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The original was posted on /r/surface by /u/Tricky_Barnacle_2060 on 2024-11-08 08:56:50+00:00.

I’ve been using Surface since 10 years ago while I was in college. OneNote was my perfect fit because:

• Handwriting support so that I can annotate my lecture notes & finish assignments
• Note support where I can type in checkboxes, rich-text, styling my note
• crossing platform syncing, when I type on my desktop and draw something on surface, in which case surface is a great drawing board for my things. I made a ton of annotated pdf books and memes this way.

It literally was my digital pen and paper and it will continue to serve that goal if it’s not stopped evolving for 20 years. What I really need it to improve are:

• Markdown. I couldn’t bear with that word-style input box anylonger. I believe it’s been a fair argument since 2014.
• Mindmap and other visual elements like diagrams and slides. Whiteboard was a simple thing but now we’ve seen Miro and Whimsical and even apple freeform.
• Real-time sync. There were too many conflict onenote files in my onedrive. Onenote works almost in real time when the network is good but there’s always some times when it’s not ideal. I don’t want to pick from versions.
• Task management and things. Although this is hard and I was cool with Microsoft To-do, but I lean towards the way of notion database more nowadays.

I don’t think OneNote will ever do that, especially since they canceled plugins after the 2016 version. So, I started to build my own ideal OneNote for Surface in 2022, which is affine.pro. What I basically achieved now is:

• Markdown and notion blocks editor
• Edgeless whiteboard
• Handwriting support
• Cross platform real time sync on IOS, web and Windows (surface)

I now use affine.pro on my surface daily and replaced onenote. Also what to hear how do you guys think about it? I want to find a right path to build the best knowledge base for surface.