Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathias | Hacker News Reader

evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)

View on HN

I migrated to Joplin some time ago. Evernote was great but you could see them slowly trying to build that 'walled garden".

I'd prefer flat MD files and a fairly decent GUI. Joplin has zero hold on me and this is a great thing.

Same, migrated to self-hosted Joplin recently.

I fired up EN at one point recently. Wanted to add a note in a certain category and it took me like 20 seconds to get to the point where I can type in the actual note text. It wasn't even connected to the internet and still the app was slow. 5-10 second pauses for something that should be done in a millisecond. Useless popups.

WTF were they thinking?

I mean, I know exactly what happened. Everyone who cared about having a good app has left the company by this point.

Anyways, I really like Joplin. Android app works fine. Desktop app works fine. It even has a TUI mode. Server side for self-hosting (webdav) was pretty straightforward to set up.

Has Joplin become any faster? I tried the switch a year or two ago. The export and import went somewhat smoothly, but Joplin was so incredibly slow to sync that I ended up going back to Evernote. I do have many years of notes in Evernote, but it just took forever, both in initial sync but also opening on phone even after the initial sync. Something in their algorithm was just very slow back then.

I wish the UI/UX for Obsidian was better. It takes just long enough to search for a note that I want to edit that I end up just putting quick stuff in Google Keep due to its ease of use.

Really? Search is instant for me on Obsidian, with about 4000 notes spanning 11 years. Maybe you had some kind of indexing issue?

The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am gone.

On ios this is now baked into Notes.app

I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty effective if Notes works for you.

Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are imported over from Evernote?](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it easy.

I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.

I’ve imported a bunch of PDFs and various image formats and it doesn’t seem to be scanning them. I’ll check back later in case it’s a feature it does in the background.

I think you have to scan directly from notes.

Nope, looks like it indexed over night!

Time for the giant migration!

On iPhone, Notes is excellent. In a browser on icloud.com it's terrible. I need it to work in a web browser because I do software development on Windows. Notes is not an option until the browser version works just as well as the mobile version. For now, I can use Notes for personal but not for work.

Amplenote has OCR for images and a pretty Evernote like interface.

I think there are different apps that do this. Devonthink does and imports Evernote however many say it’s a bulky app that does a lot. I don’t feel that way but I like Devonthink.

I had a great workflow going on with Evernote and my ScanSnap. I'd scan mail and paperwork right away, and it'd be full text searchable in Evernote. Maybe once a week or so I'd go through the latest uploads and tag them or put them in folders.

It took me a while to figure out an alternative for this because so many of the note tools I had seen were focused on just written notes and not the PDF file use case.

I tried self-hosting Paperless, but that seemed like a lot of work too. When we're talking about my document archive here it's a lot of important files and I don't want to be my own SRE just to save myself $100 or so a year.

The best I have now is I upgraded my scanner to a new Fujitsu that OCRs and pushes the files into Dropbox, and paid Dropbox plans have full text search.

I'm curious why you moves from ScanSnap (which I use) to a Fujitsu. Just time for an upgrade, or do you prefer some newer feature(s)?

I use my ScanSnap with OCR turned on and haven't had any problems, but I'm always looking for what will replace it when it finally died (still going strong at about 10 years or so, I think!).

I suppose to be precise, the new scanner is also a ScanSnap; the ScanSnap IX1600 (but ScanSnap is a Fujitsu brand name).

https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/peripheral...

I had been using the S1300M before that, which had held up since 2010 for me.

Silly me! I should have realized (or remembered) that it's a Fujitsu product. It's just the name "Fujitsu" isn't on the machine anywhere, so I tend to forget (just double-checked, and no name on the outside!)

Thanks for sharing the model numbers, too. I'll be sure to check out the newer models!

I migrated to Joplin (with a Docker container on my NAS as the server), the Windows app has "Import from an ENEX (Evernote Export)" and I haven't noticed anything missing. I've noticed the few encrypted notes I had being migrated as garble though.

I'm curious; what are the benefits of using syncthing over the git plugin, if any?

I understand if you already use syncthing for other stuff, but having the power of git for my notes is quite nice.

none, I just use it for other stuff too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com