DutchPete

OneNote might have what you are looking for.

That's the thing with Evernote: very often (too often?) one has to use workarounds.

You are right OneNote has an excellent OCR capability, and if you have the desktop version you don't even have to rely on a cloud server to do the OCR-ing for you, like with EN. However, I think the 1N OCR-ing can only be done on an embedded object. So if you need to have your PDF attachment OCR-ed, then you need a PDF app that can do that. PDF-XChange Viewer, or its more modern successor PDF-XChange Editor, does an excellent job, among its many other impressive features.

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

There is a free app that does an excellent OCR job: PDF-Xchange Viewer. What's more, it has plugins so you can OCR documents that are in different languages too. This is, or any other app that can do PDF OCR-ing for you, is an easier an quicker way than having to wait for EN's slow OCR process, which you cannot be sure of beforehand how long it'll take.

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.