I have also struggled for a long time to get what I want out of existing personal knowledgebase solutions, despite loving many individual elements of the products that are already out there like Evernote, Workflowy and Dropbox/.txt files etc. This pain was particularly acute in college while drinking from the firehose of information, and not having a tight solution, such that years on so much value was simply lost and forgotten. I have been building the product I wished I had - Naked Knowledge. It would be great to get interested parties' feedback. You can follow us and sign up for the beta here if you like: https://nakedknowledge.com

We have had very similar experiences with Evernote, then. I also used Google Notebook before the (in my opinion very efficient) product was discontinued. Google Docs on the other hand forces you to open entire documents. This doesn't work well when the most frequent use case is a quick-and-dirty append.

This may sound like a "solve everything with git" type comment, but honestly, I have found that keeping a set of markdown files in a git repository (frequently pushed to github) works well for me. I can have a quick script that appends a default journal file for thoughts I don't want to spend time organizing immediately. For everything else, I open up the relevant .md file and add a bullet point.

So far it's working better than anything I've experimented with over the last ten years.

I do the same; only with vimwiki (so today's diary is just two key strokes away). https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

I recently found a blogpost describing a way to add 'commit hooks' to vimwiki so that my repository is automatically synchronised when I make edits. You can still fall back on command line git for fixing merges / anything else.

http://jarvistmoorefrost.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/snippet-co...

I've been using Arena for the last year or two: http://are.na.

It's conceptually based on blocks and channels, where a block is text, pdf, video, audio, image, etc. and a channel is an ordered set of blocks and other channels. Channels can be public, private, or private with collaborators. It's web-based and has a good API(1), which I use as a lightweight CMS for my own website. They plan(2) to eventually charge for a pro version, but for now they are accepting rewarded donations.

(1) http://dev.are.na/documentation/channels (2) http://future.are.na/

Are.na is blocked on my work network as malicious software... Are you sure it is clean?

Have you looked at http://www.notebooksapp.com/? It stores data in plain text, supports markdown, will sync with Dropbox & WebDav, and does full text search & tagging. Available for OSX, iOS & Windows.

Agree with you. I have over 5000 notes on Evernote, but I only use its shortcut to write several content(about 10 notes). Now I am trying Weavi, but uploading files is not convenient like Dropbox. Fortunately, I find my files are less and less as I use more and more mobile devices. So what is need is pure content management not file management. If Weavi supports private records, and an extension like Evernote Clipper, it would be my best choice.

If what you have is mainly text, I highly recommend Workflowy. I have a top-level header called "Brain Dump" where I put any thoughts I have during the day, then I move them into subcategories when I have time.

The combination of Workflowy (with tagging), Pinboard, and Dropbox feels "right" to me.

Combination products are often hard and heavy to use. I would more like to choose simple concept product. You may try Weavi, (https://weavi.com/@/2739) I use Weavi+Workflowy to organize knowledge.