My Attempt To Leave Evernote For Joplin - ATTEMPT NO #3

You do not, I only asked what you think gave it away. :wink:
I admit nothing!

THE 2 WEEKS LATER POST

Alright, it has now been 2 weeks since this attempt began. I'm generally pretty pleased to say this year is likely going to be the one that sticks. I wouldn't call this without burden by any means, but even for all the warts encountered I've lost a significant amount of the temptation to stay in Evernote. I slowly found myself actually being excited to use Joplin and figuring out what it can do. I'm also much happier to take that $ that would have gone to Evernote and contribute it towards Joplin instead.

That said, there have been a lot of "oh I guess I have to live with that" warts encountered with Joplin. I am basically swapping the weird list of bugs I had to learn to workaround in Evernote for a new list of bugs I need to learn to workaround in Joplin, but with a better hope they can get addressed.

Things I've Discovered With Joplin That I love

  • The whiteboard/vision board ability. Holy crap I have been wanting this feature for ages in Evernote, and seeing Obsidian doing it willy nilly has made me venomously jealous. So having this is a BIG selling point for me, especially for a visual & note taking library like mine.

  • Jump to anything Ctrl+P feature

  • This community seems pretty nice and helpful, I really appreciate everyone who has responded with plugin suggestions and tips. I've learned that Joplin search is actually pretty powerful, there are indeed shortcuts for the functions I wanted, and how to get my desktop & mobile to sync reasonably sane using Dropbox.

  • Adjusting the CSS to make the huge new line spacing be far more tolerable (and closer to what Evernote V11 does) has brought me to the point of being able to make peace with it. Finding the CSS I needed to add though, was a lot of searching. I found the answer here For anyone curious, add this to your userstyle.css

    #rendered-md :is(p /* modify tags as needed */) /* affects Markdown viewer */,  
    #tinymce :is(p /* modify tags as needed */) /* affects Rich Text editor */ {  
      /* modify declarations below as needed */  
      margin-bottom: 0 !important;  
      padding-top: 0 !important;  
      line-height: 1.3em !important; 
    }
    
  • I CAN EDIT THE LAST UPDATED TIMESTAMP ON A NOTE. Look, you might think this is silly but I cannot remotely stress how important this is to me, it was the initial fire that kicked me off to getting out of Evernote when they foolishly disabled being able to do this (and now talk about re-enabling it like it's going to be some sort of big innovation). I tried to live with not being able to do it, but I realize it just made me afraid of ever properly fixing/tagging my notes- that is no way to work.

  • The plugin system, simply just existing. I've already begin experimenting with exploring and writing my own plugin to begin repairing some of the broken link holes created in the conversion from Evernote.

Further Things I Wish I Could Do With Joplin

(I understand these should be brought up as separate topics on the forum to be taken & discussed seriously, so I plan on doing that accordingly, but for now this is the gist)

  • Put a link to a tag in a Whiteboard. Since Joplin doesn't support nested tags (and it sounds like it's not a simple task) theoretically with the ability to place tag shortcuts in a whiteboard, I could at least attempt to programmatically recreate something like this Evernote V5 tag browser in a visual whiteboard layout. Sort of like a grand Table of Contents for tags. Pan browsing a tag listing is much easier and faster than the rudimentary vertical list everyone shoves into the bottom left corner without thinking about how that scales.

  • I DIRELY wish there was a means to be able to move a note that is currently open (in a new window) to a different Notebook. Like a button, or an command item in the MenuItemLocation bar. From what I can tell so far, the only way to move a note to a notebook is to drag it onto it ???
    This button appears in notes when viewed through a search, it feels like it would be a good potential button to bring up a Move-To prompt.

    Evernote V5 handles it in a way like this with a dropdown, and it is very convenient. This displays on every single note.

  • Copy Tag(s) from one note and Paste their application to another

  • Select some text and hit a button like Insert Link or Code Block, and have that select text auto-fill the resulting dialogue appropriately. This is fairly common UX standard.

  • No keyboard shortcut for Strikethrough text???

Problems Discovered That On Occasion Make Me Wonder What-Have-I-Done

  • Joplin seems to oscillate between very snappy and responsive, and then seizing up at random points. I've come to realize that this seems to correspond to the Synchronize function, that whenever it is running it will heavily bog down the responsiveness of the app. I attempted to set my Sync to occur every 10 minutes to accommodate for that, but it seems this might be a bug in the Sync interval is basically meaningless because I noticed Joplin will always begin a sync after editing and leaving a note. Right now I'm organizing, tagging, and moving a lot of notes, so am I very frequently triggering the sync to happen which makes interacting with the app frustrating.
  • As a result there are many, MANY times, where the note I had selected suddenly was not selected, or something else ended up getting selected. Lots of weird UI responsive hiccups like this that can get frustrating, where it feels like I'm trying to click on a note up to 3 times because the list is currently in the middle of some weird update state.
  • Sometimes having to fight the editor (see the culling space bug in the next section). Strange bugs where sometimes a note will get //'s placed in front of certain links every time the note is only merely displayed (not edited), and these will compound and I will find a note sometimes with literally ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// in it. I'm still working out how to reproduce this to be able to report it.
  • The web clipper is decent, but it really seems to be a gamble whether HTML clipping or Markdown clipping does a better job, so I find myself doing both and see which result looks more tolerable to live with. In regards to preserving HTML somewhat reasonably, I would say Evernote's clipper does a better job (though I would never ever call it perfect either)

Bugs I'll Need To Report

I plan to report these properly via GitHub and such, but I thought I would mention them here in case anyone is familiar with workarounds or causes.

  • Restoring a note does not restore the note with its original creation and modification date data, even though (at the minimum) the modification time stamp is clearly available since you use it to decide which version to restore
  • Hour picker in the date created/modified UI is weird because it loops around, and it doesn't adhere to the 24 hour format settings in the options making it extra strange. In general this dialog is also buggy to interact with with.
  • There only a "Permanently Delete Note" option in the MenuItemLocation Notes dropdown, but not a regular Move-To-Trash delete? I feel this specifically if I have a note open in a separate window and want to regular delete it.
  • Converting a HTML note to markdown unfortunately does not preserve the former's noteID, so if anything was linking to that note before the conversion, that Joplin link is now broken. Since noteID can be assigned, this seems like it could be easy to fix in the Joplin converter code?? I'm currently converting a LOT A LOT of notes to Markdown manually, coming from Evernote, but this specific issue is also breaking my progress on attempting to make a Evernote link repair plugin, since if I repair the links but then later convert the note to Markdown, the links are broken again.
  • Joplin will enter a weird state where it will aggressively cull the space I just applied in a note (like say after placing a period or a tab, it will auto-erase it if I don't continue typing after 1 second). Either that or it will actively jolt the typing cursor around, so that I'm suddenly typing inside the word I was trying to type out. This obviously, is crazy annoying, and I haven't been yet able to discern what weird circumstances are required to make it reproduceable. It seems to happen in notes with the Markup being Markdown, but notes that contain a mixture of things from HTML and Markdown (as a result being copy pasted or using the combine notes plugin)
  • As mentioned before the Synchronization interval setting seems to be a little pointless? However it seems after I do anything (like move a note, tag it, or update a note and close it) the sync will kick off regardless.

At any rate, I'm pleased to say still interested in sticking with Joplin this time. There's a HUGE AMOUNT of potential here for this application, and I think with the right amount of fixes and polish put in a few places, it will go a very long way to improving the quality of life in the UX. While this would be my first time contributing to an open source project, I'm personally very interested in trying to figure out how to apply these fixes myself if necessary (though I also realize there is currently a pull request ban on anyone but core established contributors right now).

Glad you're not only sticking with Joplin, but actively contributing to it with your findings and planned bug reports. Answering what I can below:

Press Ctrl+Shift+P to open the command palette, select the movetoFolder command, select the desired notebook from the dropdown, then press OK. If the command could show up in Options > Keyboard Shortcuts, this process would be even easier. Not even the above plugin causes it to show up there.

Hi all,

Right now I am testing an Evernote import solution that involves using the Joplin cli in wsl windows subsystem for Linux.

Rather than importing all of my Evernote notebooks into the main folder tree I want to put them into a folder called evernote_import.

I am using Joplin Cloud for synchronization and I have successfully configured that in Linux and I am able to import notebooks into a folder of choice.

I'm still experimenting but if you're interested in importing .enex files this may work for you too.

It's one thing I haven't figured out yet is how to import them as markdown versus HTML.

More later as I make progress.

Fresh off the forge: a notable mention to attempt to revive evernote internal links

Clean profile/vault with clean sync account is strongly recommended when trying this.

Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately I suspect this plugin was possibly made before the Joplin rich text editor was added, as this plugin seems to have issues with modern Joplin in that it places literal ~ symbols in the text, likely because it was assuming the editor would always be Markdown.
The shortcut keys also don't appear to be re-bindable despite being listed in the keyboard shortcut list.
Edit: Correction after further poking around it looks like the shortcut keys will only work in the Markdown editor view.

Good to know, thank you!

:weary_face: I saw this discussed in the forum. Unfortunately after doing 2 weeks of major cleanup, converting, and organizing I don't think I have it in me to re-import my entire Evernote database all over again. Additionally, even if I did use the new importer, any Evernote link repair progress is sort of significantly blocked by this issue: Converting HTML note to Markdown results in new noteID which breaks Joplin links

Isn't the context menu (for a note) an option, or did I misread something:)?

Screenshot of the context menu:

For context, I run Joplin 3.6.15 on Linux (no plugins), so it is possible that option is not present in your version.


Sounds like a similar thing to what I am experiencing. Sometimes my notes will not convert correctly, where formatting will look like this:
**test
** for bold text.
And:
*test
* for italic text.

Every time a breaking space is the culprit, and going into MD and removing the line break fixes it.
Just letting you (and others) know I experience a similar issue :slight_smile:


And congratulations on deciding to stay on Joplin!
From what I have read of your posts and links, your contributions will help all of us to a better experience :slight_smile:

I started converting my OneNote collection in May, and I am still converting. Though just a page a day. I am not even done importing OneNote 'books' yet.
I do it by first creating a new Notebook in Joplin, then make sure to select it and then start the import of a OneNote-notebook file. This helps a lot in a few ways:

  • I get full control of where the imported data goes, so if any thing back happens during import, my structure outside of the IMPORT notebook is safe.
  • I am not being overwhelmed by importing all aspects of my digital notebook life at once
  • I benefit from each quality of life code update between each notebook I import :slight_smile:

Sorry I realize now I forgot to contextualize this correctly.
I DIRELY wish there was a mean to be able to move a note, that is open in a new window, to a different Notebook.

Wow that's quite a long journey. Good luck. My Evernote subscription was coming due and this was the deciding factor on whether or not I renewed it. I needed to know pretty much straight away if the import process was going to work to help make the decision.

Interesting only I do not think there is a way to do it I've tried on Windows and Linux.

If you open multiple notes in different windows I would suggest closing the window before moving it to a new notebook from the main app.

Thanks!

OneNote is not limited to subscription, and it requires surprisingly little space.

However, in case I did not, I exported all of the books before subscription renewal time and have them locally saved, ready to be imported when I am ready. That saved me from the hard deadline :slight_smile:

It is probably a moot point now, and you sound much more technically advanced than me, but I read that Evernote notebooks can be exported into ENEX-files, which would also save you from the subscription deadline, but with option to renew in case something was missing.

The move to notebook command does show in the command palette (ctrl + shift + p), but it unfortunately doesn't seem to work when invoked from the command palette (the move to notebook dialog doesn't appear)

There is a plugin called "Quick Move" which lets you set pre-defined move commands

All,

There is a very nice backup program for Evernote on GitHub.
It logs into your Evernote account and downloads all of your notebooks into an SQLite database. After that is done, you can export all of your notebooks into separate .enex files that are ready to be imported into Joplin.

This gives you a permanent copy of all of your notebooks.

In terms of UX expected functionality in a desktop application, I personally don't think this is very acceptable, hence my noting the desire for the functionality.

Since I've started using the iOS application more, I've noticed that the note view in it does have a dropdown to move that note into the relevant notebook. This would be a perfect thing to just bring over to the desktop version, especially since it has already been developed and seems to work well. Just display it near the topside header of the note.

.

The Android software has a similar feature with a drop down from the top of the screen and move a note to a different notebook.

On your cell phone whether it be Apple or Android you're not running multiple windows there's only one window.

You do want to ensure that any edits you made in the open window are properly saved so that when you move the note nothing bad happens.

Sure, but you're also able to move a note to a notebook without having to close it.

Granted I'm not super familiar with the working of the filesystem, though as I believe I understand it there is no actual file even being moved on disk when this occurs? (I certainly don't see a folder hierarchy matching my Joplin notebooks when looking at the Joplin data folder, I only see a flat structure of 129,000 md files in a single folder).
According to the Data API the folder the note is stored in, is just the 'parent_id' property, which looks like it is just another property you can edit, just like the created_time.

I gave up on Evernote long ago with about 10000 notes. I made the decision to 'archive' most but not all my notes in a separate profile. A few collections I did move across and all new work went into Joplin.

A key tip I picked up was to stop thinking, 'How do I do X in Joplin that I did in Evernote, forget Evernote and come to Joplin like its the first notes app you have used'.

Regarding what can I due to replace whatever Evernote did.

I use the free ShareX app to markup and take screenshots. Picpick is good too. Ksnip is good if you're using Linux.

I find the Joplin Web Clipper extension very good and far better than other tools. The advantage is it populates the Header and Tags at the same time when you create a clip etc.

I know this is counterintuitive, but try making the notes column a bit narrower – then the search box will move below the buttons: