Show HN: owo – OneNote to Plain Text | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: owo – OneNote to Plain Text

github.com

83 pointsantonlopezr34 comments

Hey kind stranger. Hope you find it useful.

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated :)

Enjoy your day!

Due to anecdotal experience, I will never go back to anything that has their format without the ability to let my notes be or be exported. I was an early Evernote[1] user and Prime/Pro subscribe for quite many years. We even used it for team collaboration on documents. Unfortunately, I had to leave it like everyone else and have gone all plain-text (sometimes, spiced with MarkDown here and there when needed). Now, any tool should be a wrapper on top and should leave no damaging changes -- the best I found so far being Obsidian[2].

I tested/tried OneNote long back and doing a quick search says you can export[3] the whole at one go to a Word format. This should, then work macOS -- export to Word Format and Pandoc.

1. https://evernote.com

2. https://obsidian.md

3. https://www.thewindowsclub.com/export-onenote-files-differen...

> Unfortunately, I had to leave it like everyone else

I use Evernote, and I guess I'm not the only one, because I'm sure my monthly subscription doesn't pay all the bills of the company. They even ship new features now, like Tasks. It would be curious if I were the only user. ;-)

Obsidian app seems just an Electron app though. It uses MD (as the domain name suggests), and if you do syncing yourself its free.

It isn't "free" for a good chunk of folks. Read the EULA: https://obsidian.md/eula

agree. moved to obsidian, it is nice and flexible (with a self-cooked bash cli accessing md files from terminal...)

Kind Author, this is marvelous and keep up the good work. OneNote manages to terribly botch just about every attempt to export note books in an acceptable format (as in not ugly).

Thanks, all my college notes are in onenote and I would love to get them out of there. Ill give it a shot.

Could this be added to Pandoc (perhaps export only)?

This project caught my eye because of its name and the infamous "OwO what's this?" copypasta.

I'm not a OneNote user, so I don't have any other immediate feedback to offer, but thanks for contributing to the open source community.

This is great to help get out of OneBloat. I feel bad for the people that seriously committed to it. Hopefully it'll be a good lesson about why the markdown approach is so much smoother than a proprietary format.

An unlimited canvas where you can put all sorts of data types such as text, formatted text, handwritten notes, pictures, pdf printouts, tables, lists, links, videos; synced on all of your devices; accessible anywhere, with real-time collaboration for multiple users... truly terrible stuff

Terrible is the following: Syncing performance. It either doesn't or far too late. Although the blank canvas is great, if you want to just add something onto my notes i have to select a specific space instead of just appending at the end.

But yes all that supported stuff is great, but man those things at the top. Dealbreakers.

"Unlimited" in this sense sounds to me like "Untyped", you can invoke it with unlimited datatypes!

That might be nice for read-only notes, but for notes that I'm going to read sometime down the line, I need structure. Org-mode is great that it enables both structure and free form. And once one gets in the habit of enforcing on himself structure, his notes become clearer to himself months or years down the line when he rereads them.

Structure is where structure was made. You can easily make a mess in org-mode/markdown too. Structure does not come from the tool in that space.

Very true. I have been helping others with the philosophy of managing, linking, and thinking in their own ways instead of always hoping that a tool being the solution. Once you are clear with the general idea of how things are, any appropriate tool should be enough or good enough that you are not lost when the tool is taken away.

For instance, I have been sent many a Mindmaps for the sake of the name exported from tools but just branches of terms which would have been better off as a list.

Recently, I have been teaching my daughter the idea and the art of taking notes. She is allowed to use any tools she like to try out. I have so far told her about Obsidian, VSCode, and Sublime Text. Of course, Apple Notes is there too.

How old is she? I've been considering teaching my 15 year old org-mode.

She is 13.

Sideline observer of Org-Mode, and like with TaskWarrior, they're amazing to use on a computer, but whilst there's been some development in the space of using it on phones, has anybody nailed it yet? Been a while since I last looked.

My big gripe is that most of my task management and notes are done via my phone or tablet like a clipboard, and management of plaintext on these kinds of devices tends to suck versus the UX of say Todoist with widgets to display tasks on a launcher. But the likes of Todoist are appalling feature-wise.

What I really want is the concept of preceding and blocked tasks, and to only be able to surface currently actionable tasks. AFAIK, TaskWarrior can do this, and IIRC, similar can be done with Org-Mode with TODO dependencies.

https://beorg.app

Unfortunately, I'm an Android user, but this does look fantastic.

http://www.orgzly.com/

This is actually really neat! I used to use OneNote all the time but I like Obsidian more.

That name also makes me laugh haha

this is a nice project! wonder why you started with powershell, not something natively supported on mac and windows...

just saw there is a powershell package on homebrew, not sure how good it is on mac... :-)

PowerShell 7 is cross-platform: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/whats-...

Does anyone know if there's a tool like this that works on macos?

Thanks very much. Will test it out.

owo -- the naming is a bit unfortunate!

(if you dont know, owo is a nsfw term)

It isn't though? It's just another emoticon, like : ) or :D

owo is an expression of suprise. o's represent the eyes, w the nose. Nothing nsfw/sexual about it at all.

Look it up. In the context of sex work, it apparently refers to unsafe oral sex.

How many uses of OwO are in the context of sex work? 0.001%?

No, it's a Furry emote.

OwO is a :3 face, with O_O eyes.

uwu or UwU denotes (AFAIK) the exterior of the human female reproductive system. I didn't know about owo or OwO. Looks like an owl to me. On second thought, so does uwu or UwU.

Wait what??? uwu is just a cutesy face. It, as well as owo, is mostly associated with furries (and apparently the anime community too).

Not much cute about it in the fonts I use. As for the anime community, they're weird and far out, as can be seen with their strange obsessions such as certain CP.

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