In fact, although this articles will deal with some interesting note-taking applications, I do think that OneNote is the king.
There is Evernote, of course, however I have always thought of this as a poor-man's alternative to OneNote. The free version currently only allows me to use the application on a maximum of two devices at once. This limitation has instantly turned me away from using Evernote and I am very unlikely to ever go back to it.
I have used TreePad a few times. The free version allows you to organise a set of notes as a hierarchical tree structure. Your notes can be exported as HTML for sharing with others. The free version has a look and feel similar to your default text editor albeit with a tree structure for organisation. The paid for versions have more advanced features including a full word-processor style of interface and custom styles amongst many other features.
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TreePad Lite (free version) running in Windows 10 showing the tree structure.
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| TreePad document structure of TreePad PLUS (paid for version) showing custom icons/font and other goodness. |
Treepad files (including the node structures) are plain text files, and so it is fairly easy to generate treepad files programmatically in the language of your choice.
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| Action Note - note taking in your action center |
Another note taking app I use is Action Note for Windows. This is a note taking app that sits in your action center. I use this for taking quick notes on my phone and synchronising with my PC. I have already written a blog post covering Action Note last year.
Zim
Zim is a 'wiki for your desktop'. Just like in OneNote and TreePad you maintain your notes as a hierarchical tree structure. Each page can include text and images, with a bunch of plug-ins available including task manager and equation editor.
Zim pages are formatted in a wiki structure that allow links to other pages in the document. Creating a new node is as simple as linking to a non-existent page. Links are maintained in a simple mark-up syntax, such as :Notes:page1 or +newpage.
Zim notebooks can be exported as HTML pages with various pre-set templates. Indeed the Zim website itself was written in Zim.
I have only just discovered Zim, and as such have not got much to show for it, however I can already see that it has many advantages over TreePad most notably the fact that it is a free download; can run across Linux and Windows, not to mention the simple node creation and exporting features. Until discovering Zim, I was considering paying for the full version of TreePad PLUS, however now I don't think I will bother.
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| The Zim manual, written using Zim. |