Importing notes from other notebook applications

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Importing notes from other notebook applications

There is a concise topic for this located in the official documentation but I think a wiki post here will allow for others to add to this document as and when they learn about a new tool or trick for importing.
Please edit this wiki post as required (in the top right of this post) to add or change information as you deem necessary.
This post does not mean the main document cannot be updated with new info but with the current documentation format it is better to keep that section concise whereas this post can be as long and verbose as it needs to be and can be edited "on the fly" without requirement of PRs and reviews.

This first section covers the generic import methods supported natively by Joplin.
The second section covers information about specific applications by way of information and links to tools or related forum topics.

Evernote .enex

This is the standard import method using Evernote's own export format .enex.

For information and instructions see the official documentation.

This also applies to any other application capable of exporting its notes into .enex format or the end goal of various conversion scripts.

Markdown

Joplin supports import of both markdown files and markdown directories.

For information and instructions see the official documentation.

Many applications are capable of either exporting to markdown or simply work off of a markdown directory on the filesystem (e.g. Obsidian, Zettlr, QOwnNotes).

Other generic formats

There are a number of other generic formats that may be used as a target for exporting from certain applications that are not supported by the importer but plenty of tools can be found out there to support the conversion into a recognised format - most commonly markdown. This also includes importing from file types stored on the filesystem outside of a specific notebook application.

Pandoc is the perfect example of such a tool. Common export formats for conversion that are compatible:

  • HTML

  • Emacs Org-Mode

  • Textile

  • reStructuredText

  • MS Word (.docx)

  • Rich text (.rtf)

Example of use would be something like (using html as an example):

For .html files within a directory


for f in *.html ; do pandoc ${f} -f html -t markdown -s -o ${f}.md ; done

or

For recursive directory conversion with subfolders


find . -name "*.ht*" | while read i; do pandoc -f html -t markdown "$i" -o "${i%.*}.md"; done

Once converted you can remove the .html files and import to Joplin. You may find you need to play with and tweak the exact markdown format you export to (e.g. markdown, markdown_strict, markdown_mmd) as well as using flags such as raw_html/tex options to maintain certain tags without conversion.

@Marph's Jimmy Import Tool

Specific notebook formats

Some applications simply don't play nicely with generic and open formats and instead need specialised tools and scripts often supplied by the community in order for them to give up their secrets.

OneNote

One of the most common targets for conversion, there are a number of methods that can work here.

Colornote

Zoho Notebook

Related topics:

Apple Notes

Related topics:

Google Keep

Standard Notes

Tomboy Notes

  • A number of methods (convert to HTML, convert from internal XML, export scripts) can be found here

Nixnote

Nimbus Note

Trilium

  • Right click the >> root and press export, select this note and all its descendants and Markdown

Notion

Bear

Tiddlywiki

Toodledo

Turtl

Wiznote

Xiaomi Notes / Mi Cloud

Evernote version 2

Obsidian with attachments

Simple Note

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