I loved OneNote 2007. It was my go-to software for note-taking. It did what I wanted it to do, cut out things from the internet that interested me and allowed me to take notes on the things I liked. I also created lists and kept track of to-dos and ideas. The data was all stored locally.
However, my computer crashed and with it, my OneNote 2007 lost some accessibility. I have a current copy of the data on a flash drive, but I don't want to have to upgrade to get access to it. I also don't like Microsoft's current emphasis on OneDrive in the cloud.
I'm looking for an alternative. I tried Evernote. I can't get it to do anything I want it to do. Simple things like copying images and text from a website that used to be a breeze with OneNote is now a puzzle.
I'm looking to find another notetaking software that doesn't continually upgrade, is free and is really easy to use. Any suggestions?
I'd also be interested if you want to discuss how you use Evernote, OneNote or any of the other notetaking software.
Seconding org-mode, with the suggestion of Spacemacs to minimize the barrier of entry into emacs.
org is awesome for anything you could want to do with text; lists, tables, calendars, project management, word processing, you name it. If there's something you want to do with your text, it's possible to do with org, and if the functionality doesn't exist yet anyone (who can program) can extend it and add the functionality. It's incredibly easy to work with the output as well, I know of people who publish ebooks straight from their org output.
As a bonus, it's free in every sense of the word.
The only downside is getting started. If you aren't familiar with keyboard based navigation or vim style motions if using Spacemacs / evil-mode you'll feel like you're stuck and have no idea how to use this text editor from '85. It feels incredibly unintuitive until it doesn't.
If you edit text daily, however, it's absolutely worth it.
Emacs is, according to popular joke, an operating system with text editor function :P.
Seriously though, Emacs is an extensible with hundreds (if not thousands) of add-ons programmable text editor. Programmable means that you can automate quite a lot of work from within it. Really good for programmers, not sure if worth to use just for notes.
Org-mode is an engine that depending on some instructions from you takes the body of the note and applies the syntactic/formatting rules to print it. What's cool is the fact it's a rather easy syntax that can be exported into a lot of formats (HTML, LaTeX, Markdown, RTF etc).
I know quite a few people in the emacs community picked up emacs because they started using org-mode. I think normally someone else tells them how they organise everything using prg-mode - projects tracking and management, schedules, calendars, to-do lists even documenting their emacs config files.
Emacs is definitely a committment though.
I'm mainly using pen and notebook, but for one course I was quite happily using KeepNote. Bare in mind that I have never used OneNote, but if Evernote would be enough for you, KeepNote should do the trick. It's free and seems to be the same since 2012. You might need to test it yourself on WIndows though.
At first glance, I'm really liking KeepNote. It looks ideal for what I want it to do, which is to organize my thoughts and provide a ways for me to keep track of the organization. My only hesitancy at this point is that it hasn't been updated since 2012. It seems abandoned. Is that not an issue?
Long-term? It could be an issue. But it's open source project, even if author will not ever return to it, it's quite likely that some other programmer(s) will expand upon it. Perhaps some already did, since KeepNote works for me I didn't really look much further. You might like Tomboy instead if you want it more current, here is a description
Other thing I have used was using was Emacs with org-mode. While current and actively developed (both org-mode extension and Emacs text editor) I can't really recommend it to you, since it's one of those "takes time to master, but it's worth in the end" types of deal.