EverOrg

Objective

Migrate all content from Evernote to Org mode

Due to the limited mobile support of Org mode, I’ve constantly switched between Org mode and a Evernote/Remember the Milk combination. As this changes now due to the initiative of MobileOrg v2, it’s time to migrate my stuff fully over to Org mode.

One of the reasons of using Evernote was the possibility to export all of it’s content into XML. EverOrg uses these Evernote backup-files to generate Org mode files.

Features

EverOrg reads an ENEX document and converts it’s markup to Org mode syntax. This could be done by using tools like pandoc. But then all the attachments like images, voice-memos, scanned documents and so on would be missing from within org mode.

EverOrg reads in the file which is given as a parameter and creates one or many Org files with in the new location. In this location also an directory with the same name is created where all the attachments are stored.

Input file: common.enex
Output file:
  - merge=true: common/common.org 
  - merge=false: common/*.org and common/common-attachments

Every stored attachment is referenced from within the Org document, either as an image which could be viewed inline or as an link so that the attachment could be opened easily within an external application.

If the switch -regardDiv is set to true EverOrg inserts a newline for every <div> block. Within tables <div> blocks are ignored at any time.

Usage

Export notebooks from Evernote to ENEX files, and then convert them to org-mode with this command:

everorg --input=notebook.enex --merge=false

The output is one or many .org files and a folder with attachments.

If you have many enex files in one folder, you can run easily in one script:

#!/bin/bash
FILES=$HOME/evernote/*.enex

for f in $FILES ; do
  ./EverOrg --input=$f --merge=false
done

Platform

The first version of EverOrg was developed in Swift on MacOS. The aim is that EverOrg is platform independent so that Windows users would have had at least the option to use it in a VM under Linux. Unfortunately Swift under Linux does not work straightforward. I was not able to compile EverOrg on Linux without strange errors. Due to that I decided to write it again using Go which has extraordinary cross-compile possibilities.

Binary files are available in Releases.

Status

Known Issues

• Web clips are not nicely displayed in Org
  • tables have still some linebreaks in table cells
• Illegal characters in tags (for Org) are not filtered
• Reminders are not processed (Those are still in RTM for me)
• Note content is not formatted for the use within Org mode. fill-paragraph (M-q) should do the job whilst accessing the note in Org mode.

Discussion

Properties

I do not know if there are already any existing keywords used for the properties I’ve been using for EverOrg. But if there are, those could be easily adopted.

License

EverOrg is distributed under the GNU Public License version 3. See License.md for more info

Credits

Unicorn picture courtesy of Lohrelei