Ask HN: What is your ideal note-taking software and/or hardware?

I like tiddlywiki. It has the potential to do all the things you want, but will require some set up.

For quick notes that I don't need to index nor search later I just grab a physical notebook that sits on my table. It has a pen in it marking the next empty page.

Other than that, I click a button on my taskbar to load Notepad or Gedit depending on the OS I'm using. Take notes there, but don't save it. Once I'm done, I go to Evernote and paste the notes there, give it a title and add tags.

I'm one of those people who keep Evernote with only 2 notebooks: Inbox and Archive. All possible use cases on taken notes are based on tags, which I add/remove according to my workflow.

Probably not what you're looking for but as a student, the surface book w/ OneNote solved all my note taking issues.

I use workflowy, but mainly for task management and light note taking. The UI is cimbersome on desktop, and unusable on Android. The only thing that saves it is keyboard shortcuts.

I used to use Evernote, and still recommend them for people who want something more robust and featured. I wish they were lighter in the formatting and allowed markdown though.

Usecanvas is good if you want something dead simple.

I struggled to even try using emacs org mode, but it was entirely worth it, I highly recommend it, give it a week and honest effort into learning, being able to export to html allows me to reference easily wihle on the road, updating the .org is still a challenge while on road without my laptop and ssh access.

that being said, I think like you, my struggle is with the bottleneck between my brain and these devices. it is often annoying to sit down or access my 'notebook' wherever it is and I'd rather just make a mental note and it show up in my spreadsheet.

I like workflowy, but will not use because I do not like using cloud services as I have little trust for them (been burnt a couple times now, so after learning the lesson 3 times I finally wised up)

EDIT: some typoes and adding other thoughts...

A sub-vocalization microphone and speech recognition system that puts silently-spoken notes into OneNote.

I use Zim[1], and have been very happy with it.

> When given a note, auto-tag and sort.

I'm not sure what you mean by "auto-tag and sort", but Zim does allow you to organize pages and also search through them.

> A note can be 1) a saved web-page, 2) an image of my physical notebook [should be OCR'd], 3) text I type into the software itself, or 4) a mixture of the above.

Zim has support for attachments and embedded images[2]. It doesn't support OCR, but it would not be difficult to build a little custom tool[3] to use a separate OCR utility, so you can select an image and have it insert the OCRed text underneath. When I link to webpages, I generally just copy-paste the relevant bits into the page, but you could also save the entire webpage as an attachment. Again, a custom tool could be used to automatically save a copy of the URL on the page and/or embed its content.

> Notes should be indexed and searchable by content and title.

Zim has a search feature which works pretty well, though I sometimes have to stick extra synonyms into the text if I find that I keep searching on the wrong keyword.

> Notes should be synced across devices

> Notes should be accessible off-line

Zim stores everything in plain text files with a vaguely mediawikish markup, so I've stored the notebook in a Git repository hosted on BitBucket[4] and periodically push/pull changes between computers. This also leaves me with a history, so I can go back and `git blame`/`git log` a page to see how a project evolved.

I've also written another post on HN discussing my organizational system in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134401

[1]: http://zim-wiki.org/

[2]: http://zim-wiki.org/manual/Help/Attachments.html

[3]: http://zim-wiki.org/manual/Help/Custom_Tools.html

[4]: https://bitbucket.org/

While it's not fully ready yet, Standard Notes can in theory do all these things. It's a client based system backed by an abstract model server, meaning the client chooses how to represent data, and the server can understand any format.

There is an agreed upon client side format which is discussed in the specification[1].

It's also decentralized and encrypted which means you'll have total privacy and security. You can run your own server, or join a community server.

Would love any feedback you have. Follow for updates on Twitter: @standardnotes.

[1] https://standardnotes.org

[2] https://twitter.com/standardnotes

My ideal would be very similar to yours. When you lay out the requirements like you have it makes me realize that it's less note taking and more "distributed storage and universal access to a resource management solution that can index and categorize variable content"

That's asking a lot from a note taking app, but not from a CMS.