Consider note taking to be one of most important subject of personal computing.
What is “note taking” in the context of personal computing? According to Wordnet dictionary a note is a brief written record, but could be a short personal letter, instruction; and the verb “to note” means to make a written brief record of something.
We have to compare it to the physical note taking. When a person would like to note the phone number, then such a note would most probably contain the person’s name and phone number. Thus here we are dealing with pieces of information that belong to an address book.
If we wish to record a voice that is also a note, thus any application recording voice is a note taking application. Any application that may record video is and could be considered a note taking application.
Annotations belong to note taking applications. Software such as CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a general note taking application. Many people will be publishing their notes on Internet, so that becomes a blog, a shared on-line journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences and hobbies.
In general any kind of rather short computer assisted recording could be understood as a note taking activity.
Those larger documents could be projects, books, researches and so on. Any shorter written text or recorded audio or video for future reminding we shall consider note taking in personal computing.
As note taking is mostly written, a text editor, any kind of text editor is a basic tool for note taking on any kind of computer and operating system. All operating systems have one or more text editors. And hereby I do not mean something like word processors, but simple text editors.
Getting acquainted with your text editor is maybe the most important personal computing activity.
What you need to learn as basic to operate any computer text editor is how the structure of the file system, understanding directories or folders and files, file names, opening and saving files and basic editing facilities.
Understanding how keyboard works and how to get any kind of letters, numbers and symbols by using keyboard should be a requirement to work with a computer text editor.