Introducing Quentier - free & open source cross-platform (Linux/Windows/Mac) Evernote client

[idv 6]

Quentier is a cross-platform (Linux/Windows/Mac) note taking app capable of working as Evernote client. It can also be used for local note taking, without the necessity to even have the Evernote account.

Quentier supports such features as:

• Synchronization of user data (notebooks, notes, tags, saved searches) with Evernote
• Evernote search syntax can be used for data searching within the local storage
• Printing of notes and converting them to pdf files
• Ability to open several notes simultaneously in either tabbed or windowed interface
• Ability to switch between accounts - both local and Evernote ones

Quentier is free software distributed under the terms of GNU GPLv3. A large part of core functionality was delegated to a separate library which is distributed under the terms of GNU LGPLv3.

Note that the project is currently in public alpha state and is not yet intended for production usage! Some things might be unpolished while some other things might just randomly break due to some unforeseen circumstances. In order to make the app ready to fulfill the needs of casual users in near future the help of brave people prepared to meet and report bugs and inconveniences is required. So I'm seeking for volunteers willing to take part in testing, bug reporting, developing and co-maintaining this app (as well as its core library).

The project has downloads with binaries for all supported platforms (AppImage for Linux) so you can take the binary and tinker with it for a bit. The user documentation is pretty much nonexistent at the moment but there's a brief overview of the app's features which should get you started.

Quentier is written in C++/Qt, uses CMake build system, also uses some bits of SQLite, JavaScript and CSS. If you have development skills in these technologies and would like to dive into the project, there's an overview of the app's internals + the detailed guide to building and installing the app's dependencies as well as the guide on building the app's core library and the app itself. There are also some pre-filled issues (ditto for the core library) some of which are marked with "help wanted" and "good first issue" tags - these are intended for new developers coming to the project.

In addition to help with testing and development I'd gladly accept and appreciate assistance from someone with good design skills: for one thing, better application icons are needed than what I was able to produce myself. For other things, the overall GUI appearance might need some improvements or their ideas at least.

The project has a blog in which I write about various technical and non-technical stuff related to the project in one way or another.

[zdanevich 26]

Thank you for your effort, but much better for the community would be to contribute to the Nixnote. If you think that you can make a better software - I hope that you can improve Nixnote. I do not see a big reason for a new project that looks very similar.

[idv 6]

Quentier is not a new project in the sense of starting from scratch, I've been developing it since mid 2013. I've discussed some connections with Nixnote in this blog post. In short, I don't think I can help improving Nixnote since some of my technical views are very different from what can be found in Nixnote. And besides, it never hurts if the end users have a choice of software solving their tasks.

[CalS 5,280]

Not quite the same for sure, but this one is registered.

[kmkonline 3]

May I suggest to have selectable Notebook download instead of the whole library. Sometimes we will work with device with less storage. 

It might be useful with selectable offline Notebook features. 

[idv 6]

It is best to suggest features directly on GitHub, that makes it more likely these suggestions won't be forgotten.

Selectable notebook download does make sense for mobile devices since storage is can indeed be quite limited there. But it's hard for me to believe it's an issue for desktop in 2018.

[kmkonline 3]

I am using MacBook Pro 15 and 13 inch. One is having 512GB and the other one is 256GB. 

My Evernote library is around 35GB after 8 years of usage. I scan a lot of documents as work ref. 

The only way for me now is trimming the size of the database by reducing the quality of documents / photos on my Evernote account. 

[idv 6]

Ok, you get your point then. I can't promise to implement selectable downloaded notebooks in near future but I'll think about how it could be done.

[kmkonline 3]

5 minutes ago, idv said:

Ok, you get your point then. I can't promise to implement selectable downloaded notebooks in near future but I'll think about how it could be done.

No worry, just a ideal feature for me

 

[Amtriorix 3]

I want to see Markdown support, like in Laverna. Without Markdown it is hard to make professional notes exportable to websites.
So I suggest you look to the code of Laverna or the plugins of Dokuwiki.

• https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:markdowku
• https://laverna.cc/

[idv 6]

Thanks for the suggestion and the links, I can see that a lot of people want markdown support for Evernote. The hardest part in implementing such support is the conversion between markdown and Evernote's format used to represent notes - ENML. I haven't done the proper research yet but so far it seems only some subset of Evernote's format can be represented in markdown i.e. some notes won't be representable - for example, notes containing references to note attachments within its content (en-media tags). Also notes containing ToDo checkboxes. Alternatively, I could possibly try to somehow extend the markdown format itself to allow at least for some Evernote-specific tags like ToDo checkboxes.

I keep markdown support in mind although it is not one of the things which I plan to start doing in the nearest future. If someone would like to jump in and help somehow (for example, by doing the preliminary research of conversion between ENML and markdown), that would be great!