I’m in your camp. Apple Notes somehow fell into this gap for me. For me the ability to format, add images and screenshots and easily share gave it an edge over plain text.
I loved notes for years but switched to Bear in the last few months in order to get sane Markdown export.
I couldn’t ever find a nice way of exporting (and backing up) my Notes notes. There was an IMAP storage option but that meant losing formatting options.
You can try Exporter. I've been using it for some time now to export Apple Notes to markdown and then checking into a git repo. Caveat: it doesn't export attachments or tables.
I'm also using Bear for note taking. It is a great tool that includes a nice way to export documents with style. One thing I struggle with is taking notes for things not related to work. This might be because I have a separate set of notes for work and not work. After reading the article I've decided to try and use one diary for everything. One note per day, but all in one place.
A few things I miss for this to be really good are:
1. Folding. A single file will be long. Being able to fold the major sections (# Work, # Private # Projects) would be really helpful. It seems Bear is planning to add folding.
2. Security. One can select all notes under a given tag (for example #Diary), but if they contain an attachment - for example an image, the password based encryption can't be applied.
I have been using FSNotes for the past year, but feel ready for something more polished; so now I am trying Bear. Thanks for the tip!
Did you look at FSNotes before switching to Bear yorself?
My own note taking is too fragmented right now, being split between org mode, FSNotes, and Apple Notes. It’s a bit like having clothing with too many pockets: I am too often unsure where to look for a particular note.
You can use your own writing to create a font set for OCR to recognize off of. Will doing a better job off a data set trained off of your own writing.
I've done some minor OCR to scan my bank PDF statements. I use tesseract iirc, there are different training sets to use. You can build a training set from your own writing.
I found that using an iPad with the Pencil has been a great middle ground. The OCR in the various Notes apps (including stock) is able to recognize my horrendous writing (it’s really bad).
For tasks, this might be the plan for the next few days, where everything fits on the same page.
For notes, those might be scribbles to help solve the problem at hand.
Larger and more long term things start benefitting from searchability indeed.