---
title: "I tried to move my notes out of Emacs. I failed. Again."
slug: i-tried-to-move-my-notes-out-of-emacs-i-failed-again
url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/i-tried-to-move-my-notes-out-of-emacs-i-failed-again
canonical_url: https://baty.net/posts/2026/10/i-tried-to-move-my-notes-out-of-emacs-i-failed/
content_type: blog_post
language: en
published_at: 2026-10-07T00:00:00.000Z
updated_at: 2026-10-10T08:07:51.007Z
author: "Jack Baty"
authored_by: human
publisher: "baty.net"
publisher_url: https://baty.net/
topics: ["Emacs", "Productivity", "Note-taking"]
license: all-rights-reserved
word_count: 336
reading_minutes: 1
citation: "Jack Baty, baty.net. \"I tried to move my notes out of Emacs. I failed. Again..\" 7 Oct 2026. https://baty.net/posts/2026/10/i-tried-to-move-my-notes-out-of-emacs-i-failed/ (all-rights-reserved)"
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---

# I tried to move my notes out of Emacs. I failed. Again.

> Jack Baty describes another bout of Emacs fatigue, moving his notes into Bear, and why the feeling that everything lived inside one app sent him back to Emacs, this time with Denote managing Markdown files instead of Org mode.

Every so often I suffer from what I call "Emacs Fatigue". It's closely related to "Text File Fatigue". Using Emacs tends to pull one toward using it for everything, which is what I'd done. Then, I simply grow tired of staring at the same thing every day. When this happens, I "decide" to uproot my life and move my notes into something else. This time, that something else was [Bear](https://bear.app).

Bear is great. It's solid, beautiful, and refreshingly simple. It syncs flawlessly (for free) and runs on macOS and iOS. It's also inexpensive. It uses an SQLite database, which doesn't bother me. Databases are great at this stuff. All the "But but what if the database...?!" talk is mostly hearsay anyway.

The thing that made me twitchy was that it felt like my notes were "in there". It's not the database. It's the fact that everything is in an app, and that app makes me need to use that app. This is how I'd started to feel about Emacs, but mostly due to Org mode.

Bear is macOS and iOS only, which should be fine for someone like me who has "decided" to live on macOS. And yet, Linux continues to emit a low-grade hum in the back of my head that I can't ignore.

If I don't want my notes in Org mode files, but I'm still drawn toward Emacs, what should I do? Denote! That's where they'd all started in the first place, but as .org not .md. I'd nearly forgotten that Denote handles Markdown files natively. One Emacs configuration change and I was back where I belong. And since Bear notes are already Markdown, all it took was an export and a (Claude Code-assisted) conversion script for file names, links, and attachments.

So yes, I've done that thing where I quit using Emacs only to come crawling back later. I know better, but knowing better doesn't stop me. Maybe I'll work on a sync/bridge between Denote and Bear. That would be neat.