Introduction

Evernote and 1Writer are two note taking apps. Evernote focuses more on giving the end user rich text and the ability to upload voice clips and images for OCR. 1Writer on the other hand is basically a markdown based plain text editor for iOS devices.

This package installs a script to help you migrate from Evernote into markdown files, keeping some metadata information for convenient use with 1Writer. The script will take an Evernote enex export and turn it into a directory of md files.

The html that is provided by Evernote is processed by the html2text library. This transforms the html into Markdown. The 1Writer application web UI supports previewing notes in Markdown, so this works out nicely.

Development Installation

Clone this repository with git:

$ git clone https://github...

Enter the code directory:

$ cd ever21writer

Install live preserving local changes to the code:

$ pip install -e .

Usage

Once it is installed, you will have a new executable available to you. Before you can run the conversion, you will need to export your notes. This can be done from the desktop client. You can select the notes you want to export, then Export Notes to Archive..., and select the enex format.

Once you have that, you can run the script on the file setting the --output to a directory and using 1writer as the parameter to --format:

$ ever2simple my_evernote.enex --output 1writer_dir --format 1writer

That will output each note in a *.md file named by creation date into the 1writer_dir directory (creating it if it doesn't exist).

All you need is to put this directory into your Dropbox or iCloud accont for synchornization, and to add this directory in your 1Writer app.

Metadata saved from Evernote

The following metadata is saved from Evernote to the header of the output *.md files:

• tags as a list of hashtags
• source URL of the note if any
• creation date of the note

This is how a note will look like in the application in preview mode.

As 1Writer makes use of hashtags you can search and browse notes using this information. Make sure that you have turned this feature on in 1Writer settings.

1Writer also supports autocompletion of hashtags.

Command Line Help

The help given by running ever21writer -h:

usage: ever21writer [-h] [-o OUTPUT] [-f {json,csv,dir,1writer}] enex-file

Convert Evernote.enex files to Markdown

positional arguments:
  enex-file             the path to the Evernote.enex file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                        the path to the output file or directory, leave black
                        to output to the terminal (stdout) (default: None)
  -f {json,csv,dir,1writer}, --format {json,csv,dir,1writer}
                        the output format, json, csv or a directory (default:
                        1writer)

Notes

• For using Evernote tags as hashtags, make sure you have your Evernote tags are named the way they will be valid as hashtags, because the script makes no conversion of your tag names. The rules are simple: no spaces, no special chars, don't start with or use only numbers. The script adds the preceding # to your tags. See this for more information
• You should turn on the support for hashtags in 1Writer app for using them.
• 1Writer looks for your whole note for hashtags when the feature is on so if your note body contains hashtag-like words they will show in the app as well.

Todo

• turn back to README.rst
• check for file existence before writing any new files
• download linked images
• alphabetical sort of hashtags