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This may not be completely acceptable, but I swear by Mempad (http://www.horstmuc.de/wmem.htm). It's not open source, but that isn't a huge deal breaker for me, since it can import/export human readable text files very easily, and its file format is really simple. If I ever needed to convert my thousands upon thousands of notes to a different format, I could probably write a program to do it an hour, and most of my work would be writing the new format. Most of the open-source programs I looked at didn't make getting to my data that easy. (Plus, since I use speech recognition for everything, I can't get picky about source availability. Anything that uses non-native widgets is almost entirely unusable for me, so I can't use anything that uses GTK or Qt. That rules out like 80% of open-source.)

It only supports plaintext, which might be a deal breaker, but I've gotten used to it. I rarely find myself needing formatting, and it has some functions to get around that, like the ability to drag arbitrary URLs and files into the text box and have them turn into clickable links. If I ever need to have images in my stuff, I usually just have links like that in my text.

That might make working with the notes a bit awkward on Android, though. Honestly, I wouldn't know. I rarely edit my notes on the go. If I need to look at my notes when I'm not using my computer, I usually export a small section of my file and physically print it out.

The program's so small I just keep it and all the files it generates in my Dropbox. With that setup, I pretty much get all the benefits of Evernote I'd need without worrying about losing notes or proprietary file formats or whatever. It's kind of weird, but I would really recommend giving it a shot.

(Among other things, I wrote this entire post in it. :p )



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