MarkupServe – A DIY Evernote Alternative

I’ve gushed at length in the past about how much I love Evernote. I upgraded to Evernote Pro about half a year ago so that I could attach arbitrary file types to notes. After a while, though, a couple of things about my workflow with Evernote were starting to irk me.

First, I wasn’t even coming close to using Evernote Pro’s generous data cap. Second, I wasn’t sure that paying $5 a month so that I could attach a PDF to a note was worth it given how infrequently I was attaching PDFs to notes. Third, and maybe most critically, their WYSIWYG editor has always kind of bugged me; lists never really indent the right way, sometimes formatting leaks to the next paragraph in unpredictable ways, etc. It’s just really hard generally to get precision control over how your text looks in Evernote’s editor (at least on the Mac, I have no experience with the Windows editor). Its lack of Linux compatibility isn’t a problem for me anymore, but it might become a problem if I start working on Linux boxes again in the future.

I figured the “paying for space I don’t use” problem would be solved if I could find something that would sync with Dropbox. I have a couple GB of free space with them that is really underutilized and I would prefer using that space instead of paying for more underutilized space. For the “imprecise editing” problem, I decided that what I really wanted was the ability to write notes in a markup language like Markdown (which I also love and have gushed about here), do my writing in Emacs, and be able to view the notes in HTML easily.

I couldn’t find any pre-existing solution that I really liked, so I decided to roll my own.

Dropbox support wasn’t a problem; I just exported my notes from Evernote, used html2text to convert the exported notes into Markdown, and moved the folder containing the converted notes to my Dropbox folder, where it happily synchronized. Dropbox, you are awesome.

At first, I used Marked to render and view notes individually. Marked is a great app, but I wanted to be able to interact with rendered versions of my files more quickly. I had thought about writing up a read-only filesystem with FUSE that would do the rendering of Markdown to HTML transparently and just present a filesystem of HTML files, but that sounded like overkill even for me. I figured that writing up a simple web server with Bottle to display the rendered files would get me to a working solution much more quickly. After a couple hours of coding on Thanksgiving, I had MarkupServe working.

MarkupServe is pretty basic at this point. It’s given a directory tree containing markup files and presents that directory tree as a directory listing similar to the one httpd gives you if you don’t have an index page. It has simple keyword search (which just runs grep at the root of the directory tree and HTML-ifies the results) and renders notes to HTML on-the-fly when they’re clicked on. I made MarkupServe extensible enough that it should support more than just Markdown, in case others would find something like this useful but want to use other markup languages. It’s not the fastest or prettiest thing ever, but it works.

The last hurdle was making attaching files in Emacs comfortable. Evernote exports all attachments for a note note.html in a directory named note.resources, so I figured I’d stick to that convention. I made MarkupServe ignore directories that ended in .resources so that it wouldn’t clutter up the file listing. Then I wrote a couple little elisp functions that create a .resources directory for a note and “attach” a file by copying it into the appropriate .resources directory and inserting a Markdown-style link to the new copy. I’ve posted those functions in a GitHub gist if you’re interested in looking at those.

One big piece that this system is missing is a mobile app. Evernote’s iPhone app is terrific, and I’m going to miss it. At this point, my solution is to use Elements to edit notes and add photos taken with my phone’s camera to notes manually if the need arises. It’s sort of awkward, but I used the image attachment feature so infrequently in Evernote that I’m not really concerned about it. The system also lacks Evernote’s slick image OCR capability, but that was another feature I never really used (my handwriting’s pretty awful and the OCR could never really parse it well).

I’m sure I’ll tweak this setup considerably as I get more experience with it, but it was surprisingly quick to throw together and has proven really useful so far. Hopefully open-sourcing this stuff will help any other people who might have a similar itch to scratch.

Related posts:

1. Software I Use Daily: Evernote
2. The Joys of Markdown