Leaving Evernote
I've been trying to figure out a good way of exporting my notes away from Evernote this evening, and am slowly coming to terms with the fact that there is no easy way. Ideally, I would like to store all my notes as plain-text mark-down formatted files, but Evernote will only export HTML, and the HTML it exports is a colossal mess. I've tried running the HTML through “tidy” (a fantastic Linux command line tool) which did a fairly good job, and then through panadoc (another fantastic Linux command line tool) to turn it into Markdown, but the result is a mess – almost totally because of Evernote.
I only have 128 notes to convert – I'm considering doing it by hand (let's call it a rainy day project) – In the meantime I will just store them as HTML.
In some ways I'm glad I discovered these issues with Evernote before I stored too much stuff in it. I have been hearing horror stories about others losing data in Evernote recently, so not being able to export notes cleanly (and then only via the Windows desktop app) is the final nail in it's coffin.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. If I had thought this all through a few years ago, I would never have started using Evernote in the first place, and would already have had a neatly curated set of Markdown files. Oh well.