mikemap

I've been testing Evernote for a few weeks and finding the tag system to be hopelessly primitive, so I think I could use Evernote mainly as a webclipper, at which it excels despite a horribly keyboard-unfriendly interface, and then export all the notes to my main file system where they can be searched together with everything else. So I read through this bloated, redundant thread and I'm surprised nobody talked about exporting tags. I have no qualms with HTML export. That's a great, convenient format to deal with, but WHERE ARE THE TAGS? I tested some HTML and MHT exports and they include the title but no tags anywhere. I viewed the HTML as plain text and the tags are simply not there. I imagine I could export to both ENEX and HTML, easily extract the tags from ENEX, somehow combine them with the HTML export and then delete the ENEX export, but, wow, that is complicated for something I'd expect to be absolutely fundamental to any data portability paradigm. Instead of going down too many rabbit holes with Evernote, I'll probably just cobble together a few webclipping widgets/extensions/bookmarklets/etc to capture content and sync it across devices in Drive. From my vantage point, tags are the whole point of Evernote. That is the main content, or at least a critical component of the content. Despite the "note-taking" rhetoric, Evernote is essentially a halfway decent attempt at a tag-based file manager. Scanning a receipt and giving it metadata like OCR and keywords is not note-taking; it's managing a file using a superior metadata platform. Because tag-based file management is a category of software that barely even exists yet as far as I can tell, it's a big step forward and very useful, but it has too many limitations to be used as a general purpose file manager for everything. It's advertised as "keep track of everything", but in reality it's only useful for certain kinds of data that have a "note-ish" quality. Very smart people in this thread have observed that Evernote is a great note-taking app and a terrible file manager, but there are plenty of other great note-taking apps and Evernote shares their basic flaw of creating yet another data repository that isn't unified with a user's other data repositories. I've tested TagSpaces and Tabbles, and they are great conceptually, but too crude to be used for real-life work. I think iMatch has potential to be a fully powered tag-based file manager, but I haven't properly tested it yet--a bit of a learning curve there. Once you have an adequate tag-based file manager, the concept of a "note-taking app" is trivially subsumed. There's a million perfectly functional ways to create/edit text-based files.