On portability and notes apps
Evernote is getting a lot of flack lately and for good reason. It was recently acquired by Bending Spoons, a company that has acquired a number of other apps and proceeded to enshittify them. It appears Bending Spoons is now doing the same with Evernote. Evernote’s pricing recently jumped to $250 year (or $25/month) for their “advanced” plan.
THAT. IS. INSANE.
And people are rightfully getting very annoyed with up Evernote (see just a few examples here, here, here, and here).
It has been many years since I used Evernote. I ditched the app back in 2016 and a big reason I ditched it at the time was because I was worried about my data being locked into an app. Evernote was already getting bloated and I was slowly realizing how difficult it would be to get my precious information OUT of Evernote.
🔓 My goal from that point forward was to never have my information locked into a single app. So far, this approach has served me generally well. I have used a few different note taking apps over the years, gravitating over time to more local and direct control of my information. Markdown files is a huge part of that.
Here’s what I’ve learned exporting and importing notes over the years across different apps
- Bear Notes, the first Markdown notes app I used, has been great for exporting notes in Markdown. While it saves files in a SQLite database, exporting them into Markdown and a variety of other formats is easy to do and works great. The biggest issue is that Bear Notes doesn’t use folders, so you have to export by tag if structure is needed. (Bear devs are also working on the Panda editor), which if it ever actually comes to fruition could be a cool option for Bear Notes fans who want more local control and storage of their notes.
- Obsidian and Logseq are the leaders of "local first" file storage and the ones I recommend most for those who really want total control over their information. However, use plugins with caution. In Obsidian especially it is easy to quickly become dependent on plugins, and this means that less and less of your "vault" will work outside of the Obsidian environment. I generally try to avoid plugins that inject HTML into notes (like a plugin that highlights text in different colors), as this can be really messy if you ever export those notes.
- Apple Notes recently surprised me with its ability to bulk export notes into Markdown. Bulk export is only available on the Mac, but I used it recently for exporting hundreds of notes and it worked FLAWLESSLY. I was able to move the exported Markdown files into Obsidian with zero issues, attachments and links preserved.
Developers are clearly understanding that portability with note taking apps it an important concern and something people look for when moving between apps. But promises of portability are not always as they appear.
For example, Craft says its files are portable, but I ran into a lot of issues when I exported notes from Craft (mostly with formatting and how embedded notes were handled). This is to be expected since Craft has a very different approach to note creation, but it still made it feel like the app was trying to lock me in. When I did move notes from Craft to Obsidian, things were a mess that took a solid week to clean up.
Also, just because you use flat, locally stored Markdown files, that does not mean that apps will all be able to access those files equally. For example, I had once thought it would be great to use Obsidian and Noteplan interchangeably, but quickly realized this was impossible because Noteplan does not use the same file naming convention as Obsidian.
Portability has improved, but true portability and the ability to simply point an app to a folder of notes is still not possible. There aren’t enough standards for things like plugins and add-ons to make this possible.
