I am finally leaving Evernote (exporting Notes to Markdown)

UPDATE: Check out Joplin, which supports importing .enex notebook exports as Markdown, and has a lot of the same organization structure as Evernote–looks great for getting on something open source and multi-platform!

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My annual Evernote subscription is expiring next month, and I received an email saying that the annual subscription fee will increase from $69.99 to $129.99. I’ve been watching Evernote stagnate and become less useful to me for many years, and based on anecdotes from many friends, a lot of people are in a similar state. I’ve tried migrating to OneNote, Notion, Mem, and others, but no migration path has ever really worked well enough for me to commit to the new ecosystem. As a result, I have continued to pay the $70 annual subscription while only using the app a handful of times each year.

The announcement of the price increase came with a pledge to add features, but instead of being excited by the prospect, I was annoyed. Evernote has been sitting around for a decade with the only major change being to abandon native apps in favor of a web interface (or an app that wraps a web interface). Now, it wants me to believe that it will modernize itself using an 87% increase the annual subscription price? The email was the final push for me to get all of my data out and cancel my subscription. Instead of trying to find an Evernote replacement (which has been impossible), I chose to convert all of my notes to Markdown files with linked images and files.

For years as I struggled with Evernote, I used nvALT out of a Dropbox folder. It was blazingly fast, but I missed having rich text, images, attachments, and robust multi-platform compatibility. I waited for nvUltra for years, but have given up on that as well.

These days, I am using Mem. I’m excited by the prospect of an AI-first, brain extension app. It could be more performant, but it’s been working well enough so far. There is an Evernote->Mem migration path, but it is not fully featured (doesn’t include Notebook names nor tags), and I also found the migration workflow to be buggy and slow. In the end, I chose not attempt to import my 5766 notes and 82 notebooks.

Exporting from Evernote to Markdown:

1. In the desktop “app”, export each Evernote notebook as an .enex file by right-clicking on it and selecting “Export notebook…”. There is no way to do this in batch, which is not surprising. In Evernote, batch operations have become harder and harder over time (another reason to jump ship). Export all .enex files to a single folder if you want to batch convert later.
2. Install evernote2md.
3. Use evernote2md to convert each .enex file to a folder containing an .md file and associated images / file attachments.

To batch convert all .enex files in a folder, I used this bash script. Be sure to set your desired output directory before running it.

#!/bin/bash

# Set the output directory
outputdir="outputdir"

# Create the output directory if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p "$outputdir"

# Loop through each .enex file in the current directory
for file in *.enex; do
    # Get the file basename
    basename=$(basename "$file" .enex)

    # Create a new folder with the matching basename in the output directory
    mkdir -p "$outputdir/$basename"

    # Run "evernote2md" command on the file
    evernote2md "$file" "$outputdir/$basename"
done

Bash script written by ChatGPT!

On a Mac, I use MacDown to edit and view Markdown files. To search, I use Spotlight (or Everything Search in Windows, the best search app ever).