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Comment by smusamashah | Hacker News Reader

OneNote after trying many Markdown based tools including Obsidian. No other tool comes close in how fast it let's you dump down whatever it is in your head. It's like writing on a whiteboard or something. Click anywhere and write or paste. I have so much notes in there that now I want some kind of structured and linkable data support in it.

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OneNote lock-in is crazy. I legitimately lost access to over a year of notetaking after my "complementary" OneDrive storage trial period ended despite having paid for a Surface that included OneNote. I shudder just thinking of going back to any note taking app that doesn't export my data in a portable format.

Agreed. But there isn't a single tool out there which offers free form writing and pasting like OneNote does. I have tried all I could find. There are may be one or two which let you click and write anywhere but that is all they do.

I was hoping Obsidian canvas will replace it, but it's not there yet.

I dropped OneNote when the feature to add subtabs to tabs was removed. It used to be great, but compared to Obsidian it's clunky, slow to load, and my files aren't right there on my disk and editable/parseable with the CLI (which I use a lot).

Yeah, sure, you can do local notebooks in OneNote, but the UI is so intent on trying to trick you into storing things in The Cloud. Lock-in bad. Markdown good.

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