ever2text: Migrating off of Evernote to Dropbox with Plain Text Files

tl;dr

ever2text converts Evernote exports of notebooks and files to pure text files, stored in Dropbox.

Why migrate off of Evernote?

Evernote recently announced they were limiting the free tier of accounts to only 2 devices, and also substantially increasing the pricing of all of their plans. You can read their announcement here.

I used Evernote on 5 devices, but I only used Evernote to take text notes. I didn’t use Evernote for images, PDFs, email support, or any of the other features included in the — now costlier — paid plans. I just use plain text notes.

I started working on a plan to move to a different platform for my notes. My goal was to get plain text files that I could use with any text editor, and on any device.

Migrating to Dropbox

I heavily use Dropbox, so Dropbox seemed like the best place to store all of my text notes. With Dropbox, I could access my notes on all of my devices and store them permanently in plain text files.

The Dropbox app for phones and tablets (both Android and IOS) also lets you create, search, and edit plain text files. This means I have no need for any additional apps on my phone and tablet devices for taking notes.

The problem with Evernote became: how do I export my all of my Evernote notes and notebooks to plain text files?

Exporting Evernote notes and notebooks to plain text files with ever2text

After some googling, I came across ever2simple which was created to export Evernote ENEX export files to SimpleNote format. It could also export to a directory, but it left me desiring more functionality, such as preserving the note’s title in the generated filename, and an option to export to pure text rather than a markdown formatted text file.

I decided to create a pure Evernote to text file converter: ever2text.

Ever2text converts Evernote ENEX exports to files while preserving the note title in the file name and the ability to choose either raw text or markdown for the formatting.

I did come across an issue with exporting Evernote notebooks. It appears you are unable to export all notebooks in to a single export file. I had a lot of notebooks I had created over the years, so I ended up having to export each Evernote notebook individually in to separate ENEX export files. You can export an evernote notebook by right-clicking on the notebook then clicking on “Export Notes”. Make sure to select the option to export as a file in ENEX format.

You can find ever2text in my github: https://github.com/nicholaskuechler/ever2text