what is the best note-taking app? Save me trying them all please! Basically just want to be able to scribble things down & search through them for keywords later. If I can categorise/tag them then bonus but not essential! Basic sketching tools might be handy as well.

Paper is one of the best, at the moment, AFAIK but when iOS 11 is released in September, it’ll be pretty powerful.
From what I’ve read, just tapping on the screen with the Pencil will open the app, allowing note-taking, amendments to PDF files, all notes will be searchable, and other stuff.
I’ve got a Pencil, but at the moment I’m not taking full advantage of it, not being much of a drawist.
I’m sure there are other apps, made for just note-taking, and I’d be interested to know what else will make use of the Pencil.

Goodnotes is also good for writing notes on other documents like word etc.

Paper by 53 can be good for drawing but not so much for writing. Nebo can convert to text automatically – takes a little longer to make sure the text is converted accurately. My favourite is Penultimate by Evernote. Very intuitive, nice cut/copy/paste controls. Line thickness and the other font and highlight options work nicely too.

*Edit. I use mine every single day. It’s brilliant. Writing is just so natural.

Ive still to find the ‘just right’ solution for me, but i’m liking notability for notetaking, and as above, goodreader to annotating documents.

‘draw’ is also an option built into office 365 iOS, which whilst not perfect, can also be handy for direct notes on word or ppts.

Notability is my choice.

Goodnotes is also good for writing notes on other documents like word etc.

For Word documents I use Word.

Following on to my previous similar tread…. of these various note apps do any give you useful controls over exporting the notes? Used one note for a bit last week – worked very well in lots of ways but it seems to do nothing to optimise the files when you want to send them- a note with a few photos in was 45mb with no apparent option to slim it down

Notability allows a few formats, PDF, RTF (this won’t allow anything but typed text) and Note (appears to the Notability standard) but not sure what size they come out at.