yarle: Yet Another Rope Ladder from Evernote

A tool that converts enex note(s) into Markdown format in order to let you escape from Evernote universe with all your belongings.

Features:

• Works with enex files that contain single or multiple notes also.
• Works with notes that contain pictures too.
• Puts title, creation time, update time, tags, and latlong meta-information into md as metadata.
• Updates md files' access and modification timestamps according to the notes' update time.
• Organizes all attachments into a _resources subfolder (to keep the notes' folder as simple as possible).

Restrictions:

• Notes of Web Clips are not supported (yet).

Installation

• install Node.js. Please use Node 10.18.1 because of 3rd party dependencies rebuild problems.

• clone or download this repo

• npm i

• npm run build

Usage:

Those markdown notes that contains external resources such pictures or files, are stored in /<outputDir>/complexNotes subfolder, the simple plain-text ones go to /<outputDir>/simpleNotes folder.

Options:

• --enexSource=<your-enex-file> or the folder of your enex files , specifies the exported Evernote notebook(s)
• --outputDir=<relative_output_dir> , this is the main output dir in where the extracted markdown files are going to be created
• --include-metadata , if it's set, then every markdown file will be extended by metadata (tags, time of creation, time of last update, lat-lon coordinates)
• --zettelkasten , puts Zettelkasten Id (based on time of creation) at the beginning of the file name
• --plaintext-notes-only , skips those notes, which has attachment, or picture in it.
• --skip-latlng, does not include location into metadata section
• --skip-creation-time, does not include creation time into metadata section
• --skip-update-time, does not include update time into metadata section
• --skip-tags , does not include tags into metadata section

Using cmd:

  npm run start -- --enexSource=GeneralNotes.enex --outputDir=./out --include-metadata --zettelkasten --plaintext-notes-only

In program:

 const options: YarleOptions = {
        enexFile: 'enexFile',
        outputDir: 'outputDir',
        isZettelkastenNeeded: true,
        isMetadataNeeded: false ,
    };
 yarle.dropTheRope(options);

Release notes

Version 2.7.0

• Huge performance improvement, works with enex files that contain 2k+ notes
• Bugfix: generates OS-friendly file and folder names

Version 2.6.6

• Logging improved
• Bug around tag extraction fixed

Version 2.6.5

• Bugfix: handling internal resource files (with no filenames) correctly

Version 2.6.4

• Small bugfixes

Version 2.6.1

• Attached images are converted as standard Markdown images instead of as wikistyle-links.

Version 2.6.0

• Highlights supported
• Typescript building bugfix

Version 2.5.0

• Generating links in wiki-style links is supported by default, its command line argument is removed.
• Evernote's internal links among the notes are supported in the case if the note title and its created reference is the same text.

Version 2.4.1

As a hotfix notes within resources (e.g. web clips) are skipped to be referenced from the generated Markdown files.

Version 2.4.0

• Folders can be added as input, in this case all the enex files within this folder will be transformed
• Zettelkasten IDs are unique, if multiple notes has been created in the same minute, then they will be indexed by numbers starting from 1 (except the first, it has no index)

Version 2.3.2

• Bugfix: untitled notes' title is removed from the generated filename if Zettelkasten is required.
• Bugfix: tags are moved to the top and # added as prefix for each if it's missing.

Version 2.3.0

• Skipping parts of metadata in configurable via options

Version 2.2.0

• Links are generated in wiki-style links ([[link]]) if --wikistyle-media-links option is set
• Bugfix: Notes with single resources are exported fine
• Codebase refactored

Version 2.1.1

• Conversion of tables, lists, numbered lists and checkboxes are supported.

Version 2.0.4

• plaintext-notes-only command line argument added, that enables you to skip converting notes with any resources, pictures, pdf, etc.

Version 2.0.1:

• The whole tool is reimplemented in Typescript
• ZettelKasten ID is an option for filename generation (format is |(pipe) <title>.md or .md if there is no title)

version 1.2.0, fixes and improvements:

• File name conventions changed (whitespaces are generated instead of underscores)
• Metadata is moved at the end of the text and transformed as code snippet (looks better in Ulysses)
• Fix on HTML to MD conversion (turndown package is configured better to do not add multiple newline characters )