Migrate from Evernote
Mike Mccallister moves your Evernote files to Joplin, stores them on your own cloud, and shows off some other neat tricks, which is nice.
Mike Mccallister moves your Evernote files to Joplin, stores them on your own cloud, and shows off some other neat tricks, which is nice.
There have been a lot of note-taking apps for Linux over the years, most notably Basket for KDE and Tomboy for Gnome. Perhaps you’ve used a personal wiki to collect thoughts and webpages to clear your mind and be more productive.
Chances are that you’ve also used the Evernote app to “Remember everything”. This proprietary app runs on Windows, Mac, and has mobile apps for IOS and Android. Until recently, it also ran on Linux via Wine, but corporate priorities changed. That left the field open for a new open source contender. Enter Joplin.
Named after the 20th-century composer Scott Joplin, the king of ragtime music, this Javascript app from Laurent Cozic runs on every platform you can think of (if you count Linux on mainframe). Joplin is a very handy modern replacement to your existing notetaker. Nick Peers introduced Joplin (and Standard
Notes) in LXF254. In this article, I’ll go a little deeper to show you how Joplin can take good care of your ideas, wherever you may get them.
Ragtime?
Download Joplin at https://joplinapp.org. Scroll down to the Installation section, and you’ll see the desktop apps. Click the Get It On Linux button to download an Appimage, or use the script provided: wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ laurent22/joplin/master/joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash
Save the script to a file, as you can run it to update the app to a newer version. You can also install a portable app to store and run from a thumb drive, which is handy if you switch machines often. On first launch, a Welcome notebook offers a quick tutorial for Joplin.
Updating Joplin
Joplin updates frequently with bug fixes and new features. You can get on the project mailing list to be notified when a new release is ready to download. You can also go to Help > Check For Updates in the app to get the latest Appimage from Github. Download the new Appimage and make it executable. The updated version then takes over, and your notes and settings are all restored.
Go to Tools > General Options and scroll down to Application to have the application check for updates on startup. Check the Automatically Update The Application option to be notified when there’s something new. Look for Get Pre-releases when checking for updates if you want to test beta releases. When a new release comes out, the notification window will take you to the download site for the new Appimage.
Import old notes
The next step is bringing your Evernotes into Joplin.
Evernote uses an ENEX extension for its export file. To create this file, go to your All Notes notebook and select all. Go to File > Export. If you have a decade’s worth of notes, be patient! Tags make it through the exportimport process, but you have to create new notebooks in Joplin. If you really like your notebook collections, export each notebook separately, as Evernote will name the export file with the notebook name.
Once the ENEX file is complete, open Joplin. Go to File > Import > ENEX file. Select the file to import, and after a while it will appear in Joplin.
One caution: while you may be planning to switch permanently away from Evernote, you may choose to keep your app on hand. Joplin does a good job of importing all material, but if you’ve got a 10-year-old web clipping with a graphic included, the graphic may be sitting on an Evernote server, but the export file only includes the graphic’s URL at the time it was saved, or perhaps an internal Evernote reference point. If the
graphic is important to you and isn’t at the original URL anymore, consider searching https://archive.org to find the page and its graphic.
The web clipper
Let’s get the web clippers going. You may use Evernote as a personal web archive to store interesting stories and reference material. You’ll be happy to know that Joplin has web clipper add-ons for both Firefox and
Chromium. They work much like Evernote’s web clipper.
Go to Tools > Options to open Joplin’s settings dialog. There are many things you can do (see Goodies
in the Config Panel below), but for now click the web clipper tab to activate this tool. This page lets you start the web clipper service on the desktop. The browser extensions can now find the desktop app. This tab also gives you handy links to install the web clipper through your favourite browser (provided it’s compatible with the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons).
When you see something during your web travels that’s worth saving, click the Joplin icon. Your webclipping choices include:
Simplified Page: If you just want to save the article without the ads and other material on the page, choose this. Joplin will save the text and create a link to each graphic in the note.
Complete Page: Choose this to get any sidebars and other material outside of the main article. Yes, you’ll get the ads too.
Selection: If you just want a portion of the article/page (like that great quote you want to create a meme of), select the portion before you tap/click the clipper.
Screenshot: Maybe you don’t want to interact with text but just got inspiration for your own website. Just take a screenshot, and the page will become a graphic.
URL: Do you simply want to find this page later? Clip the URL and it’s done!
Once you click the clipping type, the preview window will display what it will do with the page. You have to assign the clipping to an existing notebook. Bear in mind that you cannot create a new notebook with the
web clipper. Add tags you may find useful, especially if you want to search for the clipping later.
At the bottom of the web clipper window, you’ll see the service status. If you have the clipper service installed, the port number should be listed there. As a decentralised app, the web clipper only works on a desktop machine that has the app installed. Unfortunately there’s no mobile web clipper.
Click Confirm to save your selection to Joplin. Sometimes it will take a little while to arrive on your system, but you can easily move on to your next web task without waiting for the clipping to finish copying to your desktop.
On the move
The problem with ideas is that they can happen anywhere. You aren’t always in front of your laptop when inspiration strikes. Cozic and his team know this, so they made Joplin for IOS and Android. You can install them from the Apple App Store, Google Play, or visit https:// joplinapp.org to find download links.
The mobile apps conform to the standard processes of their mobile operating system. The inline help is also quite good. More importantly, it doesn’t matter where you create and edit your notes. When you connect each application to your cloud server of choice, everything will synchronise.
Cross devices
The ideal solution is to have a single storage spot for all your notes, so that no matter when a new idea strikes you, it winds up in that same spot. Proprietary apps like
Evernote buy a lot of servers to store its users’ notes, and charge those users a monthly or annual fee to