The current export features: Export as Markdown file and Export as ZIP, both create Markdown files that lack crucial metadata. This makes the files useless if we ever need to re-import our notes into a fresh account, or (perish the thought) another piece of software.
What’s missing?
Notecard UUID
Parent UUID(s)
Tags
Icons
Rest assured, I’m not asking for this feature because I’m thinking of abandoning the Supernotes ship! Quite the opposite - for me, Supernotes is lightyears ahead of the competition on the vast majority of features I care about, and I suspect it’s going to pull even further ahead when 1.9 releases!
It’s rather because having a complete and robust import/export feature extinguishes the main complaint that most people have about keeping their notes in a proprietary and cloud-based service, namely the lack of ownership of their knowledge. When Supernotes can export your entire notes graph into files that look essentially the same as someone’s Obsidian or Logseq markdown files, then it’s impossible to be worried about the sovereignty of your knowledge. Then it’s just about picking the best tool to work on your notes - and we all know that’s Supernotes!
One step ahead of you! In the upcoming version we’ve added a JSON export option which is a dump of exactly how Supernotes cards are represented internally.
Technically you can already do this via the API, but we realize that’s not very approachable to most users which is why we’re adding this option directly to the export interface.
Admittedly this won’t result in a files that are perfect for importation into [insert other app here], but unfortunately there are a bit too many clients to support at this point, so we’ll give you 100% of the data as it is but leave users to do a bit of post-processing on their own.
If I may be so bold: JSON is not an export format that the typical non-IT user can do anything with. While it’s nice to have it, I don’t think it will be sufficient to change the minds of people who want to own their data.
You say there are too many formats to export to. I disagree. There’s a de facto emerging standard in the PKM community which is GitHub Flavored Markdown + wiki links and pipe links. A complete export to that format would give you immediate interoperability with Obsidian, Logseq, 1writer, Taio, Craft, etc., etc.
From my testing of the Markdown export, embracing wiki links is the one thing you should focus on. Preserving the Supernotes links with Supernotes UUIDs is not very functional.
The other is probably parent notes relationships which could also be done via wiki links.
(And yes, I’m one of those people who care about data ownership and decided against using SN for real despite falling in love with it).
Hi @gestaltist, thanks for your feedback. We have some improvements in the pipeline to our markdown format and by extension the robustness of our export options.
Unfortunately pure wiki-links are not possible on Supernotes, as Supernotes card titles are not guaranteed to be unique (for a variety of reasons).
I like having the JSON export as a failsafe (if you have all the information there is, nothing can be missing…), but it’s possible to make markdown export more robust by including a YAML frontmatter in the markdown files. That could have the UUIDs, titles, tags, creation date, modification date, etc. Really like a stripped-down, focused version of the JSON export that won’t get in the way of any markdown reader while providing the most critical information, too.
Another important part missing is that links to other cards export as supernotes links instead of markdown links to the file exported. This means that the most valuable part (the connections between cards) isn’t actually preserved.
It’s amazing how quickly and effortlessly I can export MD files from the app. I usually choose the single markdown file option when I want to incorporate my notes into an AI chat service like Perplexity. This way, I can chat with my notes seamlessly.
And I was thinking that it would be super great if the exported notes could include the tags and parent connections. It would make things a lot easier. What do you think?
Hi @upsaad, happy to hear you’re enjoying export from Supernotes!
You’re indeed correct having the flexibility to include tags, parent connections and also comments would be very helpful. You can do this already with the JSON export, but I’ve raised the priority of adding this for Markdown export as well.
(Note: I’ve merged your topic with this existing one so everything is together )
Exporting with the wikilinks “[ [ ] ]” style solves the issue, at least partially. If the cards are not unique, the wikilink option could be blocked in the case of an export of the entire PKM, to avoid conflict, but this would be useful to export a certain subject.
I feel like this is a very important thing for Supernotes to solve since it’s about atomic notes, which leads to the use of links as a core thing. So without an easy and simple solution to this, user data is “locked” (considering a practical point of view).
The limitation would be that wikilinks are usually associative, but Supernotes is about parenting associations to.
It’s amazing how after the explosion of PKM software culture, I literally can only count 2 or 3 “big ones” that have this problem solved. But I feel like this is very important because a really important part of taking notes is to be able to reuse them.
Link problems are common, but also some have “title” problems. Lots of PKM software puts IDs in the markdown files titles (without users asking to), making them a complete mess… but that’s not the case of Supernotes, that has the linking problem as the only urgent one, in my point of view.
Other thing to consider, is that if Supernotes grows a lot one day, others softwares will make import options.
Just talking my mind… hope the best for you guys, to handle this issue. Supernotes is really nice.
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