How to keep programming related notes

Originally posted on kozubek.dev

Inspired by "The Pragmatic Programmer" book and "sharpening the saw" idea, I will write some posts on tools I use every day to be a more efficient developer. Lepton gist client is a way to keep your notes organized.

Why? 🤔

Once I found I need a systematic way to keep notes. There is something to learn each day and keeping notes:

1. helps to memorize stuff important for you,
2. with writing you go to another level of understanding since you need to explain it to your future self (at least),
3. if you keep it organized you will easily find an answer for a problem you already solved once but forgot.

Above combined makes you a more efficient developer 🤓

Options:

Notebook

I keep some stuff written in notebook or post-its. With a pen and paper you can express your thoughts quick and easy.

But you don't want to keep code snippets or shell commands in your notebook to use daily. You would rather put that stuff in more copy-paste friendly environment.

I still use a notebook with my calendar to sum-up challenges I met every day. I write them as short tags I can recognize in few next days. When I find the time I evaluate them into digital notes with code snippets or so.

Google Keep

Someday I started using Google Keep. It is a simple app, has a nice UX and integrates easily with Chrome, Gmail, Google Calendar. What I missed is a code snippets/markdown support which is crucial to keep software related notes. The same goes for Evernote and every usual note capturing app.

Github gists

Most of us developers use Github every day to store git repositories and handle code development. The lesser-known Github feature is gists, they are something more light - you can keep code and markdown snippets there and then share easily.

But it lacks good UX. You can't categorize them, can't search through them quickly. So I use them as a storage for my notes + I can embed them easily in HTML as below:

Final choice - Lepton gist client!

Finally, I found an open-source desktop app which meets my expectations. Lepton gist client synchronizes with your GitHub account and lets you handle your snippets more efficient:

• add a new one with keyboard shortcuts,
• categorize via hashtags and snippets type,
• search through your gists easily,
• do all above with intuitive keyboard shortcuts.

Handling gists is a breeze now 🌊 Check out a short video on that below: