Wednesday 8 January 2014

Nixnote and Everpad as Linux Evernote clients

One of the things that has always stopped me moving over to Linux full time has been the lack of a decent Evernote application, for these occasions when you are away from base but need to check up on a document.

I live inside of Evernote - it’s what I use to manage projects, file documents and the rest. And this means that there are occasions when the web client will simply not do.

I need the bells and whistles from a desktop client and the performance of a local copy of the database. While I’ve found accessing Evernote from the web client on my Chromebook usable, I do find I need to go and tidy things up from a desktop client.

For a long time I’ve used Nixnote on Ubuntu. And while I’ve had my differences with it over the years it’s now reasonably stable, but just a trifle slow. Certainly good enough for what I need for work.

However I recently came across a possible alternative - Everpad. Written in Python, installation looked to be straightforward, and certainly it did seem to work more or less out of the box. Except it didn’t.

scrrenshot of Everpad with crash

It bombed out during the synchronisation process. Which was kind of annoying. (Although to be fair, NixNote has done this to me in the past).

As a product I’d say it’s not quite there as a replacement for Nixnote. Also the interface is a little minimal - not necessarily a bad thing, but searching for notes (and I’ve around 5000 of them) is not implemented. It basically appears to provide no more than a local cache of the data - something for which there is a definite use case but it’s not my use case.

However, in spite of this I'd say it does have some uses - for example if Evernote was being used as a shared project notebook where the number of individual notes (and notebooks) within the database was not too great ...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I too use both Nixnote and Everpad on Ubuntu, as well as Evernote's own app on my Android devices. Basically, like you I need Evernote available to me at all times.

I must confess, however that, even though I am an Evernote subscriber, I've never really liked the service. It's just the best of a bad lot, and Nixnote, Everpad, and the Android app are exemplars of my love hate relationship with the service.

Like you, I find that notes I type in on their desktop client have to be "cleaned up" in Nixnote or whatever. In fact, I find that, unless the formatting is very simple, it's almost impossible to get a note to display the same on the desktop, the android app, and the two linux programs. IF you like Evernote's "Food" app, you're in even more trouble.

Where the linux clients themselves are concerned, I personally find Everpad to be so broken it's almost useless. It throws a bug report every time I log into my account -- and has for over a year! The bugs have never been fixed. If you go to Git, you'll find that nothing has been done on the project in at least 3 months, so it's either abandoned, or a very very low priority for the developer. Too, it's missing many of Evernote's features. It ignores shared folders, and it lacks many of the advanced formatting features available on the desktop and on Nixnote.

Nixnote, meanwhile, like you say, is slow. It can also be deceptive. I've actually lost data in Nixnote because I though it had synced with Evernote when it (apparently) had not. Still, because it's relatively stable, Nixnote is my "go to" for daily work on my desktop.

Anyway... That's just my two cents. You're probably due change. :P