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Comment by Xunxi | Hacker News Reader

I use Microsoft's Onenote. You can literally do everything in the blog as well as audiovisual captures. All text is searchable.

This video covers some of the things you can do with it in an academic setting but relatable. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JQD5c8A_D2g

0:33 - Math equations

1:45 - Replay text

2:45 - Ink to text

3:20 - Research tools

4:39 - Immersive reader

6:01 - Web clipper browser extension

7:12 - Save emails to OneNote

NB: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2015/11/1...

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I disagree completely. I wouldn't trust anything important to OneNote, and it's hard to get things out of it again, too. Your notes are basically locked in. You can sort of print to PDF, but it uses different pagination to the original PDFs you annotate! PDFs are inserted as bitmap images instead of vector format, and text is only sometimes searchable.

OneNote has a really scary number of obvious bugs, with pen input especially. Writing disappears immediately or jumps left and right, the document randomly stops updating the screen, the program gets stuck in a high-CPU loop making huge input lag and needs restarting, selecting writing doesn't select what you draw around but a smaller area inside that, etc. It's incredibly frustrating and difficult compared to the Android pen-based notes app I use, Squid (which has a much narrower focus, but is much better at it).

...it's hard to get things out of it again, too.

Export is really the weakest area of OneNote. As far as I can tell, there is no way of batch exporting that also exports embedded attachments (for example, if you embed a PDF or Word document into a page rather than "printing" to the page).

>Export is really the weakest area of OneNote

I'll give you two guesses as to why that is.

My biggest issue with onenote is that you can no longer use local notebooks with the new versions. I'm stuck on onenote 2016 or all my local notebooks become read only.

One drive is blocked at work so onenote is effectively useless to me now.

For now, I've started moving my notes to a static site using hugo. It's a bit less convenient, but until I settle on a better permanent solution at least I have text files I can move around and manipulated in bulk if needed.

seriously.

it blows my mind that there is no good migration strategy for pc base OneNote databases to cloud based ones.

Yes, lock-in is a big problem we have with Onenote in my company, since Microsoft decided not to offer offline notes anymore. Lots of people have their notes locked-in that format and we cannot store that data on a third party server.

I would love to get a Surface and use OneNote -- especially because it has excellent support for hand-written notes (and I much prefer hand-writing to typing). However, I'm hit in the face with two problems:

1. Uncertainty about data export. I don't want to be stuck depending on a third-party proprietary solution for something so important to me. (That said, Microsoft is typically quite good about supporting products for a long time)

2. I actually find Windows unpleasant to use, and much prefer linux. (Arch linux + i3/KDE happens to be my preferred setup).

Re 1. I would really not recommend using OneNote. I recently closed an Office 365 Business account and tried to move my notes on similar topics, e.g. pros/cons and how-tos of using different tools, from a group OneNote page to my own and it was very difficult to do so.

The documentation isn't very good (it's unclear which version) and I ended up having to install the local version on my Mac and manually copy/past the pages I wanted because the copy notebook dialog didn't work with notebooks that have many pages. The worst part is not being able to access the raw data and simply copy that from one place to another.

I've switched to markdown files on Sublime with the Markdown Editing package for now, because they are easier to read and edit, portable and I can convert my notes to wiki pages, blog posts or documentation very easily. I'm still not 100% happy because of the different flavours and how pandoc converts files differently sometimes (especially lists).

At that point Emacs- org mode must be optimal for the use case

I'm not sure if learning a new system is worth it, given the simplicity of markdown files - do you have any good resources?

My goal for now is to have a simple way to record (the files) and manage (the folders) notes, collaborate (I currently use gitlab repositories) and potentially use them later, e.g. by copying relevant parts to make posts, documentation etc, or by writing a script that finds relationships based on the content (something I've been thinking about for links I save in Safari or Firefox too - a script that scrapes the pages and builds a tree to organize links automatically).

Maybe a tool that could navigate the files, extract headlines and content to figure out relationships out of the files would be ideal to help me compose new documents and posts.

Org mode is not very different from Markdown ( Most of the rules are extremely similar) and it can do much more than what you expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgizHHd7nOo

I am sure that there are things OneNote is even better at than Notion.

However, some of the most important concepts covered in my post are databases, relations between those databases, and editing workflows (markdown, slash commands). As far as I can tell, OneNote does not even attempt to do these things.

I’ve tried tons over the years and just keep coming back to OneNote. It’s great, very underrated.

I kept having sync problems with OneNote so I had to ditch it and started using evernote instead.

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