Jump to content

lmackinnon

Level 2
  • Posts

    19
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by lmackinnon

  1. @Paul A., thanks, that filtering function is very useful - I wasn't aware of it. Much appreciated.

    The difference between that tag | filter by tag function and the link I was requesting is, (surprisingly!), the link. I want a link that I can place in the body of the note that has the exact same effect as clicking on tag | filter by tag

    For example, I might have an overview note that has some introductory text and then copy like 

    "Tag link 1 - all notes on startup

    Tag link 2 - all notes on strategy

    Tag link 3 - my ideas for articles to write

    Tag link 4 - my ideas for books to write"

    Where "Tag link 1" would have anchor text of the tag name (e.g. "Startup") that is linkified and clickable.

    This would give me a navigable index to tags the way I want to construct it. 

    Another use case is I might have a note on Y-Combinator's approach to startup, and want to link to all other notes on Startup via a "tag link." Or I might be writing about an agile iterative testing process, and want to link to notes on Startup as related content - and a tag link would be useful for that.

  2. @PinkElephant, I use tags a lot. I can easily add tags to the shortcuts. Either through a context menu or by dragging them over. There is no particular challenge around getting an "internal structure" to do it. It's just standard functionality. 

    Similarly to create a link, there's no challenge that I can see with "internal structure." Just right-click / ctrl-click on a tag (or shortcut of a tag) to get an option to grab a "tag link" or "link to tag" and then have that in the clipboard ready to paste it into a note.

  3. Say I have a tag, e.g. "Startup". Some notes, say 23 of them, are tagged with the tag "Startup".

    I can create a shortcut to that tag, and if I click on the shortcut it brings up all 23 of the notes tagged "Startup". It does that by filtering all notes in the notebook by the tag "Startup".

    I want the same thing inside a note. I want to click on a "tag" link in a note, and then it brings up all the tagged notes.

    Here is how I would picture it working:

    I'd go to a tag in the list of tags (or a shortcut of a tag), right-click or CTRL-click and select something like "Create link", and that would give me a link to the tag. 

    Then when I paste the link to a tag (like "Startup") in the body of a note, if I click on the tag link it then it opens up the results in the main note window, with results filtered to only show notes with that tag (in this case, notes tagged "Startup"). 

    The tag link would look like a link - Anchor text with a different colour and hover-over features. If you want, it could be a different colour to other links, to differentiate tags vs other links.

    That would be very useful to me. 

    • Like 2
  4. Thanks everyone. I didn't hear anyone from Evernote staff chip in so I went ahead and marked @Boot17's approach of modifying the config file as the solution.

    If Evernote staff read this later, it would be great of you could:

    1. Explain this open-notes limitation and its solution to your support staff, so that they could have given me and other people like me effective support when the issue is raised (I raised it twice and neither support person had a workable answer) 

    2. Modify your preferences panel so that the number of notes Evernote allows open is a preference setting within the application, rather than needing people to know to and implement finding and changing the config file.

  5. @gazumped, thanks. For me it's a bit of a function of time. If I have say 40 or 80 notes open, the Mac OS X is happy with it. However over time (weeks or a month or two) the app "builds up" and uses more memory. So does my browser for browser tabs. Ultimately the only way to get this memory back is to restart the apps or restart the computer. 

    So I think it' largely goes back to some kind of memory management issue in Apple OS X, with apps constantly leaking memory - even if the information the memory is holding is static and unchanging. But I'm not an Apple systems engineer and don't have their data or insights.

    • Like 1
  6. Boot17, re "However, if you are typing in a note in the main window and you think "hey - I want to open this in its own Window now." -- how do you do that without using the mouse... with just a keyboard shortcut?" - to be honest I don't feel that one's a problem for me. If it's in the main window, and I'm editing it, it is by default the topmost note in the list if I have the notes ordered by most recently edited, so I just double click on it in the notes list. I know this is using the mouse, but that's not a problem for me. I get your point that it would be a convenience to have a keyboard combo for it, like Command-O ("O" for "open"). 

  7. @Boot17, re the keyboard combo for opening a new note, I use CTRL-CMD (control command) which works for me. Option-Click opens a link in the main note window.

    I'd prefer to open it using the context menu (right-click or command-click on the link and then choose an option "open note in new window") but that's not available in the current Evernote (but it is in Legacy). So that might be one to add to your list! :)

  8. Confirming:

    1. My limit was set to 20 rather than 22 (see image)

    2. Changing the config file to set the limit to 100 seems to remove the problem for now. I'll monitor performance and see if I think there's a level of notes being open that it's worth limiting it to (although just restarting Evernote tends to refresh the RAM usage and remove the problem). 

    Thanks everyone for your help. 

    I still think it's worth Evernote formally making this a user preference setting rather than having everyone alter their config files, so I'll leave it open for a day or two to see if any Evernote staff chip in around the merits of or issues with that, then I'll mark the workaround as the solution. :)

    Evernote_Config_2023-04-16_10-16-41.png

  9. @gazumped, I contacted support around the 20 note limit around March 12 (when I took the screenshot above). I separately contacted support around a week ago pointing out that the Evernote developers address a surprisingly low portion of improvement / bug requests that I have submitted over the years (I have been with Evernote since the early 2000s), and could they please do something about that.

    I stuck with Evernote Legacy as long as I could - and I would still be with it except that the latest major OS X upgrade (I think it was Ventura) broke the legacy version - every time I made a window smaller for some reason I couldn't make it bigger again. That became unusable, so now I am trying to make the current version work for me. 

    Apart from the 20 notes open limit which is my major practical frustration, another major frustration is the lack of a context menu for links. In Legacy I could right-click / control-click on a link and get options like "open note in new window" and "open note in new tab." I used that extensively in Legacy because I have highly interlinked notes, but it's not there in the current version. Yes I found key combination hacks that kind of work around this, but still there should be a working fully functioning context menu. The context menu was the major reason I stuck with Legacy for so many years rather than use the new version. 

    These are both core features from my point of view for Evernote usability and, one would think, relatively simple fixes. 

    @Boot17 and PinkElephant, I understand that having lots of notes open has a potential performance impact. My old Mac Pro desktop I used for over a decade had 32GB of RAM, my new Mac Studio has 64GB of RAM. Part of my reason for this choice was exactly so that I could have lots of notes open in Evernote and lots of tabs open in my browser. 

    A key point to me is that hobbling Evernote to address performance issues should be relative to the computing power of the machine. If I have 8 or 4 more times RAM than someone else and faster processors, maybe it comfortably handles 8 or 4 times as many open notes (from experience I don't think it's linear, I think it ramps up earlier and flattens out later). Also, part of Evernote's - and Apple's - job is to improve this efficiency and performance so that it's not an issue and people can have more notes open more easily. Plus Moore's law should in principle make this problem go away year by year.

    There's a simple solution for the developers if it is a performance issue - make the number of notes I can open a user preference setting. Maybe make the default 20 if that's what they want to do, but let the user edit it to anything up to 250, or whatever they think is a reasonable maximum for a top performing computer with maximum RAM based on todays computing power. 

    Am I using Evernote differently than others? For sure. I'd probably, if asked, call myself a power user. I implemented a kind of zettelkasten within Evernote (google for it if you don't know but are curious what a zettelkasten is). I have a Ph.D., I work in the knowledge economy and do extensive research, I read around 80 or 90 non-fiction books a year (again, that's an outlier - Gallup tells us that the percentage of college graduates - bigger readers - who read more than 10 books a year is just 35 and last I checked over 50 would be in the top 10% and 80 or 90 is well under the top 1%). I have over 6,000 notes in Evernote which, to be honest I have no idea whether that's big or small, but the difference in my notes is that a lot of it is analysis rather than just clipping an article (I currently tend to put articles into raindrop.io instead unless they are directly related to my research). I use particular features like tags, links and shortcuts a LOT.

    If I am a power user, and I probably am, I would think I'd be exactly the kind of person that Evernote developers would want to pay the most attention to, to work out what matters at the cutting edge of using their product productively. 

  10. No one had to pick a number. The previous versions of Evernote up to an including the Legacy one all allowed unlimited notes to be open (i.e. no restriction). Someone at Evernote consciously decided to hobble it, and my request is to un-hobble it. 

    I contacted support before I posted here. After I observed that the developers have rarely implemented anything I suggested, and they further noted that developers will not talk to customers, specifically the below, they recommended I post the issues here:

    "Our developers’ team can’t reach out to customers directly, but I’ve forwarded your feedback to the appropriate team to see your concerns are addressed better from here
     
    In the meantime, I would highly highly encourage you to register and discuss this matter on Evernote's Forums."

    The emphasis in bold / italic was from Evernote.

    This is the first issue I posted here subsequent to that advice.

  11. gazumped, maybe. But I can't think of any good business reason to artificially restrict people to only having 20 notes open at once, other than perhaps as a crutch to mask Evernote performance issues - in which case it should at least be a user-editable preference because different computers will have different computing power and different memory and therefore a different capacity to have more notes open. In any case, the restriction was not there in earlier versions of Evernote.

  12. For the last three or five years I have used the Legacy Evernote app, because the current one is broken and dysfunctional in so many ways. 

    However, now the Legacy app doesn't work either after the Ventura upgrade. So I need to use the current version.

    One of the big differences is that in the Legacy version I could open as many Evernote notes as I wanted (it might be hundreds). 

    In the current Evernote app I am strictly limited to 20, which is at least 100 less than I need. 

    How can I get the current version of Evernote to work (i.e. open many more than 20 notes at once)?

    Evernote_hobbling_2023-03-13_09-36-08.png

×
×
  • Create New...