I noticed a classmate using some sort of note-taking software in class the other nite. After asking him what it was, I found out it was part of a student Microsoft Office package. Called ‘One-note’ or something like that. It seemed pretty cool – and I figured I could find something at least as good (if not a bit snazzier) for linux.
Well, I was right. Kind of. I did a post on the Ubuntu Forums and got quite a few replies. Here’s the best of what I found.
Basket Note Pads
The best one I tried out was called Basket Note Pads. It is availiable in the regular ubuntu repos (though the version is slightly older that what is availible on the website). I tried to install the latest from the website, but didn’t have much luck, so I thought I’d just try the one in the repos to see if I liked the program. To install:
sudo apt-get install basket
Pretty much love this program. It’s kind of a twist on Tomboy notes (which comes with Ubuntu), but I really enjoy it. I am going to use it, though maybe not (at first, at least) to take notes in class. But I will probably play with it for research papers and such – I think it’ll be great for that!
KeepNote
This also seems like a pretty promising program. It has some awesome export capabilities (which I haven’t tried yet…). It’s not in the repos, but you can download a .deb isntallation package from the website. It installed great in Ubuntu. This, to me, seems geared a little more towards formal research. I’m going to hand onto this and maybe work through some of the documentation on the website to figure out if it might handle my note-taking ‘process’ (Basket provided several example pages which made starting out really, really easy – not so this program)
Gasket
Gasket is a simple program written in python. I had to download a .tar.gz from here, extract it, and then follow the installation instructions (using the terminal) to install it. The installer had to grab some python program to do the installation, but it did everything (after asking me first, of course!) and was really painless. It ended up being a slightly simpler version of Tomboy – but it did have some rather snazzy little icons you could insert really easily to flag/tag stuff in your notes. Not too bad in my mind.
Overall, in my mind, Basket is probably the closest to what I need – though if I figure out KeepNote, it might actually work better. But for right now I’m going to be sticking withthe OpenOffice.org word processor for my notes for the time being. It can format and bullet and list as I prefer. Though I am definitely going to play with Basket some when I do research for some papers and stuff this semester.
