AndyDent

I think I have an explanation for our different results. I'm fairly sure, after reading your and PinkElephant's post, that you are only talking about hits on OCR documents. That's a very interesting point of difference, which may indicate these searches are using the server API rather than local indexes. Do you have any plain text notes which verify these results? What happens if you type in a plain note with invoice in it then do a search on "invoic"? Note that the results I quoted in my message above are from testing I repeated as I wrote the message, on the current desktop clients. I'm definitely not working from old samples or memory. During the last tech support thread I triggered complete re-indexing to see if there was a related problem. This is highly repeatable for me.

Just to clarify things, for anyone reading that comment, I am not talking about OCR. Evernote search is fundamentally broken as I described at length for original content typed into notes and text clipped from the web. I agree OCR is not perfect and sometimes I've seen slightly off interpretation of words on photos. This is not the same thing.

Where is use of hyphens advertised/described? It doesn't work for me. Are you talking about a really specific example where this worked or am I missing something? The documentation I linked to is the standard Evernote search help page which clearly states using quotes to limit a search. It is the top hit when you Google Evernote Search. At the bottom of that page is a link to the Search Grammar page. I erupted with frustration a while back because the standard helpdesk response is to direct people to that page even though it is only correct for the web client. Neither of those pages states that there is any difference with desktop or mobile client search. In one of my more recent support ticket responses I got the impression I should have been cognisant of the wording on the Search Grammar page that it says Cloud API. Users do not care if you are documenting an API. If an API describes behaviour that is not applicable to end user apps, it should be very difficult for them to find and have a clear disclaimer at the top. (more lines of rant elided...) Back to the search problem Here's the test I used in reporting the problem - search for china "chan" That's a good test because if the quotes are working it should ignore common words such as changes and changed. On the web, I get 27 notes (out of my 40K), indicating that the web client uses the API directly and thus works as documented. On Mac and Windows desktop, iOS mobile clients: 43 notes found, with the highlighting indicating it is indeed doing a partial match on chan in changes. Interestingly, my Android client found the correct 27 notes but I wonder if that was because I seldom use it and it did the search whilst it was part-way through a major metadata sync, so would have had to call the API for the search. Note, my frustration is not because I have to skim 27 vs 43 notes but because in some cases I'm visually scanning hundreds of false positives, having to read through their content. That's a massive waste of time. So my workflow is often: search in Mac client realise there are massive numbers of hits swear open the web client repeat search, noting drastically smaller list stay in web until I've finished my task My workflow if I'm away and trying to use mobile clients involves a lot more swearing if need to search on small terms. Why am I so obsessed by, and upset with this? It's really broken - there is no replacement for being able to restrict searches other than having to use a web client, which is not always an option. A major product point is that Evernote should work offline. It's neither well-known within Evernote support nor is it documented, because the wrong help advice is given. I had to push and push to get someone to talk to developers to realise I was right and the docs didn't reflect reality. As a developer for over 35 years, who's worked on multiple database engines, query interfaces and data visualisation products, I'm professionally embarrassed on behalf of Evernote. This is shoddy, indefensible work.

Something that drives me utterly crazy is that Evernote desktop (both Mac and Windows) has a stupid search - putting things in quotes does not force an exact match. This is contrary to the way the API and the web interface work. It is contrary to the way the documentation says it works, but there is no desktop-specific documentation explaining this difference. This may not be much of an issue for trivial users. I have nearly 40K notes and frequently want to search on exact matches. I have at times given up and used the web UI because desktop returns too many hits. There seems to be some very serious quality engineering going on in Evernote - I'm very impressed by the speed improvements recently in v7. So, please give us a way to search like you have documented, with exact matching. My most recent attempt to clarify this was ticket #2765560 back in Feb 2019 at the end of which I received a clear message. I've just heard back from our developers on the "Search Grammar" issue. From my understanding this appears to be an issue due to confusion between searching from the API vs. searching from the Evernote client. According to our product engineers, the behavior described below is exactly how our API and client always worked. When searching for the word foo through the API (that's important!), you will only find full words. foo will be matched, foobar won't. That aligns with what we have in the API documentation. When searching for the word foo through any Evernote client(including Mac), the actual submitted search query that will hit our API will be foo* — this way you will find both foo and foobar. According to our engineers, this behavior was always like that in all official Evernote clients. Note that, earlier in the discussions, we had again gone around the circle where I'd said search didn't work as documented, people referred me to the search grammar pages (standard helpdesk response) and I had to prove that it didn't work. It would be funny if it wasn't so painful.

Prompted to look at this by seeing @jjdevenuta comment on another thread. I am about to travel so not inclined to experiment but has anyone tried using a hard link to redirect their Evernote folder? I use them to have some of my iTunes content on my Drobo. There's a good user-level discussion here of aliases vs symbolic links vs hard links. Warning they are broken by APFS, the new file system in macOS High Sierra. See Apple doc and this recent Ask Different thread. I'd also suggest experimenting with symbolic links (they may still work depending on Evernote). So if hard links are the only way to go, your main drive needs to remain HFS+. Use the diskutil terminal command to determine if your drive is HFS+ $ diskutil info / Device Identifier: disk1s2 Device Node: /dev/disk1s2 Whole: No Part of Whole: disk1 Volume Name: MBPHD Mounted: Yes Mount Point: / Partition Type: Apple_HFS File System Personality: Journaled HFS+ Type (Bundle): hfs Name (User Visible): Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Journal: Journal size 40960 KB at offset 0xe8d000 Owners: Enabled

Sync is also a pain if you need to setup a laptop for travel which is not commonly used, or have to reinstall - I've had a Surface which required a reinstall two days before a trip. Fortunately, the Windows version allows for on-demand download but that's still not a substitute for proper selective sync on desktop.

The point is that if you are relying heavily on JS it is a lot harder to avoid things bogging down an iOS app. (Ironically, WebAssembly would probably make it easier for a pure web client to delegate). I can get up to four keys popped up on my iOS keyboard as the editor bogs down.

Hmmm, maybe Atom, if it looks like Electron? I can understand you abandoning TinyMCE as the costs go up dramatically but very sad it is still JS-based.

Mac 7.1. I had to upgrade from 6.11 because of other clashes with recent MacOS. It no longer has any control over how often sync occurs. Both the timing and manual option were removed. When I am editing a long note, sync during the process means things end up in the wrong place. If I am just typing without using any commands, it usually copes. Copy and paste is a disaster.

Me too, for much of the last 25 years. Plus Swift and C# and GLSL and .... I would rather stay in Swift ;-) rezcib said Electron is an app framework, not a WP engine. I'm interested on multiple grounds: I have a dark suspicion that, particularly on iOS, a JS-based engine is being used which locks up the main thread and that conflicts badly with processing metadata for 34K notes. I have projects for which I'd like to use a cross-platform WP engine, not a simple non-wrapping text editor. Going back into the early 90's, I've delivered multiple projects using such engines. Back in 1992 we had custom WP on Mac Classics for a magazine classified ads system. Written in C++ with the c-tree Plus shared database file, it delivered better search and editing experiences in a distributed system than modern web-based code. Hence my deep cynicism about progress. That was just an off-the-shelf (expensive) package no longer available - to get the performance then it was written in 68K assembler. I've also put a lot of time into layout and word-wrapping logic writing my own report-writer, again for vastly less powerful machines than today. I have a fair idea of how hard this can be.

I want to edit large clippings. If I can't use Evernote for clipping then I may as well look for a replacement. I appreciate the range of WP and other writing tools and use some of them but the entire point of Evernote is to have my data available and searchable in one product, across my many devices and locations. If I have to go back to using dedicated document editors just to add some inline comments on a clipped web page, it's lost most of its appeal. The main thing I ask is that Evernote not go backwards in robustness! A very large part of my current frustration is because of their hack to fix a sync problem, which makes it sync every few seconds.

In my case I have a search failing which is only searching on attributes and tags, not text content, but was given the same advice to apply full text reindexing. Very little showing in the Activity log.

Bump! It is April 2018 and the current editing experience on Mac is woeful. I am a "power user" with over 34,000 notes mainly editing on Mac and Windows, some trivial editing on iOS but have given up. Is the current editor across platforms based on TinyMCE? Does using a JavaScript editor result in more work having to be done in the main UI thread and hence more conflicts with sync? (that's more of an issue with the iOS version, which is unusable unless your phone is fully synced prior to editing) I have over 35 years development experience across many platforms, much of it GUI and a lot of editing and text layout experience. Evernote's buggy behaviour tends to trigger my suspicions as to what's going wrong and that it's got a deep architectural flaw underpinning it all.

I was having this with 6.11 and updated to 7.1 to fix it and other bugs. I found that closing the window and opening a New Window often fixed in 6.11. (However the frequent incorrect search results in 7.1 are making me regret the upgrade)

However, in what seems like a misguided attempt to promote it, sending someone a sharing link now goes through Work Chat. It used to be delivered to their email. This has resulted in my co-founder not having a key notebook shared to him whilst he was overseas and I just thought he was ignoring it. Evernote's recent washed-out design has significantly decreased usability to the point where it's very hard to read background prompts as what sections in the Share dialog mean. The dialog starts with a Work Chat list and a Contacts list. However, when you send a sharing message even with a contact, it comes back to a Work Chat dialog so I have no idea if these have gone through. I can't find a way to send a sharing request apparently outside of Work Chat.

I do something similar to falk but using BBEdit rather than the Terminal window. I don't advise people pasting things into Terminal windows in case they forget the cat > /dev/null step.. Any programmer editor will take the plain text off the clipboard. The reason these approaches work is that it puts a cleaned version back on the clipboard. The clipboard contains multiple representations. (Evernote puts about 20 on there, as I pointed out in January.) When you paste into a programming editor, you just get the plain text representation. if you then select all and copy back from the editor, the only thing that goes into the clipboard is a plain text version. Even if that plain text is identical to what was already in the clipboard, it wipes out all the formatted representations. Pasting into Evernote will then convert that plain text into a minimal formatted version using the settings in your desktop app for default text.

I don't know if Scott is using a beta which has changed things. The current Windows desktop version I have is the release version 4.6.7.8409 and the Simplify Formatting and Remove Formatting behaviour has been the same for a long time. It applies to the whole note regardless of selection.

Look on the Format menu - Remove Formatting is down the bottom and the Windows key is Ctrl-Shift-Space

Is this going to remain a web application or are there plans to move it to desktop or mobile?

That raises some interesting issues for third parties trying to implement this feature. I manually create "home pages" where I have a table of internal links to the most important pages relating to given topics. Those are in a special notebook of their own. I wonder if there's some scope for an automated "abstracting" app doing something similar to create a notebook that you use offline, as an index page. Would you settle for the text content only being stored offline without markup or media? Evernote's index of terms from scanning may not be available for offline searches - if so that would make this feature dramatically more difficult.

My focus with this app is on power-users who want to tweak raw ENML (the HTML-based markup language) or use Markdown syntax with it translating between ENML and Markdown. This is partly because I think that there is a different market from the normal Evernote client apps and the markup-editing class of users are never going to be addressed by an official Evernote client (unless this got acquired and became a second blessed client). So, my editor will be accompanied by a preview in a web control but almost certainly not WYSIWIG editing. It may also be attractive to people who do not want to edit raw markup text but want a better range of formatting cleanup controls, so maybe I should expose the format cleanup directly on the preview pane as well. This discussion makes me wonder what levels of format simplification may be needed and if the UI should offer a choice between things possibly not mutually exclusive e.g.: strip all style formatting but leave tables structurally intact unify styles to same font collapse paragraphs and other divs into simple paragraphs (technically, the same as pure plain text in a text editor) collapse tables where possible, thinking of the use of tables as a web page formatting gimmick, with non-tabular data

Here's a workflow I posted on Quora, in a thread about this problem, if you need more ammunition to remind them why this was a bad design decision: if you make a mistake when editing a note and want to avoid loss but can't cancel the note - jump immediately into Safari and fire up the web client so you can make a copy of the affected note. That way you won't lose the content. I'm often editing notes on an iPad but have my iPhone with me so will do the same thing with a different client - fire up Evernote on the iPhone and duplicate the note there before I press the Done button on the damaged note. As a really last resort, you can recover old notes on a desktop computer with backups, going through the hoops of restoring an old entire database just to copy one note out

I am working on an app which will make this possible however it's second in line behind my DevCup entry. First out will be an iOS version closely followed by the OS/X and then Windows (I don't do Android, yet). It's a side-feature of an app which is a MultiMarkdown-based editor also allowing power users to directly edit raw ENML.

ahhh, disappointing, I would really like something finer-grained.Maybe by the time I've got my current projects completed, the iPad client will include native ink. (err, that would be completed my current projects and the vast domestic chores backlogged by the interruption for the Evernote competion :? ). Otherwise, I'll have a go at it myself.

Thanks for informing me of another solution because I find myself in the same situation at times. Which of Notetaker HD vs Noteshelf would you say has the best Evernote integration especially if you want to jump around between a few pages?