I've done something similar, but I keep going back to paper because it's a lot easier to vary formatting, reorder and restructure things etc. I still want to find a digital structure that is sufficiently flexible, but so far I haven't come up with anything that feels good enough.
In fact, it drove me to write my own editor recently (because, frankly, it felt more straight forward to write my own editor than to learn elisp well enough to do what I wanted with Emacs)
I've tried both, because as an IT guy it made sense to use, you know, computerized tools. But as a DBA, I live and die by checklists and multi-column quick reference tables. I find these are much easier to create, maintain, and update on paper than they are in Notepad++, for example. I also trained myself to use the mouse with my left hand so I can write with the other, and so it's a lot less disruptive to my workflow and train of thought than having to jump back and forth between multiple app windows. My current favorite is the Leichtturm (sp?) 1917 with the dot grid.
It's one of the toughest usability problems in computing, I think. Replacing paper is remarkably hard. I had hopes for tablets, but input lag is too disruptive still, and they still suffer from the problem that I can't flick through pages or spread them out on a desk. I'll probably keep trying to find a solution for the rest of my life, and keep failing...
I work in an industry not far from publishing and I'm fairly regularly asked about "the future of the book". The thought experiment I run people through is to look at the book like you might a piece of technology. It's UI, cost, features, durability, battery life, etc. Paper holds up pretty well as a technology.
The UI really has a lot going for it, though part of that is that we've spent our whole lives learning it. Plus many of the shortcomings of paper have been at least partially overcome by clever workarounds (like indexes).
The input lag on the latest iPad Pro is remarkably small to the point where I don't notice it anymore. The bigger problem for me is feel, a stylus on glass just doesn't feel like writing on paper. But other than that, as you said, the bigger problem is still software.
I really need something that syncs across all devices, can take handwritten or keyboard input, is searchable, and organizable via some kind of embedded links to other content in the "notebook". Usually you can get like half of those things in one piece of software.
I was really hoping the Microsoft "Courier" tablet concept would become a reality, but nothing yet...
Agreed. I really, really wanted to find a slick way of doing lab notebook / bullet journaling electronically, I tried Notepad++ Workspaces and OneNote. But neither of them really worked for late-night ops work, troubleshooting notes, etc., and I kept migrating back to paper. Plus, there's just something wonderfully satisfying about checking off a list with a pen.
How long did it take you to learn to use your mouse with your left hand? That sounds handy.
I currently get around window confusion by programming the F keys to certain windows. E.g. if I hit ctrl-shift-f1, my currently focused window will be bound to f1. If I hit f1, that window will be brought to the top. I did this with xbindkeys and xdotool.
So when I first start a session, I bind everything. F1 my IDE, F2 my command line, F3 my notes, F4 my browser.
It took about two weeks of daily use. I switched my mouse at work to be left handed and committed myself to not switching back if I got frustrated. Before I knew it, it felt as natural as my other hand, and I can go back and forth with ease. I'd actually say that off-hand mousing is now my preferred state. It helped that at the time I was doing a lot of work in Adobe Illustrator so I was really getting a lot of fine-control practice. You might try playing a game like Minesweeper for a similar effect.
I would love to keep paper notes but I find the opposite for myself. It's very easy to reorder or restructure a digital document and very difficult for me to re-organize my random ramblings on paper.
Maybe you could share your methods paper methods in a blog post or something; I'd be interested in reading it.
I've tried it. I find it alternatively constrains my formatting too much and uses too much syntax that I don't like. It certainly looks very flexible, and I'll probably steal ideas from it all over the place, but it's just not for me.
I think that's actually one of the biggest challenges in this space. E.g. there are a zillion different Todo apps or notetaking apps largely because there is an infinite set of possible ways of working with them and people develop very specific styles.
I think this is one of the reasons for the success of things like Trello: Trello is very generic and impose very few limits on what you can do with it. But even Trello won't conquer even the Todo/lists type niche entirely because it's not generic enough.
Same for things like OrgMode. It may get me 90% of the way there, but paper gets me 95% of the way there, because I'm effectively implementing my own workflow in my mind exactly how I happen to decide I want it right now.
And "right now" is a big part, because one of the things I've found both with plain text and with paper is that workflow at least for me does not remain static very long. My preferred format changes frequently depending on type of project or even specific tasks or just over time. Any "perfect" application to handle this would need to be able to accommodate that without making me conform to the tool.
Instead when I try tools for this, I often end up finding one I like, spending time on it, only to then start feeling constrained by it not because I've learned new limitations I wasn't aware of, but because the way I use the tool is slowly drifting towards a new workflow.
This might be a personal flaw, but from seeing people take notes, I think you'll often find that part of the flexibility of paper is exactly that your workflow can drift over time without making you hit a wall.
I have an irrational dislike of Lisps... I do know the basics, but I've never been able to get into it even after 23 years of Emacs..
Meanwhile, it took me less than a day to have the basics in place (not entirely from scratch; I borrowed a very basic starting point [1]) in Ruby, and I've spent less than a week getting it to a point where I probably using it about 3/4 of the time (falling back to Emacs on occasion) (my own editor isn't pushed anywhere, but it will appear here [2]).
Of course it's not as feature-full and polished as Emacs, but it has most of the features I need, including sufficiently tolerable auto-indent and syntax highlighting (courtesy of "rouge", a Ruby highlighting library that can output ANSI codes), and with a bunch of custom transformation rules to e.g. add lots of extra stuff to my Markdown files to make my notes look nicer.
One thing I find is that with respect to things like this it's very much a 20% of the time to get 80% there thing, but if you write software mostly for your own use, getting 80% there is often sufficient. E.g. I haven't added a "safe" extension mechanism - my editor will crash if I decide to customize something, because the "extensions" are modifying the core of the editor rather than get treated as an embedded language.
That'd not really be acceptable as a general purpose editor. But as my editor for my personal use, it's quite ok (and loss of any substantial amount of data is easy enough to protect against). It's shortcuts like that which makes it viable. E.g. I also know that trying to open a gigantic file with it would be silly, but I very rarely do that, and can resort to a "grown up" editor when I need to.
In fact, it drove me to write my own editor recently (because, frankly, it felt more straight forward to write my own editor than to learn elisp well enough to do what I wanted with Emacs)