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Whenever one of these threads pops up I'm always surprised at the lack of responses for OneNote. For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices

Whenever one of these threads pops up I'm always surprised at the lack of responses for OneNote. For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices, supports the iPad pencil, supports OCR and text searching in images, has native apps, and it's free.

KTallguy 5y ago
I used OneNote for a long time. It's not bad, but it has some quirks that I wasn't fond of: why are notes in these weird draggable boxes? When I decided to export my notes to a different format it was a huge pain. I ended up creating a keyboard macro script and cycling through each note one by one. Once I exported all my notes to word documents, I was able to convert them to markdown/org from there.
- ygra 5y ago
  For me that actually is one thing I really love about OneNote and hate about everything that tries forcing my notes from something paper-like into something text-file-like because that's just not how I take notes. I tend to scribble into corners or wherever there's space. It doesn't linearize well, but it doesn't have to (at least for me).
darekkay 5y ago
+1 for OneNote. I need a notes tool that works on desktop and mobile, where I can easily view and edit notes (text and images) even when being offline. Most tools unfortunately don't pass this basic criteria.
hobabaObama 5y ago
One small correction. OneNote is free till you expire your free OneDrive storage space. After that we need to pay for online storage.
- criddell 5y ago
  I don't think most people around here have a problem paying for something that's valuable to them.
- brocket 5y ago
  Syncing with OneDrive is an optional feature. You can save notebooks locally to use up as much space as you want without paying.
sylens 5y ago
I just wish it had an ability to do Markdown or at least let me drop a code block into my notes
ubermonkey 5y ago
I said this uptopic, but I've tried to love OneNote a few times in the past partly out of interoperability / possible collaboration and partly out of popularity, but I just can't get there. One of the key things that kills it for me is that I really need my notetaking tool to be smart. I tag lines as "to-do", and my tool of choice can assemble an agenda of items i need to accomplish in a metadocument, even if they're spanned across multiple files. OneNote, frustratingly, HAS a way to tag something as a Todo, but it's just decoration. There's no provision for showing you all the Todos in a document in a summarized view or whatever, or at least none I could find. I'm willing to admit that my need here to comingle todo items and notes is perhaps idiosyncratic, but fortunately it's not TOO niche because it's basically the foundational idea of Orgmode. (....and that's the story of how Ubermonkey became an emacs user.)
brocket 5y ago
I really enjoyed using OneNote on Windows or Mac but no native Linux client turned out to be a deal breaker for me. Web app is sluggish and limited, then using it through Wine was pretty buggy. I finally gave up and switched to a platform agnostic solution.

KTallguy 5y ago

I used OneNote for a long time. It's not bad, but it has some quirks that I wasn't fond of: why are notes in these weird draggable boxes? When I decided to export my notes to a different format it was a huge pain. I ended up creating a keyboard macro script and cycling through each note one by one. Once I exported all my notes to word documents, I was able to convert them to markdown/org from there.

ygra 5y ago
For me that actually is one thing I really love about OneNote and hate about everything that tries forcing my notes from something paper-like into something text-file-like because that's just not how I take notes. I tend to scribble into corners or wherever there's space. It doesn't linearize well, but it doesn't have to (at least for me).

darekkay 5y ago

+1 for OneNote. I need a notes tool that works on desktop and mobile, where I can easily view and edit notes (text and images) even when being offline. Most tools unfortunately don't pass this basic criteria.

hobabaObama 5y ago

One small correction. OneNote is free till you expire your free OneDrive storage space. After that we need to pay for online storage.

criddell 5y ago
I don't think most people around here have a problem paying for something that's valuable to them.
brocket 5y ago
Syncing with OneDrive is an optional feature. You can save notebooks locally to use up as much space as you want without paying.

sylens 5y ago

I just wish it had an ability to do Markdown or at least let me drop a code block into my notes

ubermonkey 5y ago

I said this uptopic, but I've tried to love OneNote a few times in the past partly out of interoperability / possible collaboration and partly out of popularity, but I just can't get there. One of the key things that kills it for me is that I really need my notetaking tool to be smart. I tag lines as "to-do", and my tool of choice can assemble an agenda of items i need to accomplish in a metadocument, even if they're spanned across multiple files. OneNote, frustratingly, HAS a way to tag something as a Todo, but it's just decoration. There's no provision for showing you all the Todos in a document in a summarized view or whatever, or at least none I could find. I'm willing to admit that my need here to comingle todo items and notes is perhaps idiosyncratic, but fortunately it's not TOO niche because it's basically the foundational idea of Orgmode. (....and that's the story of how Ubermonkey became an emacs user.)

brocket 5y ago

I really enjoyed using OneNote on Windows or Mac but no native Linux client turned out to be a deal breaker for me. Web app is sluggish and limited, then using it through Wine was pretty buggy. I finally gave up and switched to a platform agnostic solution.