Here’s a quick blog post on how I like to take notes. Well, it’s more of a post on which tools I currently use, and actually how I arrange my windows, which I think is important. I still struggle with it and change it often. So this post can be thought of as like a glimpse into my methods at this exact point in time.
Let’s rewind a bit to when I started to study for certifications where I needed to ‘show my work’. The first cert of this type was “BTL1”, which is awesome and helped me a ton. During studying for this, and during the actual test, I used Notekeep. I like how it’s super old school, simple, and has the easy hierarchical layout.
Shortly after this, I started to think about other features I wanted in a note-taking tool, and I tried several others, like Evernote and OneNote. I like them both. Evernote is really great actually for its markdown editing style. The problem was, my screen real-estate was shrinking, and I don’t want to need more than a few apps open at once when I’m working on an investigation for work or for study.
This real estate problem was further exacerbated by the fact that along the way, I fell in love with Visual Studio Code. Doing Hack The Box, for instance, I now had VS Code open, to reference any scripts I had made, plus maybe a standalone terminal or the VS Code terminal, plus Evernote or Obsidian, plus a web browser, plus maybe Burp Suite or any other tool.
My solution to all of the above is my current setup: Visual Studio Code, with an extension called Office Viewer(Markdown Editor) by database-client.com (cweijan). It’s amazing. The main thing I like about it is that it’s a YSWYG editor, meaning you can edit markdown in-line, with real-time previewing. To solve the terminal problem, I just use the VSC terminal with tmux. Between these solutions, I’ve got my notes, my code, and my terminal all in one app. I’ve found that arranging the panes vertically, side by side between my notes and terminal is nice for a small screen too. It also makes for easy copying and pasting from terminal to notes, which helps with actually taking good notes :)
My only advice for others is to keep messing with your setup from time to time, trying to keep your hands on your keyboard as much as possible to keep the efficiency of movement up.
Anyway, thanks so much for reading this and have an awesome day.