Hacker News Reader

Comment by candyman | Hacker News Reader

I love tools and have tried so many over the past year including these new "hot" ones like Roam and Notion. After all that I have come full circle and reinvested in making Evernote work better for me. It has limitations but has always had a big edge in the capture and storage part of the process. I'm still working on how best to author/render content from my work to the outside world but at least with Evernote I can get things in one place and then add notes, content, analysis where I can find it. I agree with some here that it's still hard to beat pen and paper for really creative stuff - it's so free.

View on HN

What I've discovered is that the real breakthroughs needed in these tools aren't in the "taking" of notes but in the "retrieval" of notes/ideas.

Yes. This is how the reMarkable has changed my life. The way I am now able to access my own writings, reflections, etc is a completely different paradigm.

I’ve been seeking a drop-in replacement for EN. These days I use ‘Evernote Legacy’ because the new Evernote is horrible.

I’ll use it until they kill it. I’ve seen a few good “almost there” replacements, but each have their own quirks.

I've been using Simple Note: https://simplenote.com/

It's good enough for me. I don't think I've ever used Evernote's advanced features because I'm too lazy to organize things into books. It seems like they have an Evernote Import feature?

Same. I just canceled my EN subscription; it refreshed right before New EN, and I gave them until renewal to get that working. It’s still garbage and I have completely lost the habit of using it because I can’t revert to the old iOS app and have to use the slow, awkward new one.

I am currently evaluating Joplin as a maybe. It is webshit in an Electron wrapper but I think the only note app that isn’t webshit that I can use to collaborate with my Windows/Android using husband is Microsoft’s; it did a shit job of keeping my formatting last time I tried it, plus I hate the way it wants every note to be a text box floating in an infinite canvas.

I still have to actually check out Joplin’s collaboration, that only seems to work if you’re paying for their sync service instead of using something else.

Joplin also has a plug-in to do what EN couldn’t do in an entire decade: give you a nice diff UI for dealing with conflicting changes.

(My requirements: cross platform collaboration, decent EN import, not be webshit, deal gracefully with notes with PDFs and images in them.)

My experience is that the new Evernote Desktop is now working fine, and I really like and use a lot the Tasks feature.

Evernote for Android has gone from useless to barely usable, on my Xiaomi A3 phone. I guess it will keep improving.

The transition to the new Evernote has been a pain, but things are improving faster than I expected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com