I like Google Keep because it's one of the few apps I have found which gives me a readable preview of the notes. I generally try to keep the notes short. There is also an option to save the notes as Google Docs and then download as plain text if you like.
Of you wanted to arrange the short notes into a longer form, then Scrivener is a good next step. Again, Scrivener allows me to view these short notes in a readable preview. I can also drag and drop notes onto a larger document. Plus tons more features.
I have tried tons of other apps and none of them seem to allow a readable text preview. I like plain text, but I also like some sort of visual reference where I can scan loads of texts. Of course, this doesn't work well for longer text.
There have been some threads here lately about Perkeep, which I think has a lot of potential. A Google Keep interface on Perkeep would be perfect. What I like about Perkeep is that all content is content addressable and you can create meta-data external to the file which can hold things like tags, links between files, hierarchy, titles and a bunch more.
So... latency.
Especially since HN emacs interface offer a decent way to read but not a way to post and since HN itself is not much good in term of conversation (even worse than Reddit, far far far worse than classic usenet) spending time in adding post capabilities it's probably not much interesting...
The idea is to capture notes/thoughts/todos quickly and send them to any service (Trello/Basecamp/Asana/etc...). For people doing deep work (programmers, designers, writers) you want to stay in flow but also be able to capture any random thought that pops in your head.
This project is a bit harder than ones I've done in the past because I'm trying to take it cross-platform (macOS first) and keep it native UI everywhere.
For the past few years I've been storing almost everything in Markdown and organizing files into yearly folders—I call it my "memex".
It ends up being pretty simple, but I end up missing some information that gets silo'd off in services like Trello.
I used Catch Notes for a bit several years ago before they were bought out. In case you weren't aware: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/export-your-data-from-catch-note...
I've got the OneNote app on my iPhone and it works well enough for what I need to access on the go. What trouble do you have accessing it when you're not at home? My biggest use-case for OneNote on the iPhone is to tick items on the grocery list - it works great and changes propagate to my SO's phone in under a second.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3269056/software-productivit...
On the plus side, Office 365 is quite cheap considering you get 1TB of OneDrive storage for the price. Since you're a Linux user that might not be useful to you though.
I started using Notion.so (after a recommendation on HN recently) and the difference is incredible. All the versatility of OneNote, but there is actually somewhat of a hierarchy.
So far I sync via git, which sort of works but is definitely not great on mobile.
My current setup (syncing between home and work laptops) is to auto-save files every few second in emacs, and "git pull; git commit -am `date`; git push" every few minutes in a cron. Works like a charm.
edit: I also do "git add * .org; git add * .org_archive" inside the org folder before the commit, in the same cron job.
Well, yes, immediate sync should work, all merges would be fast-forward except for a vanishingly rare case of two conflicting simultaneous pushes.
It's not very practical if one of the devices is mobile, so it's not always online, and parallel changes may build up sometimes.
BTW do not blame org for the mobile crappy OSes we have, they are not designed to serve us but to serve vendor leaving us small crumbs, milking us for commercial purpose.
I've tried fancier solutions over the years, including Tomboy and Evernote (and maybe even Google Keep, for a few minutes), but none of them have had sticking power.
Ultimately, my note-taking needs fall into two categories:
1) Something I can paste text into, where said text is best kept plain. (Word processor formatting would just get annoying, and cause endless problems, especially if that text is a code/command-line snippet.)
2) Something I can scribble on, where the content is likely to be some sort of sketch/diagram/chart with annotations. Most software note-taking solutions would fall flat on their head here, because its not what they're designed for.
When I was in school, I actually found that taking notes on a computer only worked in liberal arts classes. In STEM classes, handwritten notes were almost always easier.
FWIW, I recently picked up a reMarkable tablet as another way of attacking the "scraps of paper" problem (and as a nice offline PDF reader). Its generally nice, but still doesn't quite have the resolution to match a fine-tipped pen/pencil annotating a diagram without being close enough to the limit to drive one OCD crazy. (But it is getting fairly close.)
It shouldn't be, as there's an iPhone client, a Windows client, and you can use the web version for Linux. I have my complaints about OneNote, oh I've got complaints. But cross-platform isn't one of them. I don't have a personal notebook that use much anymore, but I've got one for a local non-profit that I work with, and a couple for work, all of which are accessible anywhere I have a connection.
That said, I just use vimwiki and Apple's Notes/Reminders apps. I've used OneNote since it was an internal Microsoft build running on my Toshiba Portege Tablet PC, but instead of adding features that have (IMO) been needed for over a decade, it looks like they'll be removing functionality in the next release. So it's vimwiki for anything remotely complicated, and Apple's apps for the day-to-day "remind me to buy cat food" stuff.
vimwiki, which means you better be using vim, isn't a text version of OneNote, but it's close enough. And in a lot of respects I find it less annoying than OneNote's quirks. Project management, daily log, work notes, things that could use bullets and mulit-level outlining and the like. Export to HTML if it needs to be printed. As there doesn't seem to be any kind of iOS client, I might write one of these weekends when I'm bored. But I dump the wiki files to iCloud, so I can get to it from work or home, and if I were desperate I suppose I could view the raw files on iOS.
Apple's stuff I use mainly in conjunction with Siri. "Hey, Siri, remind me at 8:00 tonight to pay the light bill". Quick, one-off stuff I don't want to forget and would like a reminder for later. No heavy, project-oriented stuff goes in there.
I used to use Apple Notes and still have years of stuff on there. Before that it was Evernote. And before that it was text files somewhere.
I came back to text files just because of the lack of formatting. It forces a primitiveness on the idea that ensures that it doesn't become distracting.
A lot of people in the WIP community are starting to use Notion. Haven't looked at it yet.
It allows you to be present in meetings and just jotting down headlines of things to review, instead of madly scribbling notes.
Livescribe: https://www.livescribe.com
However, I hated the notebooks, simply because I didn't like carrying around multiple notebooks.
Now I use an iPad app called Notability, which does the same thing, without the annoyance of dealing with paper. I just wish they had a Windows version for when I get a Surface Book!
Notability: http://gingerlabs.com/
Works great for me so far. Its QT based and uses plain Markdown files. Notes are organized in notebooks with (sub-)folders. Some of the features on top of this are tagging, full text search, reader-mode, vim key-bindings, attachments, MathJax, PlantUML, and Mermaid.js support.
I do miss OneNote's OCR, text indexing/search, and seamless cross-platform sync (web, mobile, laptop).
Still I never seem to actually use it... Maybe I'm just not a note taker other than the odd post-it note.
I bought it years ago. I've never looked back. Such a great notebook.
Mostly text, Web/iPhone/Android, private, freemium+self hosted
On my iPad, I use GoodNotes with an Apple Pencil, which is an amazing experience.
You can even selfhost it.
org-mode in a git repo for everything else.
notability for lectures, just for the audio synch