I was using the Signal “notes to self” too when taking notes during talks and conferences. Taking quick pictures of the slides in context was also a key thing for me. Exporting these unstructured notes into a useful notes archive is a pain as you say, especially if there is media too.
I caught myself doing this so often that I ended up building myself an app for this specific workflow. It’s rather simple, just an MVP if you will, but it works well for me. Taking notes works exactly like Signal’s “note to self” but it has some QoL stuff on top of that like separate notebooks and exporting notes and pictures to a single PDF archive. I can then import the PDF archive into Notion, which is my main notes repository. Notion can now parse PDF files and import them as regular Notion pages, which closes the loop for me rather nicely. YMMV ofc
I haven’t published it to any app stores yet (might do in the future) but the source code is available here if you’re technically savvy and happy to build and install it yourself.
IT guy here. The CLI is not something I’d expect the average computer user to use at all. However, for power users and professionals it’s a force multiplier at least, and a prerequisite often.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, IT system and server administration, in the cloud or your own hardware, is often done via the CLI. This is because it’s not that common or convenient to hook up every server in a rack to a monitor to click on stuff. But dialling into it remotely via SSH or even a serial port to perform bootstrapping procedures, troubleshooting and even routine management tasks sometimes, is very quick , easy and reliable.
The other main reason is automation. If I buy 10 servers to power my website, they all need installing and configuring a whole bunch of software, e.g. an Apache web server, DNS, SQL, Active Directory, AV, firewall, networking, and a host of other services. Now imagine doing all of that by hand. You don’t even need to be a professional sysadmin installing server racks for a living for this to be important. Even if you run a couple desktop/servers/Raspberry Pi/NAS at home, they’ll need updating, upgrading or replacing every once in a while. Having to click your way through everything every time you need to (re)configure them gets old very quickly.
GUIs are extremely poor at providing a consistent, predictable, automatable way to do things. They force you to do mostly everything manually and be present to supervise the whole thing. With the CLI you can script out pretty much any task and let it run in the background while you go do other things. I really don’t see CLIs going anywhere anytime soon. I’d say it’s actually the opposite. PowerShell was Microsoft’s way of acknowledging this very fact years ago. The primitive Windows Batch scripting language wasn’t cutting it for anyone, especially Windows Server users who had to painstakingly configure every Win Server install they did manually through a GUI wizard.