jefito

The question was what your guess at percentage of the Evernote user base (i.e., >60 million users) are developers who use this to store code snippets (I'm one) and require format highlight support (I'm not) is (not what is the percentage of users that you know are using it for this purpose)? Given that, you'd have some basis for making the claim that this is or is not a niche activity (and therefore worthwhile for Evernote to do). So is it technically easy? Maybe, but to put in a wholesale highlighting system for arbitrary languages is probably beyond Evernote's intended scope, as far as I can tell). Anyways, my guess is that GrumpyMonkey is correct. I can't testify to his altitude, but he's usually pretty level-headed, and often in favor of adding new features, as well as being extremely helpful to other users on the forum. Take that for what you will.

So a guess at the percentage of coders who use Evernote would be...???

Evernote Desktop for Windows uses the Chromium Embedded Framework. Basically, it's like Google Chrome, only with the "browser UI parts" cut out and with a different application reusing the same foundations (GUI toolkit, networking stack, etc.) So it is actually very much as if it were written in Qt. No need to rewrite anything - well, perhaps some fairly minor portions. Forgive me for not knowing (and I couldn't determine conclusively by a quick reading of the online docs), but isn't the CEF used only for the note rendering part of things, and not for any of the actual UI framework?

And we were all just getting along so nicely when the "I don't have anything valuable to add so I'll just mock other people" guy shows up and ruins it all. Just to clarify (since I also engaged in some light mockery here on the same topic, namely on the notion that alphabetizing a grocery list is a good use case -- it's not, as far as I can tell), mockery itself is not necessarily disallowed here. to wit (from the Forum Code of Conduct): "We don’t mind snark and gibes, but don’t get hateful". There is snark, yes, and it's only marginally topical, but it's hardly hateful. That being said, mockery is probably all that's left to us in this topic. Let's face it: the request is valid, the case is made (sorting's usefulness is pretty well understood, so we don't really need any more test cases or testimony on the topic to make the case any stronger), Evernote are aware of the request, and we've touched on some of the reasons why they may not have implemented it (and we generally don't get a lot of feedback as to their rationale as to why they do what they do). In other words, we aren't likely to be getting any smarter about the topic, so we might as well have a little fun. As far as I'm concerned, the topic is pretty well played-out, and could be locked as is without loss of further edification. Not that I am planning on doing that...

As a business consultant, you should therefore be aware of the necessity of a business to make choices based on resources (time and people) vs. what they believe delivers value to their customers. I doubt very much that Evernote is "carelessly" discarding anyone's suggestions; what I do expect is that they'll try to make good decisions about which suggestions they will implement. As with many things, "good" is a relative term, depending on where you're sitting.

I'll only need this when my grocery store decides to alphabetize its wares, so I'll be getting my coffee and cereal somewhere near the cucumbers, my onions next to the olive oil and oranges, my squash near the spaghetti, etc., etc.

This has been requested before. Evernote staffers read all posts (so this will be noted as a feature request), but they may not reply here in the forums.

I think that this is kinda misguided. First, Linux != Unix. Second, programming for the Linux GUI is not the same as programming for the Mac GUI. There's usually a lot of code sunk into programming an application's user interface, maybe even more than is written to implement the under-the-hood functionality. Now if Evernote had used a cross-platform toolkit for their Mac development, Qt, you might be onto something. But if they went native, then that probably doesn't translate to not "a huge job". I don't actually know what they do on the Mac, but this is a deeper question than the premise assumes. Yes. No. We don't know. Does it matter? Grrr ... I have more trouble with this kind of response (I'm not angry against you, I say this with all courtesy of course), stop again, to stigmatize Linux users .. Because we are a Linux user, we programmer! this is wrong! We say that there is more and more users of free OS and therefore more and more people are not computer experts. My mother 56 years old, is under Linux Mint. She does not know how to program a solution Evernote and why does it not have the right to have an Evernote client? I'm 56 years old. What does age have to do with anything substantive? Please stop throwing around overly dramatic words like "stigmatize" with respect to Linux users. I don't think it means what you think it does: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/stigmatize

I really don't understand the conclusion, based on your premise (which I'm also at odds to figure out). You want to see all of your notes "contained within one notebook" (even though they're really not; btw, the phrase "tagged explicitly for the notebook" doesn't really make sense in the Evernote world: tags are not notebooks), but somehow this implies that nested stacks are the solution? I don't follow; if you want to see all of your notes, then just use the "All notebooks" feature. You don't need nested stacks for that. That being said, I do understand that many folks would find nesting of stacks (or notebooks) useful. It's just not clear to me how your example supports that usage. Did I miss something?

As regards your architecture, I don't see much need for either internal tags or shared stacks. Each student has a portfolio: that's a notebook. Each *single* item in the portfolio ("document, picture, etc.") is a note in that notebook / portfolio. Each portfolio item can exhibit any number of aspects: that sounds like tags to me, since multiple tags can be applied to a single note. You share on a notebook basis, so the portfolio is inherently shareable. You can search on individual aspects (tags) or multiple. If you need more granularity (a single section of a portfolio item represents an aspect?), then you can always implement "internal tags" by using keywords embedded in the text, one per aspect type. This will work better if they are uncommonly used words. A search for those aspect words will turn up the note, and an internal note search (Ctrl+F) will turn up the instances of each aspect.

Apparently we do.

A couple of things to note: A notebook only contains notes, not stacks and not other notebooks. A stack contains only notebooks, and not other stacks or notes. A note belongs to exactly one notebook, but may have multiple tags. Notebooks are the coin of the realm when it comes to sharing groups of notes, keeping local notes (notes that are not synced to the Evernote server, for desktop apps) and offline notes (notes that are always available on mobile devices, even when you're not connected to the internet -- a premium feature). You can only use these facilities using notebooks, and not stacks or arbitrary groups of notes. Consider only creating notebooks when you must. Searches have essentially three contexts: a single notebook, a single stack, or all notes (some clients allow you to search "personal" only or "business" only notes, but that's just behind-the scenes flim-flammery -- I'm talking about searches that use the search language, including saved searches). You can only have one context per search: either a single notebook or a single stack; otherwise it's all notes. Since stacks can hold multiple notebooks, that's the only way that you can search a strict subset of your notebooks at one time. Note that you cannot search for notes *not* in a particular notebook or stack. Tags go across notebooks. This gives them a lot of flexibility in terms of categorization, since multiple tags can apply to any single note. You can also search for notes that do not have a particular tag. Note that the tag hierarchy is for organization only; tag searches do not take into consideration a tag's sub-tags when searching.

You are invited to seek out existing discussion on this topic in the forums. There's plenty. Short form: probably not in the foreseeable future.

A lot depends on what you're trying to do; I think the best way to find references like this would be to just search the web for "organizing evernote projects" or just "organizing evernote". There are plenty of articles, and you'll also find posts here in these forums in the results (I usually use Google rather than the actual forum search here).

The current canon: * A Note contains content (text, attachments, etc.). A note belongs to exactly one notebook, and can be labelled by multiple tags. * A Notebook contains only notes (not other notebooks, and not stacks). A notebook belongs to either one or zero stacks. You are allowed a maximum of 250 notebooks at present. * A Stack contains only notebooks (not other stacks and not notes). * Tags can only label notes, and not other tags, notebooks or stacks. Tags can be nested for purposes of organization, but are otherwise semantically and functionally distinct, meaning that searches do not pay attention to tag hierarchies. So in a word, no, you cannot make a hierarchy quite like that. You could make a project notebook ("Project A"), and add notes for supporting docs, images, plans, etc. Tag the notes accordingly ("Plan", "Research", etc.). There are other ways of organizing projects.

You can export to HTML format. MS Word can open those.

The manual sort feature gets suggested occasionally, and there is existing discussion in the forums. Not much input from Evernote on the topic if I recall. I can see its usefulness for some scenarios, not sure that I miss it myself. I can see some potential messiness with specified sort order across multiple notebooks (basically you'd need to pitch it, I think), but none of that is up to me. @Factman: there's no sorting in a shortcut as far as I know, just filtering. You need to set sorting yourself.

In my experience, it's not really useful to view a tag as a folder. Folders imply ownership (a note belongs to exactly one folder), while tags imply description (a note can have multiple tags). So you can then combine separate tags, which allows for multiple ways of organization. Anyway... Sure, you can do that. But then the question is how does that scale over time? Will you have tags "September 2013", as well as "January 2013", "February 2013", etc., in addition to "September 2014", as well as "January 2014", "February 2014", etc., etc.?? Instead, you could have something like tags for each month ("January", "February"...) and for each year ("2013", "2014"...), and apply as needed. So you can do tag searches for "September" and "2013" (and "Expenses" perhaps, or search in a separate "Expenses" notebook; whatever) and see all of those notes. Or look for all expenses in 2013 using the "2013" tag. Or all September expenses across all years using the "September" tag. Etc. Of course, it all depends on what works for you. Yes, you can do that on the desktop clients, usually with more ease than on the mobile clients. As GrumpyMonkey says, adding more hierarchy is a fair request (perhaps via subnotebooks or via stacks (which already allow you to organize -- and search -- multiple notebooks), but my take is that it's probably not going to happen any time soon if at all, so if you want to use Evernote, you'll need to stick with what they have now.

My baseline opinion is that tags are no more nor less difficult to apply than a location in a folder tree, and in many cases they're more flexible. I think that there are usability improvements that could be made for tags with respect to search, and I think that stacks could serve the purpose of bringing some useful hierarchical organization to Evernote, but overall, I don't look at the absence of nested folders with much regret, if any.

You mean like "due dates" soon?

,...much less make up ridiculous stories about them, and without seeming to understand that public companies are not necessarily "financially supported by the taxes paid by people" (even if Evernote were public). And by the way -- did you notice that Evernote offers a free service -- yes, ab-so-lutely free, as in free beer. Why, did you know that Evernote doesn't "hate Linux"; in fact, they run Linux on their servers, at least as far as late last year. And hey, you can develop your own Linux client using the very same API that they use -- isn't that the Linux way? Or maybe getting behind the 3rd-party folks who do make Linux clients, rather than just complaining about how the stuff they make "sucks"? Fix it up, make it better then. When you choose an OS or any ecosystem, you make choices. Your choice has some downsides (as does anyone else's choice), but the promise of open source is that you can improve your living conditions. It's in your hands -- what are you waiting for? You have the means, but do you have the motivation?

In the Windows client, Evernote will store code formatting if it's clipped with coloring/font information. For example, Microsoft Visual Studio puts rich text on the clipboard when you clip from a code window, and Evernote will recognize that. Sadly, Notepad++, which I also use, does not. I don't think that it's much in scope for them to put in automatic code formatting -- that's a pretty specialized niche -- but you never know. I think that most people would be happy with the ability to have preset formats for things like headings and paragraphs, etc.

Also search the web/forum for NoxNote and EverPad, two native, 3rd-party clients. They may work for you. And the web client is improving on a pretty regular basis.

It's OK -- I have strong feelings about this stuff. And it's good to think about things and make suggestions, too. I understand the desire for nested notebooks, I'm just not sure how feasible it would be with Evernote's underlying storage architecture (I'm not saying it's impossible, though). The more I think about it, the more I think that the path to nestable note organization might be via notebook stacks rather than nestable notebooks. I have no external evidence that Evernote is thinking any such thing, but it just seems as though that would be a more natural step.

Notebooks are not, and should not be 'tags'. That just confuses the differences between their individual concepts: * Notebooks are used to partition your notes into separate sets of notes; tags do no such partitioning: a note belongs to a single notebook, but can have multiple tags. * Notebooks are the basis for sharing of groups of notes, offline note storage on mobile devices, and local note storage on desktop clients. You cannot perform these useful functions with tags at this point. * Because you can apply multiple tags to a note, you can do cross-categorization that is just not possible with notebooks. * Notebooks contain; tags describe. Tags are not conceptually that difficult to understand, given good description and ties to, yes, 'physical reality'. In the realm of physical reality, we have and use tag-like concept all the times. Do your physical notebooks have labels? Those are tags. Do your users use adjectives? Those are tags. Tags are tags. Notebooks are notebooks. They do different things. Let's not conflate them into some confusing blob concept/facility (that really isn't because they are, in this proposal, secretly and magically, convertible back and forth).