I'd like a combination of Evernote and Workflowy. Workflowy is an editable tree of information, but every branch/leave is only one line of text.

Screenshot: http://stillblondeafteralltheseyears.com/wp-content/uploads/...

Every branch of the tree should be a Evernote-style multi line note with text formatting functionality. The tree would be a file system like structure, but the Workflowy UI feels much less clunky than Google Drive/Dropbox or similar services. Workflowy supports marking nodes as completed, so a service like this could even work as task management system.

If I can't have embedded pictures it's a non-starter for me. That knocks out everybody, really.

Just synced text, even if it happens to be markdown text so it's a bit prettier, is not valuable to me.

Evernote's ability to quickly drag in some pictures and throw some text in to explain them is what I want. A real notebook allows me to sketch. A digital notebook must also allow me to incorporate concepts that require pictures because they can't be easily written as text.

To improve Evernote, I would like the "notebooks" to actually be tags, so the same document could appear to reside in multiple places.

I would like it to have h1,h2,h3 header tags, so I could build documentation that had structure, rather than just manually making some text big and bold to pretend to be a header.

I would like a "table" creator or tag, so I could add table data easily.

I will never give up my embedded pictures though.

Agree so much. Beyond the their-server and sync errors, the biggest missing feature of Evernote is task outlines as good as workflowy.

If Workflowy gets a bookmarklet, I'd use it more often. It is no nonsense honest service in its space.

I've asked myself for a long time why Evernote even has users and eventually landed on the conclusion that Evernote is almost like a file system. You can easily create notes, which can contain more or less everything, which is more easy than creating various sorts of files in folders to store your stuff. The "more or less everything" part, is why the whole thing is such a big mess, imho.

What I'd like is an Evernote with less possibilities and perhaps sections in each note. E.g.: - plain text (or up to Google docs kind of formatting) - a photo section where I can dump some pics without them showing on ridiculous full screen resolution. - a URL (which maybe shows a small screenshot of the webpage, or even loads a copy of the text)

To me it's about about storing/remembering stuff I care about in a simple and portable way.

I tried evernote for a while, but the main road block was the lack of good import/export/sync features.

If it's just for lightweight note taking, text apps using dropbox as a backend allow more versatility.

If I'm going to enter important information or thing I want to keep around a long time, I'll need to be able to do backups, move the data around and batch process if needed.

Regarding data management, Evernote feels more like a pretty walled garden than an efficient warehouse. Right now I feel a folder and files vased approach with a dropbox like sync service is the sweet spot, and I use a set of apps like tagspaces or simplenote on top of that to ease specific use cases like text editing, browsing or searching.

I am probably a very small subset of what most other people do. I've just started using Trac on my laptop as a personal wiki and note keeper, in addition to some minor bug tracking for small personal projects. My laptop almost never leaves home. I don't much care about syncing outside my home, but you could run it on a VPS. http://trac.edgewall.org/

What I'd like:

Something wiki like that works good with snippets (e.g. show all snippets with a particular tag on one page relatively compact, not just a list of wikipages where you have to click at each one). TiddlyWiki comes closest from all I've seen so far.

Good way of inserting/attaching random files.

quick way to add stuff to tags/categories (hierarchical tags maybe?)

My biggest concern with tools in this domain is UI: there must be a native desktop GUI. Period. It must allow creating new notes, taking screenshots etc. by global keyboard shortcuts and systray icons etc. Onenote is top notch in this regard and it's sad there is no alternative in linux.