DutchPete

I dig your zen vibe but we're talking about a text editor! So????? Whatever feature you are talking about, you will always have to make choices in terms of importance & priorities. You cannot get around that. So if a good text editor is absolutely important to you & Onenote's is superior to Evernote's, then go for Onenote & accept Onenote's shortcomings. You can keep whining about EN's editor's shorcomings, but that is not going to help you right now, if you need a solution right now. If you can afford to wait that decade someone else mentioned above until EN improves theirs, then wait that "little" longer.

I need reliable and fast sync. Onenote is great and their editor is way better than Evernote. But syncing takes forever. And some weird things, like notes taken in the web editor sometimes simply refuse to sync to my phone for about one hour. Hopefully within the next decade either Onenote will get fast or Evernote will build a decent editor. A decade in IT is eons away, so in the mean time, one has to make choices. Like everything in life, nothing is perfect, and will never be. It is always good to bear that in mind. So one has to decide which are the most important features for one's use case, then base your choice on that. There will always be features that are nice to have but that an app does not offer. Alternatively, one could consider using 2 or 3 apps in parallel to the extent that they are complimentary to one another. It's your call !!

True, but even that I think is a nonsense because intelligence in the human sense does not exist (yet?), and neither does an external brain in the human sense. These words are just marketing hype to try to get an edge on the competition. And that's not unique to EN. However, at the end of the day it does not really matter which qualifications one uses, we know the strengths & weaknesses of EN. And like GM says, there does not seem to be a viable, broad-based cross-platform alternative to EN & 1N out there (yet?).

External brain sounds like an amazing feature, but anything that holds your thoughts, documents, sketches, .... can be classified as your external brain. So any note-taking app could qualify, including 1N. In fact, your whole computer could be classified as such. I know we are talking apps here, but "external brain" does not mean anything & is therefore nonsense. I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence (in bold below).

nvAlt = Mac too Gruber's basic Markdown will only be read by apps that support it, but, like I said, many apps only support a "flavour" (= official name for it I believe), i.e. a variation on it, and those apps therefore do not accept Gruber's markdown. I have tried a number. If I am not mistaken, your planning ahead consisted of leaving EN altogether, except for web clippings. But if all users plan ahead like that EN would have to close shop. GM, I am not trying to be awkward, believe me, but I contest your premise that it is easy to export from EN into a usable format & be up & running within 15 minutes. At any rate, Windows users don't have that possibility, perhaps because EN was originally designed for Mac users so easy export facilities were created for those users. A Windows UI was tacked on at a later stage, by which time easy export for them was forgotten about. Whatever the reason may be, having Windows users' notes up & running within 15 mins is pie in the sky.

1. Your links are for Mac users. 2. Your use of Markdown conventions might work in Voodoo or DevonThink, but many apps use Markdown flavours, which are always slightly different.

EN notes are portable, but only to HTML & MHT, that's not much. I am not aware that you can have plain text notes in EN. And as for up & running in 15 mins: importing HTML into other apps is not that simple, if possible at all. Even if the app allows it, you would still have to do a lot of manual work to make those notes usable as before again. The importing bit into the other app is just the start but that does not mean they are immediately usable, so I would not call that up & running. Plain text notes woud indeed be a lot easier to import & for the user to be & running relatively quickly. But EN does not support PT does it?

Another possibility you could check on the Windows version: in the Evernote folder on your hard drive there is a subfolder AutoUpdate. In there you will find the updates stored as .exe files. You could check if Evernote_5.8.5.7193.exe is in there. I have it in mine, and there is even a later one: Evernote_5.8.6.7519.exe.

@GM: can you tell me how one get the number for a specific post on a page? In the example below the number in the link is 199660? i.e. how do you create that specific link? It is available. Have you tried it? http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/16777-howto-force-plain-text/?p=199660

Don't forget there are 3rd party apps like that already. I don't use them but this is what I have seen being talked about: * Kanbanote - http://www.kanbanote.com/, with a report on Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/kanbanote-organizes-your-evernote-notes-in-trello-like-1676463684 * Trello - a Kanban app that can work with Evernote via Zapier https://zapier.com/zapbook/evernote/trello/. But direct Trello - EN integration is still only a feature someone requested from Trello - see screenshot below or website https://trello.com/b/ooY1N7GP/braintoss-support-page

@jbenson2: do you know what the maximum note limit is on 1N? does it have equally powerful search operators as EN? Office suite: I find the office suite by WPS more pleasant to use than LibreOffice. It is not open source but feels a lot more familiar to MS Office than LO does. And the WPS Spreadsheets (as it is called) app has 1 big advantage of both MS & LO: tabs. I installed VeraCrypt on my PC a while ago & am very happy with it. For my use case it replaces the need for encryption in e.g. EN.

@Alan: there is nothing new about using Excel & EN, and you do not need to "upload" an Excel file. You can just attach an Excel file to an EN note, like you do with a PDF, JPEG, whatever. That is the beauty & ease of EN in terms of attaching files. BTW, all attachments are stored within EN itself, so you do not need to keep them as a separate copy on your hard drive. When you click to open an attachment from within a note, it is actually opened from within EN. When you subsequently amend & save it, you can close it safely. Next time you open the attachment again from within that note you'll see the amendments are there.

Perhaps JMichael had a point about language - LOL. And maybe Christine was hoping for something more intricate or even useful to her, perhaps she found my use too simple, down to earth. But maybe she will explain that personally

@Christine: no I do not duplicate between the 2 apps, a note resides in either 1 or the other. My redundancy consists of back-ups. I don't understand your remark about my comment being way too much common sense & zen for my tastes. I answered honestly the way I use them, I cannot put a more "intellectual" or "esoteric" spin on it. Sorry.

@Christine: I use EN & 1N in parallel because in many ways they are complementary to each other. For example: tables in EN are pretty useless, whereas in 1N they are excellent. So if I don't want to use Excel to create a table I use 1N. That table can then either stay in 1N or be imported into EN, depending on the use. OTOH tagging is far superior in EN than in 1N, so if I need a note to be tagged I will create it in EN. These are just 2 examples but there are many more situations like that. The point that people need to bear in mind is that neither are perfect, in fact a perfect note-taking app does not exist in my modest opinion. Therefore it is pointless trying to make EN or 1N (or any other app for matter) do something it was not designed for in the 1st place. Many people go down that road & then get frustrated when it does not work out, blaming the app for its shortcomings. I just try to enjoy the best of both worlds, accepting that neither one nor the other will deliver all, but that between them they go a long way towards helping me achieve most, if not all, I need for my use case.