App for study notes

Good study notes have to be written, but also reread, extended and found a year later. Plain markdown files with formulas and diagrams, sorted by subject and keeping their edit history, do that job well. Here is how to keep your notes with us.

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In this article

What study notes need — and what you get#

  • Formulas — written in LaTeX between $ signs and shown typeset on the page: $E = mc^2$, fractions, powers, sums.
  • Tables — for comparisons and classifications.
  • Diagrams — Mermaid diagrams: processes, trees, sequences, written as text right in your notes.
  • Code — highlighted, for programming.
  • Callouts > [!NOTE] and > [!TIP] — for definitions and key points.
  • Links between topics — [[Note title]].
  • Images — a photo of the board or a diagram from your notebook is uploaded to the repository.

How to organize them#

One repository per course or subject, and inside it one file per lecture or chapter. A handy file layout: topic and date, the notes in your own words, self-test questions, a two- or three-sentence summary. If you study several subjects, keep a separate "Study" repository with a README as the table of contents. The note-taking methods themselves are in how to take notes.

Edit history — a less obvious benefit#

Every change to your notes is saved. Before an exam you can see which topics you added to and rewrote most often — those are your hard spots. And if you delete a passage by accident, it is waiting in the file's history.

How to review#

Turn the questions in your notes into a task list with checkboxes and tick the ones you answered without a hint. A week later, clear the ticks and go through them again. For words and definitions, flashcards with spaced repetition in a separate app work better.

Things to keep in mind#

Taking notes during a lecture is easier on a laptop; the site works on a phone, but typing formulas there is awkward. There is no real-time co-editing — a group's shared notes are kept in turns or through pull requests. There is no search across the text of all notes yet — clear file names help.

What it costs#

Repositories, notes and study notes are free. One owner can create up to 25 repositories, each up to 2 GB.

Try it on your own task

Create a repository — history, issues and pull requests from day one.

Create a repository

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Where to keep notes You pick a place for notes once and live with it for years. What matters is not the number of features but three things — notes are easy to find, you do not lose them when you switch services, and you can see how they changed. Here are the options and what we offer. Notion alternative Notion is built from page blocks and databases. Skillok works differently — your notes are plain markdown files in a repository, and every change has a history. If you care about text, order and being able to take everything with you at any moment, this may suit you better. If you need database tables with formulas and real-time co-editing, it will not. Obsidian alternative with sync An Obsidian vault is a folder of markdown files. Put it into a git repository on Skillok and you get sync between devices, the history of every edit and a way to read your notes in the browser — with links between notes, callouts and tags. Personal knowledge base A personal knowledge base is not an archive of everything you have read. It is a set of your own notes, linked to each other, that you keep coming back to. Here is how to set one up so it works instead of turning into a dump of links. Confluence alternative Confluence keeps documentation as pages inside spaces. In Skillok documentation is a set of markdown files in a repository, and you work with it the way you work with code — edit, history, review. That is stricter and more transparent, but there is no visual page builder and no real-time co-editing. GitHub alternative Skillok is built like GitHub and repeats the familiar parts — repository, commits, branches, issues, pull requests, projects, organizations. The interface is available in English and Russian. Below is an honest list of what already works, what does not yet, and how to move your code in a few minutes.

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