A few months ago I decided to leave Evernote and move all my notes to a new home. Back then I was undecided between Bear and DevonThink but after just a few hours of working with both apps it was clear that Bear is my favorite.

In June I already wrote a short interim conclusion and a status update in my newsletter: I already moved about a few thousand notes from Evernote to Bear and added a lot of new ones to Bear directly. Meanwhile I talked to some friends about their setups and the two most mentioned apps are—as expected—Obsidian and Apple Notes.

At some point I got a bit lost in a silly little side project that basically was just transcribing a small architecture dictionary. Collecting and connecting bits of information and quotes is one type of working and learning that I really like with note taking apps.
Because the dictionary was mostly a self-contained collection and network of notes and because it is easy to export notes as Markdown from Bear, I gave Obsidian another shot. The Markdown syntax of Bear and Obsidian differs slightly and so I had to do a small round of refurbishment to that notes. In this process I came to the conclusion, that I really like the graph view of Obsidian—it is really helpful and I like to find and fill the missing notes and links—but I also realized that I still don’t like how Obsidian handles notes/files and that Obsidian still feels too technical to me. So, Obsidian won’t become my daily driver in the foreseeable future but from time to time I can export my Bear notes as Markdown files and load them into Obsidian and than explore my notes in the graph view. That’s enough for me for now.

For the actual moving process from Evernote to Bear I settled for a bit unconventional and more lengthly process: I export, import and re-format every single note, note for note, for all 10.000 notes.

I do this for a couple of reasons but the main reason is that I have the most control over the process this way and that I can cleanup a lot of mess: Throwing out old and unnecessary notes, tag all notes, and cleanup the mess of moving from a rich text editor to Markdown.
Another big reason is the performance of Evernote: Evernote is slow and also can only export 100 notes at a time currently. And because of that I have the fear of accidentally deleting notes.

So far I’m down to 8.700 notes in Evernote and already have 2.500+ notes in Bear. My goal is to move all my notes from Evernote before the next billing period starts.