What if you can’t use Evernote?
I’ve been an Evernote customer for years. What’s not to love? I can take notes anywhere, slurp in web pages, add handwritten notes — it even makes your handwriting searchable. But Evernote is not practical for everyone. Many workplace IT departments don’t let employees use Evernote for security reasons, for example.
If you need an alternative to Evernote, there is a Markdown-based open-source note taking app called Joplin that is interesting. I used it for a while, but I didn’t like the fact that it gave all the Markdown files hash keys as names; I wanted a tool that would give me straightforward control over my files in case I want to do something else with them. I also had a sync problem or two and lost some data — which can happen, I suppose, with any such tool. Joplin does have a couple killer features, though: for one, you can encrypt your notes; for another, you can use whichever Markdown editor you wish.
Since I switched away from Joplin, I have been taking notes with a Markdown editor called Typora. It lets you work with Markdown source directly but also has a very friendly WYSIWYG mode. It is very customizable, giving you a lot of control over how it handles Markdown, what it does with images, and when it automatically saves your documents. Like many text editors, it includes a left-nav view of files and folders so you can navigate quickly between documents.
You can create new files and folders directly from the left nav, which makes it easy to build a structure similar to the notes, notebooks, and notebook stacks in Evernote. Of course, unlike Evernote, you can create as many levels of depth as you like. It’s just files, after all. The distinction between notes and other kinds of documents can become inconsequential, since Markdown gives you a lot of freedom to create documentation sets, wikis, slide presentations, PDFs, and other documents.
The way Typora handles images is almost magical. You can select a section of an image in your favorite photo editor, copy, and paste into Typora. Not only does Typora put the image into the document, it automatically creates a local image file containing just the part you selected. Grabbing and inserting the screenshots for this article, for example, was incredibly easy.
When you pair Typora with cloud-based storage like Dropbox, you have all the ingredients for a note-taking app like Evernote. Dropbox, in particular, provides version history in case something goes wrong. And Typora lets you organize and name the files any way you like, in case you want to use them for something else.
You will by now have guessed that I wrote the first draft of this article using Typora.
One caveat: Typora is currently desktop-only, so for the time being you’ll need an alternative editor for mobile note-taking. I have experimented a bit with iA Writer, which syncs very nicely with Dropbox. It’s less WYSIWYG than Typora but still has an elegant look and feel.
Also remember that on your mobile device you might want to select Make available offline for your notes folder in Dropbox.
Setting up Typora to take notes
Installing and using Typora is pretty straightforward. Just use a folder in Dropbox or your preferred cloud storage provider to sync your documents across devices.
To fine-tune Typora as a note-taking application, you will want to set a few preferences.
Go to File > Preference. On the General tab:
- For On Launch, select Restore last closed folders. When you set up a folder to contain your notes, Typora will open it for you automatically. Of course, you can also open other files and folders.
- Check the Auto Save checkbox and make sure Save without asking… is checked. You won’t have to think about saving notes; they’ll just always be saved.
On the Image tab:
- Select Copy image to ./${filename}.assets. Typora will make a folder for each document’s images. This makes it easy to take the images along if you convert the document to a different format or send it to another location.
- Check all the boxes except for the auto escape one. This makes sure that local files and online images also get added to the
.assetsfolder. By the way, Typora saves copies of pasted images, too!
On the Markdown tab:
- It’s very useful to check the Highlight box so that you can highlight things in your notes.
- There are other interesting syntax features to explore, including diagrams.
Getting your old notes from Evernote
If you need to get your old notes from Evernote, you can use Joplin to grab them — with the caveat that the Markdown files will have non-human-readable names. It’s still better than manually copying and pasting each one individually.
You can export notebook by notebook from Evernote:
- Right click a notebook in the left nav and select Export notes.
2. Export the notebook as an ENEX file.
3. In Joplin, go to File > Import and import the notebook as Markdown.
4. You can then export the notebook as Markdown from Joplin into the folder where you have decided to store your notes.
What is a note, anyway?
If you can’t use Evernote, you lose features like handwriting recognition and automatic ingestion of web pages. With a Markdown-based tool like Typora, you can go beyond the concept of a note. Yes, you can still take notes, but you can also do real work and draft documents that can be converted very easily to other formats. You might find, as I have, that your notes and your drafts become a continuum of work, providing tremendous flexibility and shortening the distance between “idea” and “project.”
Update: If you want more information, I actually wrote a book that talks about this (and other Markdown stuff): Markdown Dreams: How to do things with Markdown and Git
