Tired of note-taking apps

> It’s not because of limited choices. But it’s the other way around. There are so many note-taking apps you could try but end up sticking to none. At least, that’s my story. It’s a perfect example of the paradox of choice.

Either this is not a good example of the paradox of choice, or as I am more inclined to believe, the paradox of choice is mostly bunk.

While I don't discount that some consumers may be frustrated at times by an abundance of choice and may naively think their life would be better with fewer choices, I don't think reality would bear that out. Maybe easier in the moment of the choice, but less satisfactory in the experience of the outcome of that choice. I know my life would be measurably less enjoyable with fewer choices in all walks of life: fewer food options, fewer cities and towns to live in, fewer computer manufacturers, and yes, fewer note-taking apps. Fewer apps would not make the apps better. It would only remove some of the options that are satisfying niche needs for other people. It's a bit elitist to say there should be fewer of any category, because it implies that the subtlety of preference felt by others is unimportant.

Choice is the consumer side of the innovation process. If anything, the non-satisfaction with note-taking applications shows that more exploration, more innovation, and yes, more choices are in fact needed. Technology still has a ways to go before we have a robust approximation of the free-flowing paper and pencil note-taking, augmented seamlessly by the computer. We see where we're heading with things like OneNote, but we're still generations of innovation away.

I see you didn't mention Markdown. My solution for the last couple of years to this problem is to have all my notes organized into folder and .md files. A couple of advantages: - I can move around different IDEs/apps since there are a lot of different solutions for every platform there. - Same goes for search and links between folders. Rely on git for version control of the files themselves. - It gives you the flexibility of using plugins to turn into PDF or host as a gitbook private site for example.

Knowledge base organization gets discussed frequently on HN. I understand your frustration though, I've always longed to see a one fit for all platforms though. Onenote sure shows a lot of potential but is probably limited by the fact that MS wants to keep it as close to their office suite as possible.

Just another opinion on the balanced note taking method:

I think org-mode solves almost all offline note-taking requirements

* org-roam makes it super-easy to link notes

* emacs as an editor is as usable as any other editor

* Rich media is possible and easy to do in org-mode. Attach a snapshot, embed a video file

* Code with documentation is a feature not available in most other note taking methods/apps. It's possible to run code snippets and add comments, documentation about them in the same space

* Latex support is advanced. Inline equations work seamlessly

* Search support is advanced

Drawbacks:

* One of the main drawbacks is that all your notes end up offline. This was a deal-breaker for me. ox-hugo helps in publishing your notes to a (private) static site where it can be searched, viewed but not edited on the fly

* Publishing through ox-hugo is separate from maintaining a backup/sync of your notes in /org/ format. You'll have to do this separately through Dropbox/GDrive/etc

* A backup of your org notes is not usable until you set up your emacs environment and download all your notes

I used it for a long time - really liked how no frills it is, but the fact that notes aren't stored encrypted in the cloud (by design) was a deal-breaker for me in the end. I use the notes as a brain backup and they're absolutely unfiltered thoughts, which need to be stored securely. In the end I switched to standard notes, which has functioned perfectly well for me since then (a bit over a year I think).

Note taking apps are stuck in a place similar to where "chat" apps are stuck.

Competition between "chat" applications is driven by network effects. You don't choose Zoom because it is the best, you choose it because somebody else chose it for you. The overwhelming pattern is "CUSeeMe used to be good but now we use PalTalk, "Skype used to be good, but now everybody uses WebEx", or "WebEx used to be good and now everybody uses Zoom", or "AOL Instant Messenger used to be good and now everybody uses Facebook Messenger". Despite a large advance in the underlying technology, the functionality of these applications doesn't seem much better.

I worked at a startup where one of our problems was finding documents in the 20 different cloud services we might put documents. The usual answer people had was to add a new cloud service, but that means you now have 21 places a document might be and it is astonishing how far people will go down this road without any insight into how it is an obvious dead end.

The obvious way out is to build some system that sucks in content from places, a "note finding" app or "note organizing" app instead of a "note taking".

What astonishes me is that so few people are working on that or even believe that it is possible. Two factors are that

(1) People are intimidated by full text search. First people think "you can't beat Google" and second if you look at Google you see Google is not very good. That's depressing. The first four volumes of TREC are depressing because people try all the obvious things that should improve relevance. (in the 5th volume they discover BM25, which nobody to this day since they don't work to do the work to tune two numeric parameters to the data set) Ask people how to make a scalable full text engine and they say "Solr" and I say "are you kidding?" OpenText and ten thousand imitators will boast about the hundreds of connectors they have to the most enterprise-y data sources, but they will say very little about relevance, in fact if they participated in TREC they did it as an advertisement, not because they saw accuracy tuning as a competitive differentiator. A breakthrough is possible, but nobody believes it.

(2) The "app economy" itself is dependent on lock-in. If there was "one ring to bind them all" in terms of the document spaces a person uses, that's an existential threat to all of the programs that want you to keep using them. So once you get some traction in this area you are going to see frantic measures taken quickly to cut off access -- like what happened with the Twitter API when they put all the alternative clients out of business.