From: [email protected]
Date: 2018-04-23
Subject: Evernote Extraction Part II - Vimwiki Inception

Part 2 of my migration from Evernote to Vimwiki.

Installing vimwiki

I don't use a package or plugin manager for vim and I don't want to
install one now.  At the recommendation of the vimwiki docs, I  un-
zipped  vimwiki  into .vim/pack/ and stared vim.  Nothing happened.
It turns out my version of vim, 7.4.576, is just below what's need-
ed  for this installation method to work.  According to the docs, I
should be able to install vimwiki by unzipping the archive into the
vim/bundle/ folder.  That didn't do the trick, either.

After  reading  How to Install Vim Plugins Without a Plugin Manager
[1] I add

    set runtimepath^=~/.vim/bundle/vimwiki

to my vimrc.  I start vim, type `<leader>ww`, and it asks me  if  I
want to create my vimwiki directory.  Success!

The  docs  say  that I should "run `:helptags`" after unzipping the
archive under .vim/bundle/ and then type `:help vimwiki` to  verify
that  vimwiki  is  installed.   There's a problem with this because
`:helptags` requires an argument.  I tried giving helptags a number
of  arguments, including "ALL" and ".vim" but `:help vimwiki` never
worked.

Extracting Notes

My main notebook has about 400 notes.  I would really like  to  re-
tain the creation date and tags for each of my notes.  This metada-
ta helps me contextualize and evaluate the content.   I  looked  at
the  installed  source  for  ever2simple  and I don't think I'll be
hacking on that.  Back to jq!

Starting with

    jq '.[] | .tags,.createdate,.content' dbucklin.json | less -S

The -S option on less chops long lines, making it easier  to  grasp
the linewise format of the output.  The tags come back in an array.
It's often empty.  I need to join the array into a string.

    jq '.[] | (.tags|join(", ")),.createdate,.content' dbucklin.json | less -S

That looks better.  I'm going to pass this output to awk so that it
can  split  it into separate files, one for each note.  I need a to
insert a symbol that will signify the end of a note.

    jq '.[] | .createdate,(.tags|join(", ")),.content,"%%"' dbucklin.json | less

As before, the content contains lots of encoded newlines and  every
line  has quotes around it.  Also, quotes within values are escaped
and there are random occurrences of a double-backslash.  I want  to
clean all of that out.  I'll use sed to do most of the cleanup.

    sed -e 's/^"//;s/"$//;s/\"/"/g;s/\\\\//g;s/\\n/\n/g'

I  want to split each note into its own file.  I'll pipe the output
from jq through sed and into an awk script to split the output.

    #!/usr/bin/awk -f
    # makenotes
    BEGIN {fcount=1}
    $0 == "%%" {fcount++}
    $0 != "%%" {
      print $0 >> "notes/" fcount ".txt";
    }

Looking good!  All together, now.

    jq '.[] | .createdate,(.tags|join(", ")),.content,"%%"' dbucklin.json | sed -e 's/^"//;s/"$//;s/\"/"/g;s/\\\\//g;s/\\n/\n/g' | awk -f makenotes

This puts each of my notes, with creation dates and tags, into  its
own  file  in the notes/ subfolder off my working directory.  Done!
Right?

Migrating Notes to vimwiki

I extracted my notes and attachments from the XML files I  exported
from  Evernote.   I've spent some time looking over everything, and
I've realized that the overwhelming majority of  the  content  just
isn't relevant to my life today.  There are recipes, grocery lists,
packing lists, and call notes -- from  seven  years  ago.   At  one
point,  I  was forwarding email receipts and shipping confirmations
to Evernote.  Why?  Much of this content  doesn't  have  a  future.
I'm  still  keeping a zipped archive of my enex files because I'm a
hoarder.

The real challenge is that I used Evernote as an unstructured dump-
ing ground for my notes.  The only organizational methods I used in
Evernote were the separate notebooks and, in my  main  notebook,  I
used tags to categorize notes -- most of the time.  I relied on Ev-
ernote's search to find information that was relevant  in  the  mo-
ment.   This  allowed me to side-step the growing volume of irrele-
vant information I was gathering.  A wiki, on the other  hand,  de-
mands structure.

I'll  have to review my notes and pick out themes that will help me
translate them into vimwiki.  For example, I have a number of indi-
vidual notes that just contain links to bike routes I've created in
gmap-pedometer or Google  Maps.   Most  of  them  are  tagged  with
"routes".   I  create a Bike Routes page in vimwiki and populate it
with

    :r !grep -l routes notes/* | xargs cat -s

This dumps the contents of every note containing the word  "routes"
into  this  page.   There's a little bit of editing to do, but it's
manageable.

I went through my remaining notes, one by one.  Most of them I left
behind.   When  I  found  a note that I wanted to keep, I created a
node for it in vimwiki and used `:r filename` to read that file in-
to the page.

As  I  look for more things to put into vimwiki, I recognize that I
have reverted back to storing my notes in  textfiles  organized  in
folders  rather  than use Evernote.  I think part of this is that I
want to edit using Vim.  That's what was nice  about  Geeknote.   I
was  also  avoiding  the cognitive overload that comes with opening
the Evernote client.  This vimwiki solution isn't  as  feature-rich
as Evernote, but I think it's feature-appropriate.

References

1. https://howchoo.com/g/ztmyntqzntm/how-to-install-vim-plugins-without-a-plugin-manager

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