SiYuan

Having a specialized application to write down your ideas and thoughts can be a huge help when it comes to organizing and centralizing them. SiYuan is one such solution, and it also packs some complementary utilities.

The main window of the application is intuitive and neatly-organized, so that each supported function is easily visible. Nonetheless, novices might still have a hard time finding their way around SiYuan unless they take the time to read the user guide.

You can start by creating a new note and experiment with the numerous formatting options provided within this mode: not only can you turn your text bold, italic or strikethrough, add a heading or insert a table, but you can also upload images or files to your document. You can insert an audio recording, create checklists or bullet lists, or add hyperlinks.

One of the aspects that helps set SiYuan apart from other personal knowledge management systems is the multitude of preview modes. In addition to the default one, you can switch to the expert one (suitable mostly for developers and programmers), to the mind map or to the instant Markdown rendering.

The graph view is especially handy when you want to quickly get a bird's eye view on your document, as this could help you get a brand new idea.

Once you are satisfied with the data you added to your note, you can export it to PDF, Markdown, HTML or a text bundle, so you can access it at a later time with third-party apps.

In a nutshell, SiYuan can easily become you go-to solution when you want more than a note-taking solution, but without losing any of the ease of use and simplicity these tools usually have.