Evernote make all the right noises about securing your data against attackers and hackers and that’s good news but as a “tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist” I would rather just keep all my private data in my own private network. However, the point still stands that if you are putting data in someone else’s “black box” then you either have to take their promises at face value or just assume that they can see everything you are sending.

Call me what you will: conspiracy theorist, foil hat wearer – I can take it, I was chubby, spotty and wore thick glasses at high school, I can take it. Perhaps one of the biggest drawbacks of Evernote (and OneNote) is that they both require you to trust that they are not doing naughty things with your data and I don’t. The best combo I’ve found so far has been Atom + Pandoc Markdown Plugin + Pandoc. Rendering my markdown is a pain – the Atom plugins for this are not perfect and due to different flavours of markdown and rendering engines, I can render the notes in one tool and find that they render completely different in another.

That one plugin, as good as it is, doesn’t solve all my other gripes though. There is a really good atom plugin for this that allows you to “paste” images in your clipboard buffer into your notes and will automatically save it to disk and generate a link. My assets tend to get very fragmented in this case too because I might use the same image in multiple notes and end up storing multiple copies of it in different “assets” folders. Inserting images into markdown notes is a pain because I need to download the image, place it in a folder relatively near to my content and add an image markup section to my code.Searching for notes in markdown requires me to read the grep man pages for the umpteenth time because I’ve forgotten which flag to set to turn on or off regex in the particular flavour I need. Searching for notes in evernote or dokuwiki is as easy as typing into a search box and hitting enter.

Evernote competitors 2017