After years of searching I’ve pretty much settled on one note-taking app: Apple Notes. Quite unexpected to me as well because I started off just to sort of “cache” random notes in it before sorting them out in OneNote. Then I found myself almost stopped using OneNote. It’s just ubiquitous enough when you have a few extra PC devices, (unlike say, Bear) and versatile enough so it’s not limited to texts like Notational Velocity or SimpeNote, and quick and easy enough so I never have to wait for launching or syncing like with OneNote. It’s not enjoy-sparking to use and the text is a bit cramped. But it gets stuff done and I forget about it most of the time. So it’s just almost perfect for me.
Apple Notes is wonderful until you decide to replace your MacBook with anything else and attempt to get by with the painfully slow iCloud web version of Notes. The same goes for Apple Reminders.
That's true. But here in China Android is much much more aggressively spied and surveilled by both manufacturers and government I'm more than happy to stay with Apple.
The only thing that makes me keep looking for an alternative to Apple Notes is search.
1. You can't restrict search to just one folder.
2. You can't use tags (would be better than folders) and search by them. I have a partial work around (I just type #tag and search for that) but it does't work that well -- the search correctly filters for "#foo" but shows "foo" highlighted in the sidebar...and doesn't scroll to the match.
A small amount of additional functionality would pretty much nuke any need for Evernote or any of these other apps (though exporting is...tedious).
I’m actually currently getting a POC built out for a note taking web app that’s entirely focused on capturing/tagging/filtering, because of these exact reasons. The idea of folders in all note taking apps is just not efficient, and doesn’t leverage the power of searching and filtering solutions.
My app is intended for multi tasking individuals.
@iamdchuk is my twitter handle if you want to connect and check it out soon. I plan to start using the app this week for work myself.
I really tried to use Quiver for almost a year. I converted to it from Org-mode in Emacs. The reason for converting was to get better typography and layout. I really want to get header rendered in different sizes, bold really looking bold etc. Quiver looked really nice ans pleasing. But the rendering engine in Quiver is flaky. Headings of the same type end up having different sizes for example. I also never felt a benefit of the cell concept. Instead often accidentally creating new cells that had to be fixed.
I've now moved to Bear, and the experience is much better. Yes, it stores notes in a DB, not as files. But it is a standard, open SQL DB you can talk to if needed. Bear renders markdown nicely, has nice themes. And syncs between devices quick. I now read and write journal notes etc on desktop, iPad and mobile. And Bear supports inline images. This, together with nice rendering of quotes, code etc makes making complex notes possible. If I only could change the caret to a non-blinking, block everything would be great. Notes in Bear really are beutiful and pleasant to write and read.
I have nothing but good things to say about Quiver except on the rare occasion and even then I would describe it as performing ok in that regard. It just gets it done and it’s full of features but not too fancy.
Probably the only thing that’s so-so is search but worst case I have to check a couple of notes to find the right one.
I make a folder called "notes" on any given machine and make a new text document inside of it when I have a note I want to make. I know this isn't clever and "it doesn't scale!!!" but I have multiple computers and it's easy to merge the notes into a single backup, and I always know where to go for the notes I take.
If I need to share a note, I use a github gist but it's also just a linear text storage so I'll prolly replace it with something else at some point...
Even if you don't mind the scalability issues, having to deal with possible conflicts if the same note was modified in different places, and barebone UI with no attachments, consider the importance of metadata:
- info on where the note came from (that's why I like web-clip-ability)
- note history and possibly versions
- tags are really great for categorizing and quick/efficient search, etc.
Simplenote would work pretty well in this case. Barebones third party clients for it on all major desktops OSes are available that allow usage of file system.
I was a big Apple Notes user, but I've read horror stories about losing notes in upgrades, which bothers me. Exporting notes for backup is tedious, too. I've switched to Notion for notes and it's been excellent minus one thing: it's slow to start. Otherwise I haven't really missed Apple Notes.
I'm looking to move away from Notes because it has a serious bug (possibly only when using Exchange, I'm not sure) where notes longer than about 3 pages get truncated without warning. I found this out the hard way when my "big list of ideas to work on later" note turned out to be missing about a year's worth of data.
It's had this bug for several years across a number of versions. I now have a huge buffer of sacrificial text at the bottom of any important note, which I then split if part of that buffer goes missing.
