What Features Am I Looking for in a Notes App

A friend shared his excitement, and joy, of using a new notes app. That made me very curious and intrigued.

I thought I could do a bit of preparation before adding yet another notes app.

What kind of preparation though? How about answering the question: what features am I looking for in a notes app?

Here’s the list of features I came up with:

  1. Support rich formatting. (A)
    1. Support inline code and block code (A1)
    2. Support embedding images (A2)
    3. Support for attachments (A3)
  2. Automatic geo-location of the notes (B)
  3. Automatic timestamp management (creation date, last modification date, etc.) (C)
    1. Support ordering based on these (C1)
  4. Good search
    1. Search by title, tags
    2. Search by dates
    3. Search by location
  5. Offline mode
  6. Available on all platforms
  7. Sync (push better)
  8. Support for automation (create notes)
    1. Append to existing notes
  9. Retrieve notes using API or other mechanisms
  10. Import notes
  11. Export notes
  12. Advanced editing features
    1. History
    2. Folding
    3. Outlines

This list is not ordered. There are things on this list that I consider mandatory. Take for example the presence on all platform and synchronization. Without these, I wouldn’t even consider a notes app.

There are other features that are more like nice to have. I’d be delighted if the feature existed. And if not, it won’t stop me from using the app.

Plus, there are features in the above list that fall somewhere in between: they would push me towards a favorable decision.

What else should go into this list?