tavor

8 minutes ago, CalS said:

Not sure how denigrating other's work flows does much to support your use case.  The point of fact is EN has not been inclined to incorporate nested notebooks since forever.  No matter the teeth gnashing.  I adapted.

I think his/her point is what is the point of tag users constantly chiming in on this request thread to essentially preach tagging? If they wanted advice on how to use tags to organize notes, they would ask for it. But this is a feature request thread, not a "school me on tagging" thread. You, @DTLow, myself and some other long term Evernote users don't care about nested notebooks, but what is very clear to me is that we are in a tiny minority. The people want nested notebooks and this thread is their place to express that desire to EN. I think we should let them do so without trying to be overly helpful when our help isn't being requested.

On 2/6/2021 at 1:18 PM, Paul A. said:

I think nested notebooks is going to happen.

For sure. I don't use notebooks for subject matter categorization (only for access categorization, similar to what @DTLowdoes), so nested notebooks are irrelevant for me, but the writing is on the wall. The vast majority of users want nested notebooks and per no less an authority than the CEO, only a small minority of users use tags. Also, I'm not aware of any serious note app competitors that do not have nested notebooks.

The green elephant may not live to 100, but it will not die on the tag evangelization hill. 

2 hours ago, ArjenC said:

But the real damage is done already and will visible in the coming months ..None of the persons I know will advice Evernote as a stable and great product anymore, and this is the real damage.. Evernote cannot repair this damage, 9+ years of loyalty for most of my colleagues  towards Evernote and they left due to the lack of proper communication and support to them... the end-users. Not only because of the big failure with version 10 release.... it is all about poor communication and expectations.

This forum is the last option to communicate with this company. So that's why more and more people are on this forum. This signal should be a red signal to Evernote Management, but it isn't... 

100% agreed. I've said before the biggest thing EN broke with v10 was user trust. And unlike a broken or missing feature, trust doesn't get fixed with an update. I stopped evangelizing for EN years ago when I realized that they don't take beta testing very seriously. But even I couldn't have imagined they would unleash this v10 abomination on their users with such little communication/warning. 

And to your point, as awful as the initial v10 product was, had they managed the release and communication better, they could have put v10 out there for people who wanted to try it, and done so without upsetting so much of their userbase. I think daily users of Evernote would have been content to wait out 6 months in v6 for a finished v10 product (with many running v10 side by side to try it out) - I certainly would have. But this horribly managed/communicated rollout has prompted me to look elsewhere and I'm now using Joplin as my daily driver (and amazingly, this open source project has features that Evernote does not, including features that have been highly requested for many years on this forum). And depending on what happens with Evernote, may move all of my notes out when they discontinue syncing v6.

18 minutes ago, Angry said:

I posted just in another thread

Ian Small on german magazine c't (own translation):
There are currently no plans to end the legacy version, although that is sure to happen at some point. But we would give enough advance notice, and by that I don't mean just a few weeks.

From here (Sorry pay wall):
https://www.heise.de/tests/Evernote-10-im-Test-und-Evernote-CEO-Ian-Small-im-Interview-5024163.html?seite=all

No worries, @ehrt74 will let the CEO of EN know that he cannot actually stop EN v6 from working even if the company wants to.   😉

1 hour ago, CalS said:

They aren’t included in the V10 rewrite which maybe says some serious back end plumbing to address?  Supposition on my part. 

That may be a good guess. If it was easy to do, seems like a no-brainer to include that early on in v10, as nested tags could have been held up as evidence of the unified codebase reaping rewards. And it surely would have neutered at least some of the furor that accompanied v10 release.

Instead, months after initial v10 release, we get a dashboard - a feature I don't recall seeing among the highly requested features such as nested tags, outline mode, etc.

9 minutes ago, Tazzz said:

Because they are. They look like folders, they act like folders, they are used like folders, almost all users see them as folders etc. If you'd replace the name Notebook/Stacks with Folder nobody would bat an eyelid. Because most users think the names Notebook/Stacks/Note are just a fancy and more appealing way of saying Folder/Sub-folder/Document, that goes well with the Evernote brand.

They also share a critical limitation of folders - a note can reside in only one folder. So yes, they are folders from the user perspective. 

33 minutes ago, CalS said:

Of what has been the question.  All accounts?  Active accounts?  Customers as opposed to users?  Mind numbing if this argument has been raging for 10 years through leadership changes. That really is spitting in the face of 98% of your users. 

Right, we have no idea. Though I'm guessing monthly or weekly active users is the denominator. Not much point for EN to include people who aren't at least somewhat active.

As someone who has very few notebooks and relies more heavily on search and tagging, I'm disappointed that tag use hasn't really caught on with a larger segment of EN userbase. Most seem mired in the folder structure and the hierarchy it provides. I don't even rely on hierarchical tags that much. Don't have much interest in "browsing" my notes. I find what I need by search and related notes (e.g., notes related to a project) are located via tags.

All that said, if you have a large proportion of users preferring notebooks to tags, at some point, as a company, you have to yield, unless you think you can be the Apple that will eventually lead your stubborn users to the light.

Nested notebooks seem to be fairly common among other note apps. Joplin, which I'm test driving has infinitely (not that I've tested, but it's certainly at least 5 layers deep) nested notebooks. As the note app competition grows, you will have many note app users who are used to nested notebooks and will not consider EN as an option unless it has that feature. Of course we are a long way from there as EN is still the elephant(!) in the space, and gets new users from people new to the space, not from the competition.

9 minutes ago, Tazzz said:

Sure. But the vast majority has the other view. What percentage of evernote users are using tags again?

Ouch. Checkmate.

2% (or was it 5%) according to no less an authority than the CEO.

42 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

@tavor „Can do“ is not relevant. If you are the electrician, you „can probably do“ more than you imagine. Like pull the plug ...

If you bother that much, then grab your data and leave.

No reason to spill more ink on this ...

I thought @catsknit's question about v6's life is relevant, and has been left unaddressed by Evernote, so it's only natural that people will want to discuss it. To paraphrase your words, If it bothers you that much, ignore it.

I expect v6 will be around longer than v6 will be relevant, so I'm not personally concerned about whether EN could pull the plug on it or not, though I do find the discussion about that issue interesting. The v10 debacle spurred me to look around at some other note apps for the first time in several years (back then it was only EN and ON in terms of cross platform note apps), and the space has really exploded in recent years. After using some features that EN doesn't have, there's no going back to v6 longer term. Now that I've seen what's out there and how fast it's moving, I can totally see why EN *had* to unify the codebase - their product would have been rendered an also-ran within a few years if they tried to sustain development of 5 different codebases while their more nimble competitors developed using one codebase. While I think their execution was horrible, v10 is definitely the way forward, and hopefully v10 will be able to obsolete v6 before the end of 2021.

11 minutes ago, ehrt74 said:

As I said, the client for Blackberry OS is 8 years old and still works fine. Evernote's API isn't going anywhere.

I can't see Evernote developing the legacy clients much, but I'm not sure they can actively stop them from working, even if they wanted to.

We're talking about an app that has to phone home when you first install it. I'm pretty sure they can pull the plug on sync when they're ready to do so.

1 hour ago, ehrt74 said:

I'm not sure the client even sends a version number. 

If evernote does know the client's version, they seem to have not prohibited clients based on version for a very long time, and there's no reason to think they would suddenly start now.

As per @CalS' post, seems this has been done before. 

If it were EN's intention to allow v6 to sync for years to come, given all the complaints about v10 and all the user departures and many more threats of departures, wouldn't EN come out and say as much in order to calm the waters?

I view their silence on v6 (other than to say it can be used for now) in the face of the user uproar as a signal that v6 will definitely be rendered inoperable at some point. My personal view is at least 6 months from v10 release, perhaps longer if approximate feature parity takes longer to achieve. And there will be plenty of notice. I just think their messaging to the userbase would be different if their current plan is to keep v6 around for years.

For sure, given the pace of development among the competition and hopefully EN itself, v6 will be obsolete within 2 years, so this may be a mostly moot point that far out as hardly anyone will want to use v6 by then.

1 hour ago, ehrt74 said:

6.25.1 will always work. Evernote still works fine on blackberry os devices and they haven't seen a new release in 8 years.

Evernote cannot change its API. it is rock-solid.

Couldn't they stop sync for v6 clients?

Thanks. Strange that "remove reminder" removes reminder tag from note attributes in Mac, but "clear reminder" does NOT remove reminder tag from note attributes in Windows.

I may have to install v10 - perhaps the unified codebase changes things in this regard. 

4 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I'm using a Mac and marked the reminder as removed

How are you doing this in Mac?

In Windows, if a note has reminder, the alarm clock icon is in blue (as opposed to greyed out if no reminder). Turning on the reminder assigns a value to 'reminder order' so now it will show in note attributes. When clicking this alarm clock icon when a reminder exists, options are to 'mark as done', 'clear reminder' or 'add date'. Even if I 'clear reminder', the reminder tags remain in note attributes.

Strange that the behavior would be different in Mac. Unless you are removing the reminder in a different manner?

11 hours ago, CalS said:

It will with the tag search dialog (Shift+Alt+T) or Ctrl+Q.  Start of the tag word anyway, or words if you set the option.  Unless I miss your point.  Windows 6.25.1. 

My bad. I was thinking performing a search of notes by tag, not a search of tags themselves.

Anyway, I discovered this morning that Joplin does have partial word search, partial tag search and partial notebook search. CTRL+P brings up this search - just starting typing and search runs as you type each letter. For tags, start with #, and for notebooks start with @.

I think you'll find it works in the manner you're accustomed to from years of EN use. Easy to try out since when you install Joplin, it includes some introductory and explanatory notes, so you can run search on those, no need to export from EN and import into Joplin just to mess around a little bit.

@DTLow, let me pick your brain, since you're pretty good with this stuff.

So even if I clear reminder order, reminder time and reminder done time in EN v6 Windows, those reminder tags remain in the <note attributes> section for that note in the enex file (with values as shown in prior post - there's a value, but it's no longer unique once the reminder fields have been cleared in the app). As a point of comparison, notes that never had reminders do not have reminder tags in the <note attributes> section in the enex. Having these reminder tags can present issues when importing into a note app that distinguishes note types based on the presence of these reminder tags in the enex file being imported.

To create or modify an enex file such that notes no longer have these reminder tags, I'm thinking these are my options:

• find a way to clear reminder fields in EN v6 (or v10) Windows such that no reminder tags are present in enex - I don't see any way of doing this
• export normally, leave enex as is, import into another app, then make changes as necessary (which will modify last updated timestamp), including modifying last updated timestamp back to original last updated timestamp shown in EN. This timestamp modification is time consuming, so while doable, is not feasible for large note counts (which I have since I used EN for GTD, so lots of notes have reminders)
• export normally, then edit enex to remove reminder tags
• same as prior option, but script in AutoHotKey. 

Anything else you can think of?

I guess turning reminder off in the app clears Reminder Order, but when I look at the enex for such a note, the Note Attributes contain Reminder Order, Reminder Time and Reminder Done Time tags all with same value (which I assume denotes cleared status), even though all 3 fields are cleared in the app.

<reminder-order>00001231T000000Z</reminder-order><reminder-time>00001231T000000Z</reminder-time><reminder-done-time>00001231T000000Z</reminder-done-time>

For a note that never had a reminder, the Note Attributes does not contain any of these reminder tags.

Wondering if there's a way in the app to eliminate these reminder attributes altogether (apart from copying and pasting content into new note, and then modifying creation and last updated timestamps since I'd want to keep those attributes). Simply duplicating the note via Duplicate Note will duplicate the cleared reminder tags.

In side list view, I can access Reminder, Reminder Time, and Reminder Done. But not Reminder Order. What exactly does Reminder Order do? How can I access this? And how can I clear it?

I'm on Windows Legacy, but can install v10 if that version makes accessing Reminder Order easier.

19 hours ago, CalS said:

Good to know thanks.  Not to be Negative Nelly how that would dance with 60+ saved searches and 25+ shortcuts (15 of which are visible in the toolbar).  Though I suppose one could brute force it with AHK or the like.

That's why I said earlier that you would pay for that $70 hamburger. 😁

For power users who have developed such an intricate system, moving to any other note app is quite a bit of work. And if you decided to undertake it, it's certainly not going to happen in one day. I've been test driving the app by importing some of my most recent notes from EN as well as creating all my new notes there. If and when I make the full move, it will be one notebook at a time. Then moving saved searches. Fortunately the tags will all be there as they come with the notes. For sure for a use case like  yours, and even for mine, staying with EN is easier, and I wouldn't even have looked elsewhere (and realized how much competition there is and how far they've come along in recent years) if they weren't dropping Local Notebooks - I'd have waited patiently for the features that EN doesn't yet have, but Joplin and other note apps do have. And it would be really easy for me to stay since Basic covers my current use case. But the elimination of Local Notebooks is a dealbreaker for me. So even the free hamburger doesn't cut it anymore, at least for me.

19 hours ago, CalS said:

There's showing results without hitting enter but there is also search information, the shrinking eligible tag list as you add tags to a search, and the ease of modifying the search in place.  If I was new to both I wouldn't know what I was missing in either until I perfected my use case.  One might be frustrating at that point.  But it's a use case thing.  To be clear, similar issues exist with V10, it's no picnic in today's form.  🤷‍♂️

Just to clarify, Joplin doesn't require you to hit enter to run the search, it just won't run a partial word search. As soon as you type a complete word (i.e., a word that exists in your notes), you'll get matches. With EN, you'll get matches if you type even part of a word that exists in your notes. With tags, even EN v6 won't partial word match. Edit: there is a another search option in Joplin that does do partial word, tag and notebook searches: 

2 hours ago, CalS said:

The thing I thought was missing the most after a quick spin of Joplin was search functionality.  Ditto for most of the other PC options out there, Nimbus included.  Kind of basic to start and not easy to modify a search in progress.  Could be my lack of familiarity as well though.  And as I do quite a bit of searching (whether it is via Ctrl+Q or saved or the shortcuts bar or the magnifying glass in the shrunk left panel) ....  🤷‍♂️

Joplin now has a plugin that essentially mimics saved searches. Each search is stored as a note, and they auto update; can also be manually updated from menu. For the GTD minded, each of the GTD saved searches could be in a note tab, so you click on that tab (or keyboard over to it) and there is your saved search result. Or you could put them in a notebook, and only keep the ones you're working from in tabs.

What probably irks you with search (I don't know the correct terminology for these search designs so bear with me) is that Evernote will search as you type even a partial word and will match that partial word. So if you start in all notes, and start typing part of a word, for each letter you type, you can see EN is searching and narrowing down the note list. Joplin uses a different search design, so when you do the same thing, you go from all notes to zero notes because Joplin isn't matching partial words, and it's only once you get to a whole word that Joplin returns the results you are expecting. Would it make a big difference if you were new to both? Probably not. But since you're very accustomed to EN's search design, Joplin's feels awkward. For me, it's a small adjustment process I'm willing to work through in return for features listed earlier, among others, that EN does not have.

1 hour ago, s2sailor said:

That captures my wish list pretty well too.  I agree with your comments on number one.  I think I have a better chance of winning the lottery.

That's why I'm test driving Joplin. It checks off all those boxes today, while EN is 0 for 4. To be fair, I expect EN will be 3 for 4 within the next 1-2 years, and I probably would have been content waiting, but loss of Local Notebooks in v10 with no prospect of a suitable alternative (such as item #1 - zero knowledge encryption), is spurring me into action.

Joplin certainly isn't as polished and seamless as EN v6, but it does surpass EN in many ways functionally. Quite remarkable considering how young the project is and the shoestring budget (donations) it operates on. It really shows the power of open source projects that gain popularity. It needs a UI design makeover and the lead dev has acknowledged as much. I'm betting at some point someone with UI design experience will step up and contribute his/her expertise to the project, which would give the app a more polished and seamless look.

1. Zero knowledge encryption option for selected notebooks. Since v10 dropped Local Notebooks and that feature isn't coming back, I'd love to have the option to zero knowledge encrypt selected notebooks, so some of my notebooks could be read by EN, while the zero knowledge encrypted notebooks could not be read by EN or by anyone who successfully hacked EN. Of course I expect the odds of this feature being implemented are slim to none and slim just left town.
2. outline view / collapsible text. Would be very handy for longer notes.
3. backlinks
4. note tabs. Having the notes you're mainly accessing/editing in a particular day in tabbed view is very convenient. EN Windows never had this.

Fortunately, all of these features are available in other note apps, so they aren't impossible and I expect EN will eventually incorporate them*, with the exception of zero knowledge encryption.

*  "Eventually" can be a very long time for EN. Outline mode has been highly requested for many years. But with all the competition in recent years, I don't think EN can afford to continue to be so slow to develop features that are now table stakes for note apps.

Thanks for posting this. I do not have extensive note links (maybe 10% of my notes have a note link), so I probably wouldn't jump through all these hoops, but it might be useful for someone who has lots of note links.

12 hours ago, Rabbit704 said:

@tavor@SK_123 There are open source migration tools available to convert .enex files into Markdown, which can then allow those Markdown formatted notes to be imported into other note applications with the links intact. Yarle is one such open source tool available to migrate .enex files to Obsidian. I have used it to migrate .enex files into Obsidian with note links intact. However, this is not a seamless process and it requires preparation of Evernote notes before migration. E.g. EN titles cannot have special characters (like the usual unix filename restricted chars | # < > etc) and the name of the note link in Evernote must be identical to the title of the note it is linking to (that is how Obsidian matches the links. It does not match the unique URL of that link).

This requirement is met in the vast majority of my note links. And in those cases, a reasonably simple manual approach is available for those who don't have a large # of note links - when you encounter a note with a note link (that goes nowhere because the target address is invalid), run a title search using the text of the note link, find the target note, copy the link, and recreate the link in the referring note. I would do this on an as needed basis, basically when I encounter a note with a note link that I wish to click thru. 

12 hours ago, Rabbit704 said:

So if you have renamed your EN note titles after creating the link, you can either fix that before migration or manually relink the notes in Obsidian afterwards (note linking in Obsidian is far easier than in Evernote and it has backlinks so the relinking process is easy - and it can be automated with some scripting using the sed command).

This is the trickier scenario - where note title does not match the note link text. For me, this represents a small # of note links, so my plan is when I encounter such a note link, I will run a search to try and find the target note (which I anticipate will typically be easy to find), then recreate the link. For a small # of these cases, seems to me it's much easier to fix on an as needed basis post-migration than it is to try to identify all such cases pre-migration. Not even sure how one could identify all these cases (either all note links or all note links where note text doesn't match an existing note title) pre-migration - but if that could be done, then cleaning up those note titles wouldn't be too bad.

An approach that @DTLowuses is using EN Mac scripting tools to append the GUID to each note. Then in whatever app enex files are imported into (including Evernote itself), when you run into a note link, you run a search for the GUID in the link and will find one and only one note, which is your target note. Then you recreate the link. I took a quick look at EN Windows scripting tools and it wasn't clear doing this was possible in EN Windows. I suppose someone on Windows could sync their notes to borrowed Mac machine, then run the script, sync, delete their notes database from the borrowed Mac machine, and now all their notes (except those in Local Notebooks) will have a GUID in the note body. For someone without a lot of note links, this may also be undesirable in that every note has a GUID appended to the bottom of the note - it's more of a shotgun approach, covering every note, rather than a precision rifle approach that would only target notes that are being linked to by other notes.

25 minutes ago, TaskClone said:

I wished they had done a much much better job of communicating and not feeling they need to be so secretive about roadmap.  If they told us more about roadmap I don't think it would impact their competitive situation one bit.

Exactly. Almost everyone gets that unifying the codebase was a pill that had to be swallowed. And Evernote power users are a very patient bunch. Waiting until they had v10 closer to feature parity with v6 and had most of the bugs ironed out, even if it took another 6 months would have been fine. Instead, by foisting this beta onto an unsuspecting public in the form of a general release and breaking many workflows, they have destroyed perhaps the most important aspect in the relationship between note app user and note app developer - trust.

And for what? Any attempt to protect their competitive position has backfired as they will have much larger number of Premium subscriber losses than if they had simply waited another 6 months to release v10. And they'll be forced to support v6 for at least 6 months following the v10 release, so they gained nothing, and lost much.

The v10 release is worthy of a business school case study. An unforced error that the competition is taking great advantage of.

19 minutes ago, Vidalia said:

Why do people assume that migrating to a non-EN platform requires all notes migrated to new platform at once?

Can it not be just take 10% of notes which are most useful and then pull other notes as and when required?

Agreed. In fact, for longtime EN users with lots of notes, your approach makes a lot more sense. Why move thousands of notes to a new platform all at once when you can move a few dozen notes (e.g., the notes you're currently using) and create new notes on whatever app you're test driving? If the test drive proves disappointing, it's very easy to move that handful of notes back to EN, and you can rinse and repeat for the next app you want to try. If the test drive is great, you can move the rest of your notes over at your leisure. 

I get that some people are upset and want to leave EN, but moving everything at once to a new note app that you haven't used as a daily driver for some time is a risky move and could compound the stress created by v10 disruptions to workflows.