evernote2unbent

Move your Evernote notes into Unbent — notes, notebooks, tags and attachments — without exporting an ENEX file first.

Evernote has no export API, so every other route runs through the desktop client's File → Export, which is manual, unreliable past a few thousand notes, and produces multi-gigabyte files you then have to feed somewhere. This syncs your account with evernote-backup and uploads straight from its local database.

Install

uv tool install evernote2unbent

Or with pipx:

pipx install evernote2unbent

Use

evernote2unbent migrate

That signs you in to Evernote, syncs your account to a local database, then uploads everything to Unbent. It asks which Unbent instance to use the first time and remembers the answer.

Start with one notebook to see the result before moving everything. The sync still fetches your whole account — it is the upload that is scoped:

evernote2unbent migrate -n "Some Notebook"

Interrupted runs are safe to repeat: the sync is incremental, and notes that already landed are skipped rather than duplicated.

Doing the steps separately

migrate runs evernote-backup for you. If you already use it, or want the ENEX files too, run the halves yourself:

evernote-backup init-db
evernote-backup sync
evernote2unbent upload

Re-running is safe

Unbent keys each note on a hash of its title and body, so a note that already landed is skipped rather than duplicated. That makes an interrupted upload resumable by simply repeating the command — and a note whose attachments failed partway gets only the missing files on the next run.

Nothing here deletes or modifies anything in Evernote.

Options

Signing in

login prints a short code and a link. Approving it in a browser you are already signed in to grants an ordinary session — no password is typed into the terminal, and no long-lived key is pasted from a settings page.

The token is stored in ~/.config/unbent/credentials.json at mode 0600, keyed by instance so a token for one server is never sent to another. logout forgets it locally; signing out everywhere in Unbent revokes it for real.

Which instance

There is deliberately no default. A guessed instance means a forgotten flag can send a migration to a server you did not choose, and that failure is silent, because uploading to the wrong Unbent still succeeds.

The answer is stored in ~/.config/unbent/config.json — plain JSON, mode 0644, separate from the credentials file so changing a URL never means opening one with a token in it.

evernote2unbent set-url https://unbent.app
evernote2unbent show-config

$UNBENT_URL overrides it for a shell session, --url for a single command.

What gets converted

Notes arrive as Markdown. The conversion happens server-side in Unbent, which is why this package does not implement one: Unbent's own importer already has a tested ENML converter, and a second implementation here would drift from it.

Attachments upload separately as raw bytes and are linked from the note body by their content hash, which is how an inline image ends up in the right place.

Credit

The hard part — Evernote authentication, the Thrift API client, and incremental sync — is evernote-backup by vzhd1701, used here as a dependency rather than forked. This package adds an uploader and a CLI on top of it and modifies none of it.

If you want ENEX files rather than a migration, use evernote-backup directly; it does that well and this is not a replacement for it.

License

MIT