[al_borland]

I oscillate between Apple Notes and a bunch of markdown files, which is a pretty painful thing to do.

I like how future proof a folder of markdown files is. But I like the design, simplicity, and deep features for capture and media support offered in Apple Notes.

The more a markdown app supports extra stuff, the more proprietary it starts to feel, as any app to read it will also need to support those things.

A while back I told myself I was going to stick to Apple Notes, as going back and forth to other things is painful, and doing it proactively means more pain, rather than maybe having some pain in 10 years of the app goes away. However, where I am again, in the middle of a largely manual migration back to Obsidian for my folder of markdown files. I used an export, but the formatting is so bad that I need to clean up every single note.

[thebytefairy]

The inability to export, as well as the lack of anything more than the bare basic formatting options (at least at the time a few years ago) pushed me off apple notes.

[prepend]

I’ve been able to export since early, early iPhone. They’re just txt files. Surprisingly, Apple notes have been the most durable as Apple has migrated them from every iPhone I’ve had for the past 15-20 years or whatever.

Basic formatting is a plus for me. Although now notes has really advanced formatting and even sketching.

[bob_theslob646]

Have you found a solution to mass export notes?

[simonw]

I built a tool for this a while back: https://github.com/dogsheep/apple-notes-to-sqlite

I just tried it and it still works:

  uvx apple-notes-to-sqlite /tmp/notes.db
  # in another terminal while that's running
  uvx datasette /tmp/notes.db

[al_borland]

I ended up using Exporter from the App Store. I didn't work great. I have an export, but there are a lot of issues with it. I'm finding it is often easier to copy the note and use the Rich Text to Markdown action in Shortcuts, then paste into Obsidian. If I spent more time with Shortcuts there is probably a way to automate this way a bit more.

[draebek]

I think https://github.com/threeplanetssoftware/apple_cloud_notes_pa... might do the trick. This is "user friendly" as long as you are a programmer or work in digital forensics. :D

[lostlogin]

There are plenty of tools for exporting, and I’ve tried to leave Notes several times and had no issue getting the notes out.

But trouble free sync between machines, the ability to ‘scan’ documents, adding basic maths support, the ease… it always sucks me back in.

I wish it kept the date of creation and edits readily available, and supported markdown. But it’s damn close to what I want.

Why can’t Apple Mail do search as well as notes?