Taking and organizing notes

Taking notes

Notes are taking in Markdown and stored in .md files. For more information on Markdown, please visit Markdown Guide

To see your note rendered as HTML, simply use the Markdown Preview functionality of VS Code.

Coffee Break adds the tools needed for managing tasks, todo’s and meeting actions efficiently in Markdown, namely

• mark task’s in your bullet lists (Alt-Enter)
• complete/uncomplete tasks (Alt-D)
• add owner to a task with @ mentions
• add due date to a task in YYYY-MM-DD notation
• easily enter dates with the // shortcut

For more information see Managing Tasks

Organizing notes

Coffee Break can operate in one of two modes

• Single Notebook - all your notes (as well as all configuration) are stored in a single folder on your filesystem and its subfolders. The same configuration is used for all notes.
• Workspace with multiple Notebooks - your main configuration is stored in a “workspace” file (*.code-workspace). Multiple filesystem folder can be added to the workspace and configuration can be finetuned for each of them.

Choose the multi-notebook setting when dealing with a more complex scenarios, e.g. create a workspace for all your work notes and add folders for individual projects.

Note: When switching from a single notebook setup to multi notebook, your configuration will not be migrated. It is however stored as JSON and it is very easy to manually move the settings from the .vscode/settings.json file to the appropriate *.code-workspace file.

For more information see Configuration

Quick note creation

Press Ctrl-Alt-N (Cmd-Alt-N on Mac) to quickly create a meeting note. You will be asked for a title of your note and after pressing Enter a file will be created with the name YYYY-MM-DD <Note title>.md where YYYY-MM-DD is the current date.

If you want the file to be created in a particular Notebook, simply type a comma (,) after the title and a few characters of the Notebooks’s name.