Curious, trying out some different systems for organizing research materials. I will try: paper notebooks, Scrivener, Google Docs, Notion, Roam, Evernote, Dropbox Paper. What other systems should I try out?

I need trivial cut-and-paste for images (and, ideally, videos, sound, etc). I like emacs org-mode, but it makes this annoying. It's a major advantage of things like Scrivener, Google Docs etc.

Another thing: I'm not wild about systems in the cloud. AFAIK none make serious privacy guarantees.

Something I like about Scrivener and emacs org-mode is that both make it very easy to re-organize material at multiple levels of abstraction. Much better than gdocs or notion, for instance. Unfortunately, org-mode is really too text-oriented for me.

If you know of examples of large projects being done in a system, that'd be great to know. Eg, some books I admire have been written in Scrivener, org-mode, gdocs, etc.

Something I'd love is a good Kindle clipper. Or 1-second paper -> phone -> desktop -> OCR'ed-in-my-doc. But neither seems to exist in any system, AFAICT. It's all laborious hacks.

(A good web clipper is great, too!)

Oh, and I should clarify: most of my writing has been done with paper&pen+emacs. I use org-mode for much of it. And I also use gdocs a fair bit, and have fiddled with many of the others. But > 50% of things I've shipped (books, essays, etc) have been done in p&p+emacs.

My sense, however, is that it ought to be possible to do much better. So shopping around!