#1

I really want to get off of Evernote but it keeps pulling me back in. I just went through the process of exporting all of my Evernote notebooks and importing them into Obsidian using YARLE).

I think Obsidian is very close and has a lot of advantages over Evernote, but there are still a few things that I find a bit onerous. I’m curious if anyone has any helpful workaround for these:

  1. Importing / clipping webpages or content from webpages
  2. Bolding and highlighting, especially in preview mode, with a keyboard shortcut (in the absence of a formatting toolbar)
  3. Easy workflows to get content from email (mail.app) into Obsidian

Any ideas? I haven’t been staying as close to the Obsidian community as I used to so I might have missed some new features.

Formatting toolbar built-in to Obsidian Desktop NOT as a Plug-in request, plus Obsidian Vault URL Hotkey or CMD work-a-round
#2
  1. I use “MarkDownload - Markdown Web Clipper” extension on Firefox. It’s not perfect but works well for me.
#4

  1. I actually use DEVONthink to store stuff from the web. It stores “other people’s thoughts” and then I use Obsidian to store my own thoughts. You could do this with KeepIt, or some other note tool that’s not DEVONthink clearly. May not be what you want, but my workflow may also inspire new thinking for you?

  2. The new Live View mode will likely solve this problem for you. It’s available to Insiders now.

  3. Same as the first item, I’d put that stuff in DEVONthink and only my own thoughts go in Obsidian.

#5

Thanks. I hadn’t updated the app in a bit so I hadn’t played with Live View yet–that looks like its ill work.

I think it sounds like I’m using Evernote today the way you are using DEVONthink. I was planning to create a separate Obisdian vault for what you describe as “other people’s thoughts”–highlights and some other documents or resources that I come across. The workflow is, I think, the same; my Kindle and Instapaper highlights go there along with other stuff that I have organized using the PARA structure.

I have been using Obsidian for my own thoughts and writing alongside this, but I’ve been wanting to get away from Evernote for a while and was hoping I could get most of the way there with Obsidian. The only thing that keeps me clinging to EN at this point is how easy capture is with it, and I have yet to find anything that’s quite as good as it for that. DEVONthink might be something to look at.

#6

I think capture in DEVONthink is stronger, but it is a bit more to fiddle with. You have lots of options when you capture but you have to change them around if you want to capture Markdown or a Web Archive or if you want it to strip out ads on a page.

I wrote a fairly long post (and video) about all the capture options for DEVONthink To Go a while back.

https://curtismchale.ca/2019/06/24/capturing-content-in-devonthink-to-go/

These map with the options on the desktop version as well, or it even has a few more.