I got an email from Evernote last week letting me know that my subscription price would be increasing to $250/year, effective January 7, when my annual subscription renews. It had gone up to $130/year in 2023. Prior to that, it was $70/year.
I’m not really unhappy with Evernote as a product, or with Bending Spoons as a company, but the price on it is getting a bit ridiculous. Here are some links to articles/videos of other folks talking about the price increase:
- Reddit mega-thread
- Taming the Trunk video
- Dave Edwards video
I had previously experimented with moving to Obsidian, in 2023, but didn’t go through with it. But now, it’s looking like I really need to do something. Maybe I could afford $250/year for Evernote if I thought they were going to stick with that price for the foreseeable future, and continue making the app better. But I’m just not convinced that they’re on a good trajectory, in terms of my own personal use-case for the product.
Cory Doctorow coined the term en****tification a while back, and it’s a useful term, though I wish he had come up with something that didn’t incorporate one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words you can’t say on TV. Still, it’s a good term. Here’s a Metafilter discussion on the (let’s call it) enpoopification of note-taking software, from 2023. I’m not sure if Evernote really falls into this category, but you could make a good case for it.
So, anyway, I’m back to experimenting with Obsidian. Luckily, I’m taking this coming week off from work, to use up my vacation days for the year, so I’ve got the time for it.
I’ll probably post more about this when I get farther along, but I thought it would be useful to write up some initial notes, informed by my previous efforts, and by watching a whole bunch of YouTube videos.
I’ll start with the process of importing from Evernote. For that, I’m using Yarle. Obsidian now has an official importer for Evernote, but I think Yarle is probably still better. Looking at the commit history on Yarle in Github, I see that the author has continued to work on it. Having tried it out again, I’m not sure if it’s working better than it was in 2023, but it’s definitely working well enough, I think.
I’ve been tweaking my template for Yarle. Here’s what I’ve got at this moment:
---
{title-block}EN-Title: "{title}"{end-title-block}
{created-at-block}EN-Created: {created-at}{end-created-at-block}
{updated-at-block}EN-LastUpdated: {updated-at}{end-updated-at-block}
{source-url-block}EN-SourceURL: {source-url}{end-source-url-block}
{reminder-time-block}EN-Reminder: {reminder-time}{end-reminder-time-block}
{reminder-done-time-block}EN-Reminder-Done: {reminder-done-time}{end-reminder-done-time-block}
{tags-yaml-list-block}Tags: {tags-yaml-list}{end-tags-yaml-list-block}
---
{content-block}{content}{end-content-block}
So I’m putting a bunch of stuff in the “frontmatter” of the note. This stuff is mostly just there for reference; I won’t actually need it going forward. I plan on converting Evernote’s reminders into Obsidian tasks, either manually or via a script or something. And the tags block seems like the cleanest way to get the tags over from EN.
The only setting in Yarle that I’ve changed from the default is to set “store attachments in notebook level” to yes. I’m still not sure about the way I’m dealing with attachments, but I think this is good enough.
As for my Obsidian setup, I think I’ve settled on a batch of plugins that’ll give me most of the functionality I need (with some compromises and caveats). Here’s the list:
- Notebook Navigator – This is a great one that allows you to get your Obsidian screen to look a lot more like what I’m used to with Evernote. Getting this installed got me past a lot of my hesitation with Obsidian.
- Omnisearch and Text Extractor – These two should bring some decent search functionality to Obsidian.
- Tasks – I’m going to try to replace the Evernote reminders functionality using Tasks. I know I won’t be able to do a lot of the stuff that Evernote can do (email reminders for instance), but I think I can get a workable system cobbled together.
- Broken Links – I’m using this to identify broken links in my imported notes. I’m seeing a lot of problems there, actually. I won’t get into the details here, but I’m going to have a lot of fix-up to do, I think.
Whew. So maybe that’s enough for this blog post. I intend to spend a bunch more time working on this tomorrow.
One thing I want to do this time is to make a relatively quick decision to either switch over or not, and to go all-in on Obsidian if I do. I don’t want to dither on it, and wind up having to renew my Evernote subscription, then spending a lot of time flipping back and forth between the two systems. (I’m kind of doing that with Raindrop.io and Pinboard right now, and it’s not optimal.) Sink or swim!