| I understand what you're saying wrt to rtf versus text but I completely disagree and I say this as somebody who used to have all of my notes in thousands of plain text files. I've never felt like rich text editor's have gotten in my way, I can start immediately typing into a note in Evernote without ever feeling like the rich text somehow hinders my ability to be able to quickly transfer my thoughts. For you, as you've said, you don't see the utility of rich text outside of presentations. But when I'm drawing up and working on new projects I like to have embedded imagery for my flow charts, when I'm working on music I like to include snippets of melodies, and I like to be able to easily take screenshots of things I'm working on and transfer them and embed them easily. I like the ability to be able to copy code blocks from programs like visual studio and web storm knowing that I can preserve the color scheme and monospaced font. It makes readability great. When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note. Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy. I am not a casual user at this point as I have about 5000 notes with folders and tags associated with them. I've been building this note store for the last 10 years in Evernote after switching from One Note. And at least for me the search capabilities are for all intents and purposes instantaneous. Evernote in particular does have a few minor issues with the inability to be able to do regex searches or partial word versus whole word searches but they're minor and don't really impact my daily experience. Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use, it took me less than five minutes to understand how Evernote worked and to have it syncing and searchable across my Macbook, my PC, my android and my iPad. I do think you make strong points but fundamentally we have very different workflows and that's what makes our requirements so vastly different. You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it. If it has limitations with regard to notetaking I certainly haven't encountered them - of course as a safety measure I also make weekly back ups of my Evernote store as a series of exported HTML files. To me this is the biggest shortcoming, ultimately I don't control the central repository, if I ever found an Evernote competitor with comparable features that could connect to an s3, FTP or even dropbox i would switch in a heartbeat. |
org-babel allows this, with added ability to (optionally) execute and see and interact with output inline.
> Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.
Fully supported via org-roam, with added bonus of backlinks.
> When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.
This is a pretty nifty workflow, and I admit a useful one. I am not sure if gifs can be viewed inline withing Emacs, but so far I haven't seen nor tried, so this is a definite shortcoming.
> Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use,
Emacs is absolute horrific experience here. It is a terrible match for anyone looking to setup and start in under 5 minutes, especially because it is wildly different from anything you might have come across.
> You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it
Evernote, way when I used it was still pretty cool. It allowed saving whole webpages directly, and linking them inside notes. But for a broke student from not-so-rich country, its free tier of 60MB ran out very very quickly. Paid tiers were prohibively expensive as $1 meant a day's sustenance or more. I also had a crappy laptop and Evernote wasn't the fastest thing around. It also forced me to think in terms of Notebooks and hierarchy. The notes and notebooks are also not so easily greppable. The UI of Evernote, its biggest strength during on boarding, became crippling for me. As for why kicked it for me in the end is, as you mentioned, single commerical entity ultimately controlling my collected knowledge and its structure. I am personally not comfortable putting thousands of hours of work so someone else can control it. I also write my journal in org-mode, with detailed analysis of social interactions (I'm not good at people, if its not clear by now :)) and I don't want anybody but me taking a peek.
Fortunately, Evernote works for you! And thanks to detailed requirements, someone might refer this conversation in future and make an informed decision based on it, as I once did :)