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.

Hello, I'm new to Evernote and testing it thoroughly. I'm trying to declutter the Evernote desktop window so I can focus on content, but I'm having poor luck. I got rid of everything on the toolbar through "customize", but it leaves a lot of dead space. I deselected the Left Panel, which is totally useless to me and has tons of dead space. Now I have two panes: the "snippet" list on the left and the Note Panel on the right. Unfortunately the Note Panel has lots of junk I don't use, like the text formatting toolbar and the "reminder"/"present"/etc buttons. I'd also like to remove the Notebook menu at the top of the Note Panel because I only have one Notebook (notebook categorization appears to be completely replaceable by tags). It would be great to remove the search box entirely, because it's a lot of dead space when it's not being actively used. Ideally it would be combined with the File/Edit/View/etc menu at the top and the whole thing would only appear when being used. Notepad++ works like that. My screen is 900 pixels in height and the top 160 pixels or so are almost all dead space, about 18% of the screen real estate! (It would be another 20 or so pixels wasted if there was a title bar for the window, but I removed that using Autohotkey.) And the most important info is mostly hidden--the tags! The tag list in the Note Panel only shows a few tags and buries the rest under a menu that requires clicking. I figure a typical note will have about 10 or more tags in a fully implemented Evernote, and this info is the heart and soul of the program, so it should be very visible at all times. Meanwhile, instead of showing this essential info the display is full of dead space and marginally useful widgets/buttons. Can this be changed? In the standalone note window, more tags are shown, but only one line's worth and the rest are buried just like in the Note Panel. Likewise for the snippet display--just one line of tags and the rest aren't visible. The best workaround I've found so far is to maximize the width of the Note List in snippet mode and toggle it on/off. Are there are any customization options for this stuff deep in the code somewhere?