1.1 What is it?

Notes-mode is an indexing system for on-line note-taking. Notes-mode is composed of two parts, the visible part, a major-mode for emacs to aid note-taking; and the invisible part, scripts which periodically index your notes for you.

Note that notes-mode provides tools to index your notes, not to search them. (Other existing tools such as ‘grep’, ‘agrep’, and ‘glimpse’ already allow file search.)

A digression about indexing vs. searching: Indexing in this sense means organize them according to categories you give, while searching looks through all text for arbitrary strings. Drawing on the World Wide Web for examples, Yahoo (‘http://www.yahoo.com/’) is an index, while Alta Vista (‘http://www.altavista.digital.com/’) is a search-engine. In (potentially) more familiar terms, the yellow pages (1) are an index, while directory information (411 in the USA) is sort of a search-engine.

1.2 Why keep notes at all?

So why should you use notes-mode? Well, first, consider why you should (perhaps) keep your notes on line. First, I assume that you take notes as part of your work or school. If you don’t, you can stop reading now and go back to watching TV.

If you keep notes, ask yourself why you keep them. Reasons vary for different people, but some include:

• To remember what is said or done.
• To focus on what is important about what is said.
• To provide proof of having done something at a particular time or date.
• I know there were other reasons here, but they slipped my mind.

1.3 Why keep notes on-line?

OK, I’ve talked you into keeping notes. Why do it on-line? Again, there are different reasons for different people. If you don’t want to consider keeping your notes on-line, you’re welcome to go back to your (clay tablets) paper notes.

However, if you do much of your work on-line, or if you have portable computer, then you might want to consider keeping your notes on-line.

• It’s faster to type than write, and possibly more legible at high speed.
• Often information is already on-line. For example, in software development, bug reports, measurement results, and everything else that’s useful is on-line.
• You can take down more detail than you otherwise would (especially if the data is already on-line). Taking more copious notes can be helpful when you go back to figure out why that strange thing was happening.
• On-line notes are easy to search. Full-text search with grep, agrep, and glimpse are all much faster and are often more accurate than paging through paper notes looking for a particular keyword.
• On-line notes are easy to index. (At least with notes-mode!) In addition to full-text search, it’s helpful to organize notes by category. If you keep a table-of-contents of your paper notes, you are either extremely fastidious or a librarian (Nadia?).
• You can keep all of your notes with you at all times (if you have a portable computer). Even at a page a day, paper notes quickly become bulky and awkward to carry around. On-line notes fit on your computer’s hard disk, an extraordinarily compact medium by comparison.
• Your notes can be automatically backed up. Paper notes can become damaged with time, and as a graduate student one of my fears was fire in Boelter Hall consuming all my research experiments and and therefore hopes of a degree. Electronic notes are extremely easy to duplicate and can be automatically backed up with the rest of your computer. (You do back up your computer, don’t you?)

While these advantages are undoubtedly clear to any right-thinking computer user, it should be said that there are a few disadvantages for on-line note-taking.

• If you don’t have a computer with you most of the time, it’s difficult take notes on-line (because you’re off-line, of course). (2)
• Computers require power. If your portable computer runs out of juice, you’re on your own. Corollary: watch your power, or bring paper. Better corollary: watch your power, and bring paper.
• Social limitations. It’s not always socially acceptable to take notes-on-line. For example, at a party, few people would use a computer to take down the phone number of a person to whom they’re attracted (at least, if they wanted the attraction to be mutual). (3) Sometimes other people find the sound of typing distracting.
• Health issues. Repetitive stress injuries do occur writing (slower) by hand is at least an alternate motion than typing.
• Legal limitations. If you want to use your electronic notes to justify a patent or invention, you may be breaking legal ground. Being on the legal cutting-edge is rarely an easy thing for the person involved.(4)

1.4 Why use notes-mode?

OK, I’ve sold you on note-taking and even on on-line note-taking. What about notes-mode? Naturally, it slices, dices, and makes julienne fries. But wait, there’s more:

• It automates indexing your notes, linking notes with the same subject together.
• It supports embedded links, allowing you to manually link together different topics and external files.
• It includes a number of convenience-features in emacs. Subjects can be completed based on existing subjects. The usual emacs customization mechanisms are available.
• Notes containing sensitive information can be encrypted.
• Notes-mode seems better than the other, currently available alternatives.

What are the alternatives? I’m glad you asked. (5)

• HTML. HTML has better formatting capabilities than notes-mode, and it has excellent linking capabilities. Unfortunately, HTML’s tags are fairly intrusive (each is at least four characters long and most come with a pair), tags can get confused with normal text, errors in HTML can be bad (obscuring data), and there’s no automatic indexing feature (at least with plain HTML). Besides, all data should be kept as close to the ASCII from whence it came, as God Intended (hi, Steve).
• Word Processors. Word processors are strong in the formatting department, but most don’t really have linking capabilities, and have poor or restricted indexing.

1.5 Y2K Statement

Notes mode uses dates extensively, both two-digit years and seconds-since-1970. However, notes-mode has been coded to function correctly through the year 2038.

To avoid problems with the year 2000, notes-mode assumes that any two-digit years before “70” are 20xx, not 19xx. Notes-mode should therefore work correctly in both the year 1999 and 2000.

(Notes-mode 1.17 released February 1999 fixes a lingering Y2K problem.)

Because notes-mode uses seconds-since-1970 for some date calculations it will fail beyond the year 2038 on computers with 32-bit integers.

If I’m still using notes-mode then on a 32-bit machine I’ll see what I can do.

1.6 Related work

What would a document be without related work?

Notes-mode is not related in any way to Lotus Notes.

I am told (by David Weisman) that it’s something like the now defunct Lotus Agenda.

Ashvin Goel, one of the contributors to notes-mode, has gone off and done a from-scratch reimplementation called records-mode. It’s very similar to notes mode, and emphasizes on-the-fly updates to entry links but lacks a manual. You may want to check it out at ‘http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~ashvin/software.html’.

Hyperbole (by Bob Weiner) offers better linking facilities than notes-mode, but it has a bunch of stuff notes-mode doesn’t need and it’s missing notes-specific indexing provided by notes-mode. For people already using Hyperbole it would be interesting to replace notes-mode’s linking with Hyperbole’s. Contributions in this area are welcome, provided they make Hyperbole optional.

1.7 Staying on top

The most recent distribution of notes-mode is always available via ‘http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/NOTES_MODE/’.

After you’ve installed notes mode you’re encouraged to subscribe to the mailing lists. To subscribe, go to the web page Send the message "subscribe" to ‘http://www.heidemann.la.ca.us/mailman/listinfo/notes-mode-announce’ or ‘http://www.heidemann.la.ca.us/mailman/listinfo/notes-mode-talk’.

The announce list will contain only release announcements and so is guaranteed to be very low bandwidth.

This document was generated on June 6, 2018 using texi2html 5.0.