After experimenting with both Obsidian and DEVONthink for a month (as discussed here), I’ve decided to stick with Evernote.
It isn’t perfect. I don’t like the bloat in the application, and I don’t use it as my to-do list or calendar. But it does a few things incredibly well:
- It handles a wide range of document types, and getting them in is effortless.
- I organize at two levels: a few folders (Inbox, Archive, Personal) plus tags, and Evernote handles this quite well.
- Every PDF and even the JPGs I’ve saved over the years are automatically OCR’d, so they turn up in search easily.
- Cross-device compatibility is built in and just works
Those strengths matter more to me than the architectural advantages that drew me to the alternatives (plus, avoiding the lock-in 1).
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The last time I tried to bulk move files out of Evernote using its export, it was messy. This time, Claude helped with several Python scripts that I ran via Terminal, and cleaned-up the exported files. ↩︎