An article about the effort to create a new editor in Evernote: I didn’t find it terribly illuminating, but it’s a lengthy piece with lots of encouraging photographs of programmers sitting in front of laptops. Any sign of life at Evernote is welcome. (But Ian Small's videos on the Evernote discussion forum are actually more instructive.)

https://www.builtinaustin.com/spotlight/2019/10/15/working-at-evernote-austin-engineering

I've been impressed with the small improvements over the past year, and think the company is moving in the right direction on larger updates.

It would be good to see that come true. I’ve never been happy with anything that claims to import and replace Evernote. The imports are just not consistently good for every one of my notes, which tend to have rich content and not just text. I suppose that’s a “lock-in” factor due to Evernote’s approach, but it is what it is. I don’t admire Evernote, but it’s familiar, works well with the apps I use, and seems to be focused on improvement.

marlowe wrote:

I've been impressed with the small improvements over the past year, and
think the company is moving in the right direction on larger updates.

They asked me to take part in a survey that would take about 20 minutes. It went something like this:

Gender: male
Age: 66 or older

Thank you. That's all we needed to know.

I'm assuming that, due to my age, it probably took 20 minutes to get past the first two questions, so they pulled the plug.

I've always had the same problem. Didn't find any app that can preserve Evernote's highlight for example. Many (e.g. Notion) can't even preserve underline.

A lot of times these formatting informations carry hugely important visual cues that allow me to quickly get the idea of a note, or at the very least allows me to parse a sentence much faster than if they were absent.

Yesterday I happened to look into this again, and discovered that Notable (https://github.com/notable/notable is able to generate valid markdown that preserves both highlight and underline in my Evernote notes. (in order to be valid markdown, html tags have to be used of course for highlight and underline. But I don't mind that). I went ahead and finally switched from Evernote (not to Notable the app, at least not yet, but to a more plain text file-based system ...)







Paul Korm wrote:

It would be good to see that come true. I’ve never been happy
with anything that claims to import and replace Evernote. The imports
are just not consistently good for every one of my notes, which tend to
have rich content and not just text. I suppose that’s a
“lock-in” factor due to Evernote’s approach, but it is
what it is. I don’t admire Evernote, but it’s familiar,
works well with the apps I use, and seems to be focused on improvement.


marlowe wrote:
I've been impressed with the small improvements over the past year, and
>think the company is moving in the right direction on larger updates.

Do you mean just plain text / markdown files? And how do you keep them in order? Just with folders, or some other software?

SmallDog wrote:

I went ahead
and finally switched from Evernote (not to Notable the app, at least not
yet, but to a more plain text file-based system ...)

Hi Alexander, yes plain text file. For sync between laptop and phone, I use Google Drive + an app called Drive Sync, although there are probably superior self-hosted approaches.

The files are mostly markdown files, edited on laptop with Sublime and on android with Markor/Epsilon Notes. Not quite the standard markdown though, since I modified the syntax definition quite a bit to suit my needs. In particular, I'm hoping to dispensing with manually applied tags and just write a syntax definition for my 'idiolect', so that (i) I get syntax highlighting for words and phrases of particular interest to me, and (ii) I can rely on Sublime to automatically go through these files and construct an index of the symbols, so then I can navigate to the relevant files by using the standard IDE features such as "Browse symbols". (Currently for example, I make it so that every phrase in title case is regarded as a symbol (e.g. "Empire State Building", "Charles Darwin"))

I've been liking the "piggyback on a programming IDE" idea very much... For a while, I even tried to implement a Zettle system using javascript functions, where each note is a function named e.g. z20191027001240, and the content of the note are written as comments. When there's the need to link to another note, I drop out of the comment and just make a "function call". Later, I can "list backlink" simply by using Sublime's "Goto References" function.




Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Do you mean just plain text / markdown files? And how do you keep them
in order? Just with folders, or some other software?

SmallDog wrote:
> I went ahead
>and finally switched from Evernote (not to Notable the app, at least
not
>yet, but to a more plain text file-based system ...)