NeverNote – an open-source clone for interacting with EverNote

When I was still using Windows Vista as my primary work OS, the OneNote program in MS Office 2007 became my primary notebook. Though I signed up for an EverNote account, I stopped using it because OneNote provided everything I needed in a notebook and I can work on it offline. Back then, I never fancied keeping my notes online for fear of security and privacy concerns.

Now that I’ve switched back to Ubuntu Linux, it meant losing OneNote and access to all my notes in it. However, it also presented the opportunity to work with EverNote again using a desktop client because I’m already familiar with it and it would be a waste to let the free account idle away.

Thinking there was a Linux version of the EverNote client, I headed on to their website but was disappointed. The client only had official versions for Windows and Mac. The alternative was to run the EverNote client using WINE, but that too was a bad idea because apparently, version 3.5.x won’t run under it. All was not lost however, because there is already a working open-source clone of the EverNote client; the aptly named NeverNote.

What’s more convenient is that NeverNote already has a neat deb package that one can simply download and install with just a few clicks. In fact, this post was written in NeverNote just to reacquaint myself with it. The UI is smooth, neat and clean. Much better than the EverNote web app.

All I have to do now is to go back to my Vista partition and export all my notes out of OneNote and import them later to NeverNote. And now that I’m on a dual-boot setup, switching between Vista and Ubuntu is a lot smoother because my notes are now synchronized thanks to EverNote.

Tagged as: NeverNote, Ubuntu Linux