For a long while I was using Tadalist which I absolutely adored because of its simplicity. It made lists and you checked things off and it was wonderful. I migrated to Remember The Milk and liked it much better, presumably because my list making was getting more complicated. In particular, I liked the ability to tag list items which allowed me to organize things more. This should have been a warning sign. I now feel that if you’re doing too much organizing of your to-do lists then you’re doing something wrong.

I also have a need for taking notes and keeping my notes organized, searchable, and visible. I was using text files for this but was finding it difficult to maintain a useful naming convention and enable easy searching across files. Maybe it’s a lack of discipline, but these files would find themselves all over my system rather than being in one place. And because they’re tucked away in a folder someplace they’re not visible and they tend to become forgotten and lost just when I need them.

“Aha!” you’re thinking. “He should use Backpack.” I do think Backpack is a worthy application and I tried to use it for a while. But I actually preferred the simpler to-do list management of Tadalist to Backpack. Also, I need to keep track of server passwords and registration information and the like and I just don’t feel comfortable storing that online. Also, I’d need hundreds of pages and I’m cheap.

Onlineness used to outweigh the need for 100% uptime, but now that I do all of my computing in one location it’s not a factor anymore. Earlier this year Remember The Milk was down for hours and I couldn’t access any of my lists. That sucked.

Most recently, I’ve been using BasKet Notepads. It’s fairly nice with a rich user interface that allows you to tag and put meaningful icons next to items. You can organize all of your information in an outline view on the left and view free form or multi-column pages on the right. Pages can consist of to-do lists, free form notes, web links, pictures, etc. A few warts but very nice overall. Except that every once in a while, for no apparent reason, it deletes some of my notes.

So, I’m searching for a new note-taking application.

I’m looking for a desktop application that allows me to create text notes and to-do lists. Ideally I’d like it to create an outline view of all of my pages. I need to be able to search all of my notes and lists. It’d be nice if it could store images and formatted text. It needs to be able to export all of the information in its database to a human readable format like plain text or HTML. I’m not particularly keen on the Wiki concept but I’ll allow you to convince me. Free or very cheap would be nice.

It doesn’t all have to be one application. Maybe you have a great system for storing all of this in a hundred text files and use a separate application for searching—I’d love to hear about it. I’m looking for solutions for Linux but share whatever you’ve got. It may be something I could adapt.

Please share your suggestions. Please share how you are managing your notes and lists. Help!