Did you know that you can automate Evernote for Windows via the Command Prompt?
Neither did I until recently. It turns out that Mac users with their fancy AppleScripts don’t get to have all the fun.
Check out the Windows command line page on the Evernote Developers mini-site.
You can see that there are two Evernote EXEs that you can use to automate: Evernote.exe and ENScript.exe.
Using these, you can automate things like:
- Note creation
- Screenshots
- Clipboard pasting
- Database syncing
- Note import
- Note printing
- Note exporting
- Notebook creation
The developer instructions show you how to programatically find the location of these magic EXEs, but for the non-programmers out there, check C:\Program Files\Evernote\Evernote or C:\Program Files (x86)\Evernote\Evernote depending on your version of Windows.
I was inspired by this Evernote forum post to try to automate notebook exporting.
Start Up Command Prompt
First, start up the Command Prompt window. Yes, we’re going back to DOS.
You can find this by clicking on the Start button and typing Command in the Search box and then choosing Command Prompt from the results.
You’ll get a blank command prompt window, and some of you will be breaking out in a cold sweat about now.
Figure Out Your Command
From the Evernote page, it looks like we want to be using ENScript.exe, and will need to figure out a few parameters.
Since we want to export our notes, we will need the exportNotes command, and we will need two options:
- /q query: The Evernote search query. In this case, I want to export a specific Evernote notebook called Recipes. So, I will need to use the Evernote search query notebook:Recipes.
- /f filename: The name of the file that I want to save. In this case, I’ll just call it test.enex.
Put it All Together
Back to the Command Prompt, here is my full command:
"\Program Files (x86)"\Evernote\Evernote\ENScript exportNotes /q notebook:Recipes /f test.enex
Obviously the location of your EnScript.exe, your command, and your options will differ based on what you are trying to do.
Unfortunately there is no visual feedback. It just pauses for a while and you go back to the command line.
If you go to the location that you are saving the file, you can see the ENEX is there.
What Do You Want To Do?
If you want to automate an Evernote activity on Windows, chances are the command line switches might let you do it. For example, you could probably take this export code and put it in Task Scheduler and have it export on a regular basis.[1]
You could also scan and have it automatically create, tag and title documents.
With some imagination, this is a powerful and pretty unknown feature of Evernote, albeit a geeky one.
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I didn’t try this, but I assume it would work. ↩
