Can anybody help with migrating RemNote to obsidian?

Hi @Sawbones, it’s been 3 months now so I don’t remember everything but luckily I made a note in Obsidian :joy:

You start with a complete export of your RemNote Knowledge Base to markdown.
You tick the box where it says that you want your own files for all top level REMs.
You unzip the file and delete all folders (you only keep the top level REM exports as single files which are in the top folder). Then you open the whole folder in Sublime.

Now the big problem is that RemNote does not export valid markdown. It’s quite a mess. I had opened several issues about this but they don’t have priority of course. Every tool wants to keep it’s customers so they facilitate import and make the export hard or neglect it. (With the good exception of Obsidian of course).

You do not need any coding skills but you do need to know Regular Expressions (Regex) and how to activate them in the find + replace UI in Sublime. You can use the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + F to find and replace in all files in a folder in Sublime. I always tested my Regex in one file before I applied the Replace on all files.

Now you can start the cleaning up… for example:

  • Replace ^^ with ** (^^ is used by RemNote for highlighting)
  • there were tags where RemNote would generate a space between # and tag name
  • delete lines that only contain a hyphen: Replace ^-\s+$ with an empty string
  • Replace → ↔ and ↓ with an empty string (used for spaced repetition in RemNote)
  • Remove the “link_generated_on_download” links that RemNote generates for some reason.

When your markdown looks more or less okay (don’t try to make it look perfect at this step), import your files to Obsidian and use the “Note Refactor” Plugin and it’s Function “Extract Selection to New Note” to split the files up. This is the step that requires most thinking because you have to decide what belongs into its own file.

I also used the “Toggle Bullet List” function a lot so I made a shortcut for it. Every REM is a bullet point but in Obsidian it looks tidier without bullet points.

I still have some notes that look ugly because they are still like RemNote exported them but I do it only when I encounter the note again. If I never meet the note again, is it really important to have it pretty? :thinking:

I hope this helps… if you have any questions or problems just answer to this thread or write me a personal message!

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