have used deft on Emacs for years. It saves notes locally as text files (I use Markdown). I keep my notebook directory as a git repository, so that I can use my notes on any of my machines. Search and filtering is whole-text--no need to set tags. Not a problem until you have years of notes on a modest machine ;) That's as simple as it gets, and yet it has served me very well over the years. QOwnNotes is a non-Emacs solution that works in a very similar way, except that it does expect Markdown files and gives you HTML previews; in fact it can use my Deft directories unchanged.

Deft Mode: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DeftMode QOwnNotes: https://www.qownnotes.org/

I evolved from pencil and paper, to text files, to minder. I stick to text and it works good for me. It is simple, fast to use, search works good, basic organization is there. Files are local and xml, so data is easy to extract if needed, backups and distribution are just file copy operations. https://github.com/phase1geo/Minder

I think it easy to get trapped by formatting and publishing. IMHO: Notes are fast and not pretty. If/when I come to the situation where I want to share, then formats like markdown or latex etc are a better fit. When I have to start 'coding' my notes, it becomes a time burden and I end up skipping it. In complicated situations, I will go the other extreme and fire up inkscape.

I realized there is little that deserves preservation.

- Business logic/knowledge changes every time I switched company/industry. And I want to be as far away from business as possible, provided I still get hired;

- Technical knowledge is best preserved in code, or design documents in Markdown or whatever.

On Windows I have notepad++ for me and on Linux Kate is the best. I know, this just text editors but in a couple with Visual Code and annotation plugin to this is a scalable way to find needed Linux commands that works, categorize important notes :

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Artifici...

Previously I used OneNotes, but git is better to works from 5 my workstations with collisions.

How about Vscode or whatever editor you use (which you're trusting already, and know all the shortcut keys for) editing Markdown files with descriptive names organized into folders that are backed up via Google Drive or Dropbox? What's the benefits of Obsidian over this? I've seen Obsidian lets you add link between files, but I find all I really need is separate files for different notes and todo lists, I'd rather limit my trust given to third parties, and I'm not that bothered about mobile support.

I dont even bother. I never end up looking back at anything and futzing with different programs and file formats and workflows isn’t a hobby of mine.

Easy come easy go.

I use obsidian with live-sync for journal taking and personal knowledge base

Have tried onenote, it works pretty well but it’s a lock-in solution and the search isn’t very good.

The really awesome thing with onenote is when you add a task and it shows up i outlook

A bunch of arbitrarily nested folders with somewhat ambiguous names, a simple text editor, plain text files, and cynicism.

Pen and paper. Walls, palms. Sometimes just pen. Most of the time I revist the same place which gave me the idea.

90% of the time I usually end up writing to myself in Slack

For more long-formed note-taking I try to use Obsidian.

I've got a lot of notes in WikidPad, which seems to be a dead open source project.

I'm testing out AI note app like mem.ai or saner.ai

I use Joplin, simple and works.

What’s your take on Notion?

Notepad

Reflect Notes

Notion

Confluence. VSCode Readmes. Google docs.