I've been a loyal evernote user for 5+ years now and IMO, its unequivocally, the best note taking app out there(including Keep, OneNote, Apple notes, Wunderlist etc). Looking at the comments, I am surprised that evernote isn't as popular among HN'ers as I thought it would be.
Having said that, I can see skepticism surrounding the app based on erratic updates they've been shipping for a while now.
The app has been ruined by :
- Wildly Inconsistent UI (Windows app > MacOS)
- Switch to table layout (monster margins look ugly and quite frankly, unbearable)
- Uncertain updates (more often than not it'll break an existing feature)
Few months ago, I mistakenly updated the Mac app and it was such a painful experience, I had to dig into archives and reinstall 2016 version to restore some sanity. As someone who is heavily dependent on the app, these changes have been frustrating. I'll be jumping ship the moment a viable alternative appears.
I have just under 15K notes and have been a Premium customer since 2008, however, these days I find myself barely touching Evernote at all, and have switched to primarily using Notion.so, with Pocket and Zotero for snapshotting/handling research, and a bit of Dropbox Paper (I had a soft spot for Hackpad).
From my perspective, Evernote has gotten consistently worse over the past few years (some of this is due to the core product not scaling as people put more notes in - the search craps out and the organization sucks):
* No way to easily exclude say web clippings from search; in general the search results are inadequate (and doesn't factor in recency or frequency appropriately) of cache things intelligently - this effectively makes Evernote a PITA for anything but write-only usage
* Rather than helping people categorize things, they've made it progressively harder by making Notebook organization clunkier. I never got into using tags because it didn't make very good suggestions, and there's no hierarchy. With dysfunctional search, in the end it's all just a "pile."
* The original appeal of Evernote was seamless syncing across all platforms, but I'm almost entirely on Linux these days and there's no official client or good alternative, and the web interface is awful. That pretty much killed my usage for good, but every time I launch the iOS app, it seems to launch slower. There's way too much friction for creating notes.
I'll probably be exporting and cleaning house sometime soon. While the web clipper is great, I can probably find a better alternative (or just switch to Zotero for everything, as it does fine page snapshotting and the collections/subcollections largely work like you'd want). The OCR is probably the nicest thing I'd miss, but besides occasionally scanning some receipts or other papers, I'm not sure there's anything else I use it for. Also, their security/privacy updates from last year also made me hold my nose.
There are some neat open source projects that have started up recently, but I'm also starting to think about my notes and research in a more long term view (keeping and syncing, but also publishing).
How did you find the learning curve with notion? I found it on here a few days ago and thought it looked amazing, gave it a few days trial but now I feel like I am just wasting time with it trying to do the things that I want.
Simple things like not being able to put different colors on text in the same block or even just putting a simple table (no not a database) into a block have put me off it. Also it is difficulty (re: impossible) to copy and paste notes over from another application without it getting all messed up.
There are definitely some rough edges - like you mentioned, copy and paste is awful (tbf this is very hard to implement, it's all edge cases), there's no web clipper yet, and for me, personally, I get annoyed by the '/' shortcut (also the search has gotten slower and slower (not sure if this is due to growing corpus or other issues) and there are some other niggles (not doing a great job auto-expanding where you're nested when you jump to a page for example), however they are consistently improving the product in lots of very noticeable ways: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...
And it does really the few things that I most care about:
* Seamlessly syncs/accessible on all my devices (I wish it did better offline access though)
* Has a rich, modern WYSIWYG editor (w/ markdown shortcuts, supports attachments and different types of embeds, comments/etc)
* Has a tree hierarchy on the left - I would prefer faceted nested collections (you can't put a note in two folders), but it's much more effective than single-pane organization like GDocs or Dropbox Paper
I've used a few the tables a bit and it's pretty rudimentary - if you don't need the organization, from what you've outlined, honestly it sounds like GDocs still might be what you need (I've always had a lot of GSheets I link out to from my notes - sucks it's not all in one place, but for notetaking, I think the more important thing is that I have a way to organize/find pointers to things, which GDocs completely fails at).
I've used onenote for a while and tried to move over to evernote - it's horrible on windows.
Simple things just as being able to highlight multiple words to change fonts or even have auto capitalization not have a toggle.
The only thing I did like was the ability to repeat the last command you took but that shouldn't have to exist for stuff like changing fonts of certain words one at a time.
If you use a Surface, or other modern, non-caveman computer with excellent pen support, then there is nothing better than OneNote for note-taking. Interestingly, MS has been slowly deprecating the legacy desktop version of OneNote in Office and replacing it with the free Windows 10 app, which is now far more capable than the old version was.
Of course, there still things that should be added - especially in the drawing, touch/pen UI (bring back radial menus!), and data management/tagging searching departments, but if you haven't tried it lately, OneNote has gotten staggeringly better over the past couple of years, and IMO, easily outstrips its current competition...
Oh, and FWIW, MS has put a LOT of effort into improving the OneNote apps for iOS and Android, too - they are approaching full first-class citizen status, which makes them really handy. (Funny, I used to bash MS, but they're really doing a great job with OneNote, VSCode, and WSL, all of which I use and rely on regularly. Now if they (or anyone else for that matter) could only build modern email/calendar/contacts app that works as well as what we had in the 90's (Palm, cough, Palm...)
Interestingly, I just checked their update history for iOS, and it seems the last real update was almost a year ago, and it was mostly bug fixes or other non-descriptive updates since then.
I think my comment was around the wrong way, I meant that evernote was horrible on windows - so much so that I just switched back to onenote out of frustration.
I do miss the desktop version of onenote as that had a lot more features that I was hoping to find on the windows 10 app version.
Evernote is good for pasting in arbitrary formatting, but horrible for editing formatting, and thus simple notes just get lost in a see of Dreamweaver-esque WYSIWYG nightmare formatting.
Having said that, I can see skepticism surrounding the app based on erratic updates they've been shipping for a while now.
The app has been ruined by :
- Wildly Inconsistent UI (Windows app > MacOS)
- Switch to table layout (monster margins look ugly and quite frankly, unbearable)
- Uncertain updates (more often than not it'll break an existing feature)
Few months ago, I mistakenly updated the Mac app and it was such a painful experience, I had to dig into archives and reinstall 2016 version to restore some sanity. As someone who is heavily dependent on the app, these changes have been frustrating. I'll be jumping ship the moment a viable alternative appears.