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Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

So what's the alternative to Evernote?

The article lists Google Docs, which doesn't really seem equivalent, and OneNote. I'm using OneNote right now to organize planning for a media/writing project, and the experience leaves a lot to be desired. The writing interface in particular is clunky, in the web client and on Android -- on my phone, I have to pop open a menu and then a drawer just to switch bold text on or off. And the Office365/OneDrive setup just isn't well integrated overall -- navigating OneDrive is confusing, and you can't, for example, insert a picture stored in OneDrive into a note.

Google Keep doesn't fit my needs, as it's missing support for any sort of real organization. It seems more geared toward quick digital post-its and todo lists.

Is Dropbox's Notes product any good? That seems to be in closed beta still...

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http://simplenote.com/

It's like Evernote used to be. Just text, not even formatting. It just works for me. There's clients for mobile, mac, web. For Windows there's a client called ResophNotes:

http://resoph.com/

I've been using this for the last couple of years, and it's perfect for my "synced cloud notepad.exe" use-case.

I've used Simplenote in the past, and it definitely lives up to its name -- very simple and smooth, great when all you need is text. And it does support some organization via tags. But for the sort of structured planning I'm doing right now (story outlines, character notes, etc), that doesn't work as well as the hierarchical folders/notebooks model in Evernote or OneNote. And the lack of formatting hurts in my specific case.

Thanks for the suggestion, though!

It's kind of strange to me that you think OneNote is clunky. I might have agreed with you about the iOS app six months ago but it has improved quite a bit since then.

Ah, sorry, I should have specified that I'm referring to the Android app. I've updated my comment accordingly. Not only is the interface a pain to work with, it has frequent syncing issues as well.

On the desktop, I'm forced to use the web client for OneNote and OneDrive, due to the lack of Linux support. I would definitely describe both as "clunky", though OneDrive is decidedly the worse offender of the two.

Ah, well I must tell you the Mac and iOS apps are first rate. The iOS app is easily one of the top 10 apps (in terms of polish) on my phone.

OneNote was great before but for me on Mac and iOS it seems like the basic text editing has gotten clunkier and buggier (most of the issues revolve around mixing roman and CJK languages I think)

I use Google docs for long form writing. That said, I use a personal Mediawiki for organizing my brain. The wikitext, hyperlinking, search and all the misc stats and queries are what I like about it.

Mediawiki is going to be around for a long time as a project so I feel comfortable making it my digital brain. I started this a few years back and it has scaled really well for me as the amount of informatiom I collect in it grows.

I'm a devops guy, so I don't mind the admin overhead too much, but it wouldn't really be practical for most people who aren't familiar with system administration. There's probably a Mediawiki SAAS out there, but most of the stuff I've looked at in the hosted wiki space isn't using Mediawiki as the underlying platform.

I like the idea of a personal Mediawiki. I'm fine with doing my own hosting, and interlinking would be really useful for connecting ideas. Is there a nice way to edit on Android?

Their isn't a great way to edit on android. It really is great when I am doing really deep research on a topic and I'm generating a ton of notes that I want to go back to in a bit. The ability to just link everything together in a hypertext mesh is really nice. While on the go I just send myself emails and put them in the wiki later.

Hey, author here. The comparison of Evernote to Google Docs was primarily on an enterprise/business level. While you're right, and the products aren't completely similar, Google has done well with market penetration for Google Apps for Business (at least as far as companies who aren't running a Microsoft stack). Even if Evernote is in many ways "better" than Google Docs for a particular purpose, if you have Google Apps paid for, it's "good enough" for most uses (especially sharing/collaboration). So it's equivalent in some senses, but certainly not all.

I use WorkFlowy (YC S10). It's not as robust as Evernote or OneNote and updates are lacking, but it's pretty flexible and works for my needs. Text-only.

I've primarily moved to a combination of Google Apps and Dropbox (for pure file storage). I can pretty much use Google Docs for the note taking I did with Evernote or I can use other apps that sync or export to Google Docs.

Add note:

cd ~/Documents/Notes ; vim `date` ; git add -A ; git commit -m . ; git push origin master

Search:

cd ~/Documents/Nodes ; grep -l 'search terms'

and on mobile?

I was joking a bit -- just pointing out that the core functionality is extraordinarily simple and that most of the value is in UI, UX, and network effects.

Paper notebooks are awesome.

you aware of Google Keep?

I just tried it, actually. It looks kind of nice, but doesn't seem to support any real organization, beyond maybe color-coding notes. The lack of support for text formatting isn't great, either.

Seems like it would work well for day-to-day tasks or reminders, but it's lacking the power that Evernote or OneNote have for structured projects.

Now that they added tagging, I feel like the only things they need to add to replace Evernote for me is real, all-type attachments, (simple) formatting and a web clipper.

I've moved away from Keep for one reason: Keep on Android downloads everything. One day I was trying to figure out where my space went and found Keep with hundreds of megabytes in space used. I was it was a true cloud service.

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