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Exporting notes from Simplenote into Obsidian

I’ve been using Simplenote for years and like it a lot, but I recently started trying out Obsidian, because it has a few features I want. I ended up writing a Python script to tweak the notes exported from Simplenote so that tags still work in Obsidian.

In Simplenote, tags are metadata about a note. But in Obsidian tags are text within a note itself, prefixed with #. Like #Recipes.

If you get an export of your Simplenote notes you get a directory of text files and a JSON file. My script uses the JSON file to create a new directory of text files (with Obsidian-friendly .md extensions), inserting any tags into either the end or almost-start of each one.

That’s about it. There’s more in the repository’s README.

Hopefully it’ll be useful to someone else somewhere sometime.

Thanks to Ian for mentioning Obsidian.

5 comments

  1. Richard Carter at   #

    Welcome to Obsidian… You’ll never look back!

    In Simplenote, tags are metadata about a note. But in Obsidian tags are text within a note itself, prefixed with #

    True, but in Obsidian you can also include tags (without # prefixes) as YAML metadata, like this:

    ---
    tags:
    - tag1
    - tag2
    ---

  2. Phil Gyford at   #

    Thanks, I didn't know that.

    I'm trying not to fall too far into the Obsidian rabbit hole too quickly. Here's a lot to it!

  3. Poorchop at   #

    I truly thought that Obsidian was the solution for consolidating the obscene amount of information that I have to commit to memory for work but I can never seem to find the time or the motivation to review my old notes. Anki has made life a little easier in this regard but the lack of backlinks and the lack of visuals showing how different information is interconnected makes the memorized facts seem disjointed. I wish that there was something that combined the best of both.

  4. Phil Gyford at   #

    There are some spaced-repetition plugins for Obsidian. publish.obsidian.md/hu… I haven't tried any but maybe they'd combine the best of both worlds?

  5. Poorchop at   #

    Thanks for the pointers.