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Comment by nlawalker | Hacker News Reader

I tried to do this, but I missed a lot of the convenient features and flexibility of OneNote too much and made my way back to it.

OneNote is proprietary, with a proprietary file format, but at least it's "self hosted" (your notes live in concrete files you control, not in a service), and it's got a lot of nice features that make it a joy to use.

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No local hosting on mac. On mac is either ms cloud or sharepoint, unfortunately.

This. Got me using Quiver with Syncthing pointed at the database (json). So far I like it but the iOS app requires WebDAV if you can't use Dropbox. I might set that up soon.

I once tried to use one note for taking notes for work (1:1s, etc.) on a surface pro 4, and found that unless you go to great lengths, OneNote does everything it can to sync your notes to OneDrive. Even after turning off sync for specific books, those books ended up in OneDrive. In the end, I had to uninstall onedrive, disable syncing globally, and then login to OneDrive to delete the previously synced copies.

So users that care about privacy in their notes beware: it does take a bit of work to turn off all of the cloud functionality.

That sounds like the free version of OneNote that comes with Windows 10. The "full-fat" desktop version that comes with Office ("OneNote 2016") is much more flexible in this regard, and has a more powerful interface.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-s-the-differen...

That said, the OneDrive integration is something I like about it; my notes aren't very useful to me unless they're cloud-synced.

I've been curious about entering into OneNote. I liked the brief experience I had using the Android app. I've been using Google Keep, but I hit a tag limit (50 tags max) that really soured my taste for it since I write about so many different subjects I'd like arbitrary tagging. I need to learn more about the organizing structure OneNote permits.

I like OneNote and have used it for many years, but I have started running into "this section is corrupted" since I tried using the android app. The iOS app is very good, but the android app is buggy, slow, sometimes won't load pages and other times won't start. So I stopped using it, and guess what? No more corrupted pages for over a month.

Be aware that the files are also proprietary and I only know of manual ways to migrate away. I am still looking for another option.

> Be aware that the files are also proprietary

Actually the file format specification for OneNote [MS-ONE] is open: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.1...

Thank you. Are you aware of any program that exists or is under development that can import the file format or access the data stored in a notebook? I have never found one and did assume the spec was closed.

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