Sticking with Evernote

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 19:22:06 -0700

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).

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. ↩︎

EdTech on Intellectual Sprawl

Sticking with Evernote