The Total Legend

I don't need extensive writing, I just need to be able to have the option to sort manually as I take notes. It's what I am using Evernote for: note taking, outlining, world building. I write my actual novel in Scrivener, but Scrivener has poor UI/UX for outlining; Evernote has it beat in UI/UX except for the one thing that matters the most — manual sorting. What I see in this thread is a lot of posts AGAINST adding an optional and very useful feature — which would take an hour or so to implement with no backend overhead — that you can totally ignore if you don't want to use it. What is the point of going against advancement here? It's a feature that has been asked for for over a decade, beyond my own personal wishes. It's not difficult.

No, this is unacceptable. Titles change often and the result is the ordering changes. Now I have chapters like 01 Title, 02, Title, 02B Title, 02C Title, etc, because I have to rename a dozen or more chapters to keep them in order each time I add or move some around. Creating an index page doesn't help either as it also needs to be managed each time. Going back to another page just to link to another page is really inefficient. The Cards provide an actual Title and a Summary of the text in the chapter which is most useful. They included this Card view which brings it really close to apps like Scrivener, which does allow manual sorting of these Cards, but Evernote fails at this one basic thing. They advertise it to write novels which I have been doing, but creating index files to manage them is extremely 1990s. I want to outline a novel, not a web page. Adding in the ability to manually sort is simple, with an option to turn if off or on as just another sorting option. I do this all the time in apps I develop with far more complex UIs. I can't believe that an app designed for note taking, advertised for writing novels, can't implement the one thing that actually gives it true custom organization other than "rename the titles" and hope it renders in the order it is asked. I looked into the app's code, it's just basic HTML with JS that like it's compiled from React or Vue or some other framework. It should be easy for them to implement, especially if they're using state management. It's an insult to me because they're advertising an extremely old and inefficient method of indexing HTML web pages (ala 1990s) as a legitimate method of custom organization because they won't offer a real solution that has been asked for, for about a decade. Any mid-tier developer and above can get it done in an hour or two. They already have the UI implemented, drag and drop is already implemented, they just need to add the ability to perform state management of an array of cards based on the position of where the card is dragged. Very simple. I would code it myself if they let me.

They need to add manual sorting to Evernote now, this is the most basic thing this editor should have. I am using Evernote to outline a novel, but the chapters keep changing orders: some get deleted, some get added, and some get renamed — and all the tricks and hacks to keep things in a specific order have become a major impediment. Funny enough, I got a somewhat insulting email from Evernote's marketing that encourages novel writers to use Evernote to "Keep Everything Organized" which is sadly ironic because it's nearly impossible to keep anything organized without manual sorting. And adding to the insult, they ask to create a Table of Contents page to hyperlink to other pages which still doesn't help. Manual sorting is not difficult to develop and implement in a web app, and yet they advertised a reason to have it, but still offer another useless workaround.

I am still having the exact same issue with the latest versions (as of this post) of EN for Mac and Windows. I use both frequently. I did the reinstalls by downloading the newest versions as suggested. My issue only happens when I first open EN and the spinner can last between 15 - 30 seconds. Once it never stopped spinning at all (Mac) and I had to quit and restart the app. The only app changes I made was for it to display in Dark Mode and I made no other settings changes.