Mistywindow

I've been holding off a switch to Bear and/or Dropbox Paper for months in anticipation of this editor update. My patience has run out. For years they've been cluttering the apps up with excess features while ignoring basic stuff that other note-taking software has introduced. Initially, Evernote's success killed Info Select for Windows, which had become cluttered with features nobody wanted, now they're inflicting the same fate upon themselves. Less is more! The only thing Evernote does better than the competition is tags. What about markdown? It's hard to understand why they'd ignore such a popular new facility.

So Evernote finally decided to respond to continual user requests to upgrade the crappy editor. Dropbox Paper must have been hurting the bottom line. I was a paid user from day one, but cancelled my sub a couple of years ago because of this issue; Dropbox Paper and Bear Notes filled the gap beautifully. This coming upgrade has prompted me to renew the subscription. Now when do we get Markdown? :)

I've been agonising over this too. There are many options, but all have negatives: restricted platforms, relatively expensive subscriptions, no hidden markdown, or just plain ugly. My favourite would be Typora if there was an iOS app; but it's just Windows or MacOS. For me that's a big but. Next is the beautiful Bear Notes, but it's Apple ecosystem only, and displays distracting heading markdown. Dropbox Paper is great, but although it has excellent mobile apps, it has no off-line access on the Desktop. It's handling of images and other attachments in notes is outstanding. It also has good tables. No tags but I make my own using #hashtags Dropbox's target audience seems to be business teams, so they're not motivated to fix the offline app problem. Not the end of the world, I can use it on my iPad Pro if off the grid. OneNote I find nice looking with good formatting options, but unwieldy and clunky with poor tagging options. The long-form writing app Scrivener is really powerful, cross platform, and very reasonably priced, but overly complex, and downright ugly. Ulysses is outstanding for long-form writing, but for note-taking their new subscription model is expensive relative to other options, and the markdown is intrusive, although that's fixable with some theme "tweaking". Dropbox Paper wins for me so far for everyday notes, with Evernote for web pages, scanned stuff, photos, and everything but the kitchen sink that I need to be taggable and searchable.

I've been on a mission comparing note taking apps and discovered by accident that cutting and pasting from OneNote into Evernote retains complex formatting perfectly. Formatting's easy in OneNote, the app is free, so it's a good workaround.

I'm been a Premium user almost since Evernote started. I accept that the company has a perfect right to develop a desktop client for Linux or not as they choose. Nevertheless I'm very disappointed that they choose not to. For at least 5 years I've resisted a permanent switch to Linux only because I haven't been prepared to abandon Evernote. Now that EN have changed from "no intentions at this stage" to giving the full finger to Linux users I'm abandoning my Premium account and making the switch to Linux. It would be interesting to find out how many other potential Linux users are not boosting the open source OS numbers purely because of Evernote. Evernote, please reconsider. I can't believe that it would be a huge job to produce a Linux client for a team which produced one for UNIX based OS X. Is the reluctance because Linux users are considered unlikely to pay for Premium services?