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Comment by acl777 | Hacker News Reader

OneNote. It’s free on all platforms and handles your listed requirements.

If OneNote had been made by a hot new startup if would have crushed the competition (easy to use! affordable! very flexible! just works!). Instead, it's too often glossed over because it's made by one of IT's behemoths and not considered to be sexy enough.

When I first tried it in like 2012 it was absolutely a mess that crashed all the time and bogged down with hardly any notes and was deserving of all the hate it got. If it was in the hands of a startup it would have been long gone by now.

How is the OCR in OneNote now? One of the features keeping me on Evernote is being able to take a photo of a whiteboard and put it in Evernote which then does a surprisingly good job of recognizing the text and making the photo searchable.

Not bad at all, even with my atrocious handwriting it manages to be around 85% accurate.

I'll have to check it out again.

Last time I spent some time with it, the UI just never clicked for me. My main notetaking device is my iPad with a Pencil stylus and GoodNotes. It does a great job of interpreting my handwriting and then I can export a searchable PDF to Evernote, or I guess, OneNote.

Is the metadata search in OneNote decent? For example, can I search for notes I created in Houston?

The thing about Microsoft’s stuff is that it slowly but inexorably gets better over time. Like a watched pot, if you are waiting for a feature it will never arrive but if you walk away and come back a few years later it will be significantly better.

"Is the metadata search in OneNote decent? For example, can I search for notes I created in Houston?"

Don't think so. You can search note titles, bodies, section names, section group names, handwriting, OCRed text in attached images (OneNote can embed pdfs as attachments or insert a printout of the file as images, it doesn't have an inline pdf reader yet). It can't search inside attachments or inside cloud attachments.

The app has its own tagging system that lets you attach tags to eg. paragraphs and the desktop clients have tag search and custom tag creation. The desktop and mobile apps both also have search that treats "#word" and "word" as different things, so you can jury-rig a hashtagging system should you want to.

It's worth noting that OneNote did always have synchronization issues until 1-2 years ago. There is plenty written about that on the web.

Now it seems they've completely fixed them.

In my experience, onenote's synchronization still has serious performance issues if you have a huge number of notes. Try moving or deleting a large number of notes and watch it just completely lock up for 20 minutes.

Also, initial sync on a new machine is ridiculously slow. As in I need to leave it for hours before it totally syncs everything.

2016 or the Win10 app? 2016 sync is a lot slower than modern sync (Win10, macOS, mobile)

I've used both, most recently the win10 app.

This! Once Microsoft bundles something that has 80% of what people want, you need to get far ahead on the innovation curve. (Though I will never understand why the formatting gets messed up when copying pasting from OneNote to Outlook)

I like and use OneNote, but "all platforms" isn't quite correct - there is no native Linux client, so I have to use the browser version, which isn't nearly as good as native versions.

While MS doesn't do great on Linux support, given their web push, I can usually find a decent Electron alternative for desktop linux. Of course it's more overhead than native, but a lot of MS's own implementations for tools are now electron based.

https://github.com/patrikx3/onenote

Thanks for that link, I'll definitely be trying that out.

Are you able to create/filter/update/delete tags across all devices now in OneNote? I know that wasn't the case for Android as recently as 6 months ago.

There is no Mac version of OneNote. There is only a Mac version of a thin client for OneNote on OneDrive.

Is this not the full version? https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote/id78480155...

It's not quite as feature complete if you're not using Office, but it's still pretty handy.

It cannot save or open local notebooks. That's beyond "not quite as feature complete." It's a thin client for a web app.

That's a gross exaggeration. Every OneNote client (except for the browser one) downloads everything from OneDrive to the local machine and does all the changes to that local copy, which then gets synced to OneDrive. You could take weeks' worth of notes and peruse mountains of reference without any Internet access and the app wouldn't bat an eye.

It's true the app's positioned as an online service rather than a file reader for offline files the way it started, but calling a native app that operates on local data a "thin client" is just disingenuous.

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