I recognize this post is rather rambling and unpolished/unedited; I just wanted to get some thoughts down.

There are many decent notetaking programs for Linux, including NoteCase, KnowIt, BasKet, Wyneken and others; other solutions such as a wiki, text-file, Tomboy notes, or sticky notes can be used. However, none of them are built specifically for educational use, and it would greatly increase the productivity of students to have an information manager that was.

Most note-taking programs currently have a sidebar on the left which contains a hierarchical note tree. I believe that this outlining model is actually unnecessary for students, and I find that I tend to just have top-level notes for each of my classes and then a flat sequential collection of notes for each class one level below. It would be better to have the program store a flat series of notes for each class, get rid of or make temporarily viewable the sidebar, and have buttons for each class aligned horizontally at the top of the editor. For students, I think doing away with the tree structure of notebooks is a good tradeoff for the added simplicity and space in the UI. Notes could be scrolled through chronologically using back and forward buttons, and they could be renamed or re-ordered with a preferences dialog rather than in a tree view. Notes could automatically be named by date (this is similar to how Wyneken currently operates), or a name could be prompted for upon creation.

The ideal notetaking software for students needs to be WYSIWYG and, importantly, have a way of making bulleted lists that does not require any clicks (perhaps with a keyboard shortcut or by recognizing the “*” character as a bullet).

Task management programs such as Tasque and gtodo have the same problem of not being designed for student use and so being less than ideally useful. To enhance usability for a student, task programs should know what homework assignments and larger projects are. They should also get rid of almost all the manual preference setting required, and have the student only need to enter a title, optional description, and optional due-date, and select a class for each task.

The notebook and task list for each class could then be shown side-by-side in one application.

UPDATE: In September 2008, I discovered TakeNote, which is almost the ideal notetaking application – it does what you want it to do and nothing more.  However, I later switched to Zim Desktop Wiki, which is fairly popular in the Linux world, because it seems a little more polished and its linking ability could be useful.

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