Re:Note Taking in 2021
by ubermonkey on Thursday June 17, 2021 @10:03AM
(#27539671)
I said this uptopic, but I've tried to love OneNote a few times in the past partly out of interoperability / possible collaboration and partly out of popularity, but I just can't get there.
One of the key things that kills it for me is that I really need my notetaking tool to be smart. I tag lines as "to-do", and my tool of choice can assemble an agenda of items i need to accomplish in a metadocument, even if they're spanned across multiple files.
OneNote, frustratingly, HAS a way to tag something as a Todo, but it's just decoration. There's no provision for showing you all the Todos in a document in a summarized view or whatever, or at least none I could find.
I'm willing to admit that my need here to comingle todo items and notes is perhaps idiosyncratic, but fortunately it's not TOO niche because it's basically the foundational idea of Orgmode.
(....and that's the story of how Ubermonkey became an emacs user.)
+1 for OneNote. I need a notes tool that works on desktop and mobile, where I can easily view and edit notes (text and images) even when being offline. Most tools unfortunately don't pass this basic criteria.
I really enjoyed using OneNote on Windows or Mac but no native Linux client turned out to be a deal breaker for me. Web app is sluggish and limited, then using it through Wine was pretty buggy. I finally gave up and switched to a platform agnostic solution.
I used OneNote for a long time. It's not bad, but it has some quirks that I wasn't fond of: why are notes in these weird draggable boxes? When I decided to export my notes to a different format it was a huge pain. I ended up creating a keyboard macro script and cycling through each note one by one. Once I exported all my notes to word documents, I was able to convert them to markdown/org from there.
For me that actually is one thing I really love about OneNote and hate about everything that tries forcing my notes from something paper-like into something text-file-like because that's just not how I take notes. I tend to scribble into corners or wherever there's space. It doesn't linearize well, but it doesn't have to (at least for me).
Re:Note Taking in 2021
by hobabaObama on Thursday June 17, 2021 @03:00AM
(#27536877)
One small correction. OneNote is free till you expire your free OneDrive storage space. After that we need to pay for online storage.
I don't think most people around here have a problem paying for something that's valuable to them.
Syncing with OneDrive is an optional feature. You can save notebooks locally to use up as much space as you want without paying.
For me it's pretty much perfect - it syncs with all my devices, supports the iPad pencil, supports OCR and text searching in images, has native apps, and it's free.