I still need a place for my notes

After trying countless systems for gathering my digital notes, I still haven't found the software that is just right.

Like you probably do, I spend many hours every day in front of my computer, a Mac laptop. Working with computers (and also humans) involves working with lots and lots of small details, some of which I would like to process and capture in the form of text notes.

Writing notes in a physical notebook has a great feel, and can boost creativity, but paper is not really a good medium when it comes to retrieving and searching through lots of diverse information.

My idea of a note-taking app

Capturing notes on the computer is the right thing to do, and I would love doing it, if there was an app that could realise my humble vision for great note-taking software:

If it's a native app, it would be good if the app was also cross-platform, and allowed for syncing between devices, but it's not really that important to me.

I did try these apps

Here are my collected thoughts on the note-taking software that I've used and found inadequate. Some are popular, and some are obscure and nerdy. They are listed here in no particular order:

The temporary situation

Currently, I don't have a good solution for my digital notes. My system is to use iA Writer, or a text editor, to capture my notes in a given situation, and then save the text file to somewhere in the file-tree under my Documents folder.

I can usually find my notes again by browsing through the files or searching using Spotlight. But, I miss simple note-taking features like tagging and linking between the documents.

Another problem is the ever increasing mess of small files. Since my notes are spread widely, I don’t always recall that I have been working on notes for something related, so I tend to start a new document, even when it would be better to amend an existing document.

Update October 5, 2015

Apparently, new notetaking apps are released daily. Here is a list of note taking apps I've noticed lately:

There are probabably many more that I've missed.