bmat

I initially missed WYSIWYG tables a lot, but I have slowly come around to a more database focused approach with obsidian. direct markdown tables work fine for small / simple tables, but quickly become challenging for data with any length / complexity. when things get complex, I try to to autogenerate tables with dataview- you can create a separate file for each row and put the column information in metadata. dataview then enables you to manipulate the columns as a query, which I mostly prefer over manual fiddling. dataview's successor, datacore (to be released) will supposedly let you edit the data inline as well. dbfolders is a different take on the same. tables can also be embedded from another app. on formatting, I love/hate obsidian's more web based approach. using CSS, you can create a style for your whole vault (or particular pages or sections), that, once you set it up, gets automatically applied to anything you write. this is amazing once in place, but also definitely more challenging and time consuming for the initial setup

the files sit in a visible directory structure, so presumably if you can get a directory to sync across devices, you are good to go. I use icloud for sync and haven't noticed any problems with it. I mainly use it on a mac, ipad, and iphone. I am also able to use this with my pc, but windows has fallen out of my day to day, so I don't feel that I can give solid feedback on that. I dropped android phone for iphone when apple jumped leaps and bounds ahead of the rest with cross-device interoperability, so I haven't tried there at all. I don't personally like web apps, but I understand these are necessary for some. these people supposedly have a solution, but who knows? Obsidian is finally on the web with Neverinstall Given the value I get from obsidian, I would pay monthly for sync if I had to, though I am thankful that I can instead store my files on computers and services of my choosing.

For those who are inclined to tinker / hack and are looking for an evernote alternative, you should consider Obsidian. I mostly stopped using evernote a few years back when they broke two of the main things that drew me to the app in the first place: 1) the near instantaneous ability to author or access a note on the mobile app, and 2) magical ability to capture webpages relatively cleanly across platforms. Before this, I long struggled with evernote's interface, beyond embarrassing search, workflow, etc, but put up with this for its ability to capture and access notes. Over the past 2+ years, I have also dabbled with good notes, notion, notability, apple notes, liquid text, nebo, moleskine flow, devon think, coda, workflowy, todoist, typora, iawriter, etc. basically every structured note /data app that I could think of. What I realized from this, is that while many of these apps do a few things superlatively well, they at best support a small piece of my personal workflow, and generally fall apart hard when asked to play well with others. also, I am constantly trying to improve my workflow, which for most of these, just left a mess. I would put evernote in its best days in this same camp. Obsidian, by contrast, has been a revelation. While the learning curve has been intense, and my notes definitely don't look as pretty as they could, obsidian notes are 100% text based (markdown+, html, css) and stored in a directory that is completely available to the user. obsidian does not care if you change notes outside of its application, it continues to work with the changed notes as if they were changed in obsidian. notes are infinitely customizable, from metadata fields to full css styling if desired, and scripting, templates, tags, search, and automations that can be applied broadly, within a note, or on a note by note basis. the environment is also customizable, with a robust ecosystem of plugins, templates, etc, integration to 3rd party software such as zotero paper / citation manager. well functioning apps across macos, ios, windows, etc. The developers of obsidian also seem to be improving it at a rather rapid pace, and there is a dedicated group of users and plugin developers who are filling in gaps that the devs haven't yet sorted. the major downside is that all this customization takes learning and tinkering. and to get the most out of it, you may want to do a fair bit of scripting. for these reasons, obsidian is not the tool for those looking for something that "just works-" see if evernote evolves to somewhere you want to go.... but if like me, you found your way to evernote for its speed and promise of flexibility & usefulness that was never quite delivered, perhaps you will be more happy with a solution that was designed from the ground up to provide this. I will keep an eye on Evernote as it progresses (I still have 20+k notes there), and wish the team the best in improving its capabilities, but after seeing what is possible from a faster, more customizable, and open, text based system, its hard to see myself going back. On a separate note, I don't get the hatred against bending spoons. They purchased a dumpster fire, with a lot of angry die-hard users and are making a go at making it better. The alternative was likely having evernote shut down sooner or later. Overall, we should be happy for their efforts, even if they don't get us where we want to go.

folks. evernote said they reengineered everything down to their basic code. why did you expect the first release to work and have all of the features you are used to? this is still a company trying to accomplish a turn around... also, let's be frank, its not like previous releases fixed much (at least of the things that have been annoying to me, i'm looking at you search, styles, tag and notebook organization, etc...) it seems an open question as to whether evernote plans to abandon their customer base in the hopes of becoming relevant again in the market place (a mistake in my view), or they create decent interoperability with the legacy versions. I would love to see the latter, but based on many years of history with the company, I don't expect that to happen. In either case, it seems prudent to back up your databases and expect to use the legacy version for some time, and possibly look to offload parts of your evernote workflow to other apps where a replacement works better. in other words, the status quo...

interesting. is your data mostly of a kind? I'd be interested in learning more about your system if you ever write it up. I have ~20k notes, mix of web clips, written notes, attached documents, bookmarks, spanning topics from work to recipes, to general interest to research of various forms. mostly when I care about attachments its multipage PDF (journal articles and the like) or business cards. I also use office documents, mind maps, etc. I find that for the PDFs, I don't like the in-line reading experience, and for office documents, it is faster to use an old fashioned directory structure ( these are usually project based anyway) and likely are backed up to dropbox, google drive and / or my NAS. though if an office document is on my radar, I am also likely editing it more than viewing. given the heterogenaity of my data, search isn't great, and tag structure is hard to maintain as any given tag isnt used frequently. I am working on a scripts to help make this more useful in the finding of things, but that is a work in process....

ah. right. quick look thought this thread was on outlining in general (which styles support), not outline format... fixed formats is a positive step

how frequently do you access these documents? I find evernote impossibly slow in this usage mode- have to find the thing, click the thing, open native app, etc... and then there is a funky connection between the note and open doc. I'm personally trying to do more in text, code, or markdown. that said, I am also running into evernote UI / functionality limitations to make this mode more challenging than I would like...

What kind of differentiation are you looking for? Evernote's list feature is very basic - you get bullets/numbers and indentation Just came across this thread. @DTLowit appears all google evernote searches lead to you! I'd really love to see basic markdown style headings at the least. ie # for heading1 ## for heading 2 etc... with adjustable styles if you haven't already, check out https://typora.io/. it is an amazing tool for creating quick structured notes / documents. evernote's editor would do well to grab some of their tricks... feels really clunky not to be able to quickly do styled outline headings...

looks like this is the one. filtered off the ID/record#? (not GUID) for the tag and the note. also, looks like evernote already caches the note counts for each tag in ZACTIVENOTECOUNT Thanks for the applescript SQLite query tip. I'll play with it. Also, curious, what is the ZLOCALUUID vs the ZGUID?

AH, got it. finally caught up to you . I should also be able to query this DB directly from python saving some time. I'll try that one later... Have you found were the tags are linked to notes? I didn't see any field for tags in the notes metadata. right... thanks. just getting up to speed on applescript and figuring out what it is good for...

how do you access GUID and ParentGUID for a tag? tell application "Evernote" set guidList to (the guid of every tag) end tell gives an error. also, is there a way to list the properties that we can interrogate with applescript? the properties found in https://dev.evernote.com/doc/reference/Types.html don't seem to translate to applescript unless I am referencing them incorrectly.

awesome. thanks. this makes a lot of sense and definitely easier than my approach

@DTLow thanks! I have something like this. I should have been more specific, its getting the count of notes per tag that has me stuck. the only way I have found to do this so far is to interrogate each note for the attached tags, put the tags into one list, allowing for duplicate items, and then count the number of duplicates for each tag. any thoughts to a better way? btw, if you are curious, https://forum.latenightsw.com/t/writing-json-data-with-nsjsonserialization/1130 talks to converting a list to a json file.

@JMichaelTX thanks. I did use your script above to get started. many thanks. I am trying to rebuild the tag hierarchy. I'm slowly figuring out how to do this in applescript, but applescript is slow, and data structures seem limited, so I may need to figure out how to do this with python instead. json is a great format for saving this sort of thing as it can take nested lists, key / value lists, etc. as a hack for now, I have applescript write the data to an excel window, but this is also quite slow. @DTLow thanks as well. I think a csv file would help. I should be able to import this no problem. separately, I have been working on pulling note count per notebook and note count per tag. right now the way I do it is terrible, and like a 30+ minute job. it involves recursing through notebook by notebook, then note by note to pull the tags from each note record so that I can ultimately count the number of times each tag shows up (which will involve another set of slow operations). do you know if there is a better way to get this info out of evernote? thanks!

@JMichaelTX I just came across this post. I'd love to see your script if you feel like sharing. I'm working to offload some of the front end tasks from evernote the evernote UI is mostly terrible for what I am trying to get done. to get started, I want to pull out tag and notebook hierarchies into something like a json file as I am more conversant in python than applescript. thanks!

These are welcome improvements, but are you also including simple boolean / logic based search on the macOS app? I would take improved search functionality over interface any day. Currently functionality is comically bad if you want to do routine searches with limited sophistication, e.g.: to find notes generated in the last 7 days on mobile or desktop, I need to first create a tag that combines mobile and desktop as sources, then search for mobile and desktop notes and apply the tag, then search this tag for notes created in the last 7 days. and I need to do this every time new content is created... good luck if you need to add another OR condition to the search, such as searching within several notebooks... Similarly, I can't be the only one who is mystified by the process of saving and creating a shortcut for a search...