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 !!

http://swipesapp.com/product/ Came across this on Google+, have not tried it.

Evernote is what it is: no more no less. No app is perfect, no app is a jack-of-all-trades. So if you need/want to expand EN's capabilities beyond what it was designed for, you'll have to use addons. There are also plenty of useful free add-ins so you don't necessarily have to spend money. It is as Gaz points out, it all depends on what you want/need.

Moved it to the 3rd party discussion page.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/evernote-web-clipper/versions/

I understand there is a bug in Web Clipper 6. Uninstall & install version 5.9.1. I have Win 8.1, use Pale Moon (a fork of Firefox) with WC 5.9.1 & have no problems.

what client are you using: Windows, Mac, ...... ? What do you mean by "save" button? The easiest thing to use is the Evernote Web Clipper and/or Evernote Clearly.

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.