I've been really getting into note-taking applications as of recent. With my course getting a little more difficult and interesting, the skill of note-taking, note accessibility and readability is a must!
For some reason, I have always wanted a standard way to take notes. Something that is transferable between mediums and easy to type quickly. Luckily, such standardisation exists with Markdown!
Many applications support Markdown (.md) files. Such programs like Joplin allow for notes to be stored in a cloud^1 and sync between the desktop and android/iOS client. This is very handy as the GUI is very nicely laid out but my biggest downfall and gripe with Joplin is that it stores the files in a database, not plain text. Yes this makes the files encrypted but if you do not have access to the desktop client to decrypt the .md files then you are stuck!
^1 There is a paid Joplin cloud service that they offer but you are better of syncing it with services like Nextcloud and I think Google Drive
Vimwiki is brilliant. As someone who has been using neovim for nearly 3 years, It's great to be able to just use it for everything text-based, whether that's an IDE for my Java applications, file manager or note-taking - having the same keybindings/configurations/plugins across what ever I use is pure bliss. Vim is one of the best text editors and I cannot even begin the depth this simple program can go into!
Okay. To install via neovim using Plug you simply add this to your init.vim file
Plug 'vimwiki/vimwiki'
Run 'PlugInstall', that's it!
Note: My leader key for vim is ',', this can be done with:
let mapleader = ","
For Markdown usage, this can be setup by adding this to the init.vim file:
let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/vimwiki/',
\ 'syntax': 'markdown', 'ext': '.md'}]