And back to Evernote

The title gives it away. I have moved my main effort back to Evernote. The number one reason was that Evernote was known to my spouse who collaborates and shares some of the content with me. Evernote supports several features: “normal editing” (at least for minor edits) rather than a change from visual to Markdown, better printouts, and less confusing behavior between desktop and iOS.

Additional reasons (from me) included

• better (but not perfect) tools for backup of Evernote exist (using evernote-backup)
• addition of several ways to embed links to other documents that are often more convenient than first getting the internal link to note
• Evernote embeds the page’s objects like images and pdfs which permits easier movement of notes around (less risk of losing something)
• Evernote scans PDFs and OCRs images
• Web Clipping

There are several things I miss, and I plan to keep Obsidian around at least to provide a shell to host ExcaliDraw and Mermaid.

Reflecting, I should have trialed a small Obsidian conversion before the complete migration. I did learn quite a bit about Obisidian, the PKM space, and even more about Evernote, so it was not all a waste of time.

Obsidian has a vibrant community and an exciting product. The core developers designed and built a great product with an impressive plugin architecture that has enabled the community to produce many plugins that move the product in various directions depending on which plugins an individual chooses. The community has impressively worked together to (mostly) keep the inoperability across the plugins.

Evernote has also been changing with a development rhythm that has released many new features, which, while substantially less than the Obsidian community releases, has provided hope for the continued evolution of the product. Everyone will watch the impact of the change of ownership expected to finalize early next year.

My short-term hopes for Evernote include the following:

• Support for Grammarly Desktop
• Resolution of the sync issues that plague some users
• Develop support for automation, perhaps by updating the Evernote Cloud API that services like Filterize use, providing some way to automate locally, or both.