I find the simplicity of Notes to be a big win. I don’t need to be able to publish a blog from it—I just need to know if I still need to pick up a bunch of kale or not.

Notes satisfies my three must-have requirements: it’s on every device my wife and I use, it allows mixing checklists with free form text, and we can effortlessly share information with each other.

I just checked and found that I have 1,321 total notes stored in iCloud. These range from my daily todo lists (invaluable for end of year performance review documents, saying nothing of just remembering what I’m supposed to do), to the all-important shared grocery list, which we will both update whenever we’re shopping at the grocery store.

How do you get your notes out of apple notes though? They're like some sort of covetous demon who won't let your notes go once it consumes them.

I literally went to the apple notes discord once and asked them directly and their response was basically "Apple Notes isn't design to be used for more than 100 notes"... so be very very careful about choosing to use Apple Notes cause you may never get your notes out of there

You can use AppleScript to copy them into other apps. Though a lack of an API is annoying.

Where exactly are my notes supposed to be going?

A local filesystem directory with text files would be a good start.

Many options, should you decide to leave the Apple ecosystem

Wait… Apple is providing support via Discord now?

Anyways, if you have access to a Mac you can sync your notes via iCloud and then on Mac you can easily access the SQLite DB containing the notes. If you can figure out the schema it would be easy to write a tool to export this automatically. I’d guess someone has already built such a tool.

I use this https://github.com/threeplanetssoftware/apple_cloud_notes_pa... and it works extremely well.

you're a legend. Thank you!

Applescript can control Notes.

Yeah, no, I am not giving my notes to lock-in devil.

Hardly that much of a lock-in issue with a SQLite DB with some gzipped protobufs in it.

At this point it works really well as an Evernote replacement, including automatic OCR and search of scanned files – and it titles the note from the top of the OCR text, which Evernote never got working.

Syncing is not as great as Evernote, for all the CloudKit prowess. I tried to import my 22k-ish notes from .enex dumps and somehow it managed to display different note counts on all my devices.

I recently switched to Apple Notes for the ecosystem experience. I like it.

That said, it *absolutely boggles my mind that there is no Markdown support*.

What do you mean by that? I write markdown in it

If it were easier to link from one note to another, that'd be my main note taking app.