You won't end up with the 100% polished experience of some of the well crafted paid apps above, but it's pretty close and the depth of features w/ extensibility is worth the delta. On balance, it took a couple of tries w/ Logseq and Obsidian and then a month of iterating and adding to Obsidian, and I had something better than what I liked about Bear, Ulysses, Craft, Spaces, Roam, Logseq, Evernote, Simplenote. My suggested starting point (others' may be superior): switch to Minimal theme plus watch a few videos (search for 'my obsidian setup' and you'll find a broad range of fairly different takes on how to use and configure Obsidian, and you'll likely get a hint of the plugins available - 'top obsidian plugins' is also a decent quick tour of what kinds of things are already available). The plugin community is large and it has some of the best extensibility going. It's inherently self-hosted : it's just local markdown files (but you can sync via git or their for-pay sync service). Notes.app gets the job done, works well across different platforms, and integrates well into every platform i use.

I have tried pretty much every 'modern' note taking tool out there, including RocketBook (yes, physical), but none of them ever really 'clicked' with me. I very rarely ever read anything i put there, so maybe i should just stop doing that :) I also use the Apple Reading List for interesting articles i intend to read, but much like Pocket it is more a place where links go to die. That would mostly be meeting notes, questions (for meetings), and high level architecture sketches that will then go into a drawing tool at some point.Īnything else lives in Notes.app, but not as complex notes, but rather just a short sentence or link to an article on the web. If i'm at my desk there is always pen & paper next to my keyboard, and anything 'short term' gets noted there. And yes, i still remember most phone numbers from my childhood, despite 99% of them having been out of use for a couple of decades by now :D I tend to be great at remembering stuff, which is probably also why i never really got into note taking.

If it's important i use my 'first brain'. I'm also on team Notes.app, but i honestly never got very good at consistent organized note taking.

Gtd and evernote