Does anybody have a counter argument for just using macOS notes if you exclusively use Apple products? They sync nicely with my devices and make note taking pretty simple for me.
I’ve been using macOS notes for a couple of years for daily note taking, because it is just so convenient with cloud sync. I have been planning to transcribe everything I want to keep into a git repo of .md files, for exactly the lockin reasons the other replies have mentioned. I hope to settle on macOS notes for daily stuff and transcribing to a repo for long term.
They are difficult to export. I had great success with Exporter.app, it converts to markdown and even handles the images. It then imports nicely into Bear.app.
This would give me a function to create a new, dated notes doc and open with my editor anywhere from the terminal. And then I'd just use standard tools for searching, instead of using a script.
(FYI: acme-open is my wrapper to acme, and I keep a link to the actual iCloud Drive directory in my home folder.)
It's a proprietary note ecosystem, so if you ever try to leave (or not use iCloud, which iOS/macOS note syncing depends on), it will be very difficult to regain control of your notes. I did this and it took a lot of effort, involved parsing out some protocol buffers, and losing a lot of formatting. I now just use markdown text files, never going back to that.
There are iOS shortcuts now which can let you do this programmatically, but you also lose formatting, and its a hack.