I’m in the middle of a project. I’m looking at my notes in Evernote and if a note can be saved as plain old text, then I’m pulling it out of Evernote and dumping it into Notational Velocity. NV is awesome. Ignore its ugly icon — are the letters made out of Jell-O? — and start using it. It has the option to save your notes as plain text files in a file folder of your choice. That’s what I’m doing. No rich text. No formatted HTML. Just plain old .txt files saved to my hard drive like normal files. Not like normal files, they are normal files. If I want, I can open those files in pretty much any program since pretty much everything on the face of the planet can read plain text files. NV is also fast and lightweight and has useful keyboard shortcuts. It’s frictionless.
I’m getting sidetracked. This post isn’t supposed to be about how awesome Notational Velocity is. But it is awesome.
The Problem
Have you ever copied a nicely formatted text note from Evernote only to find that when you paste it someplace it loses all of its formatting? I mean, you even lose the hard line breaks! Carriage returns are lost and you end up with one very long paragraph. Ugh. I’ve certainly run into that problem a lot. It doesn’t happen with all of my text notes. And I have no idea what causes it or what would prevent it. If you do, please share. (This post might explain it) The good news is that, I have a way to copy from Evernote and keep the formatting
The Solution
Use TextMate.
Install the “Edit in TextMate” input manager.
Select the Evernote note’s text.
Invoke the Edit > Edit in TextMate command.
Voilà! The note should open in TextMate with tabs and returns intact. You can then copy from TextMate and paste it wherever you want. Simple as that.
I’m sure there are other similar ways to do this. Is there an Edit in BBEdit input manager? If so, I’d bet it would work as well.
As a final note, for some reason the really snazzy QuickCursor program from Hog Bay Software doesn’t work with Evernote. Maybe Evernote needs to be 64-bit for it to work with QuickCursor? I say that because the Edit in TextMate command doesn’t work in newfangled 64-bit apps in Snow Leopard.
A final, final note. I’m afraid that if I install an Evernote update, it’s going to cause this to stop working :-/
The End.
3 Comments
In the course of trying to implement your suggestion — I didn’t have TextMate installed and then I was going into the Services Preferences to turn on the “Edit in TextMate” Service — I discovered that Notational Velocity has it’s own service called “NV: New Note with Selection” which seems to grab these problematic sections of text just fine out of Evernote.
But thanks for putting me on the right track!
Wow. Just wow.
If this ends up working consistently, I’ll be ridiculously happy about it. I’ve tried all sorts of tips and tricks to get Evernote to paste properly. It’s the one MAJOR bug in the service I just can’t get over, and it totally kicks my writing ass. This may help me overcome the silliness of their text formatting. Thanks to Erik AND Fuzzy, since I’ll be using NV to format those notes (don’t want to pay for textmate, since I’m not a coder).
Cheers!
Thanks for this tip. I didn’t use Textmate (because I wasn’t up for spending cash just to copy/paste my Evernotes), but I downloaded Smultron (a free editor, similar to Textmate). If you copy/paste the Evernote into Smultron, you can copy/paste the text from there to wherever you want and it preserves the formatting (at least the line breaks, which was my major concern).