Moving your notes · Updated October 6, 2026
Get your notes out of Simplenote
Simplenote exports everything as plain text in one click. The notes were always just text; the export only needs a .md extension and a title.
| Official export | One click on the web or desktop: a zip with a text file per note and a JSON file holding everything. Android exports the JSON alone. The iPhone app has no export; use the web. |
|---|---|
| Pictures and files | None. Simplenote has never had attachments. |
| Dates | In the JSON. Jimmy writes them into the front matter. |
| Best free tool | Renaming .txt to .md. Jimmy, if you want tags and dates too. |
| Time | Minutes. |
Why people leave
Simplenote did one thing, plain text that synced everywhere, and did it well for fifteen years. On March 2, 2026, Automattic ended its active development: the apps and the sync service stay up with basic maintenance, no new features are planned, and nothing has been said about how long the sync service will run. That is reason enough. Beyond it, people have long wanted what Simplenote never had, pictures and files and folders, and its forum carries the usual run of sync complaints, including an export that sometimes comes back short.
What the export gives you
On the web, at app.simplenote.com, open the menu, then Settings, the Tools tab, and Export Notes. On the desktop app it is File › Export Notes. Either way you get notes.zip: one .txt file per note, named from its first line, a trash folder of the notes you deleted, and source/notes.json, which holds every note with its text, its tags, whether it was pinned, whether you had turned on Markdown for it, and its creation and last-modified dates. The text files are the notes exactly as you typed them: if you wrote Markdown, it is there, and nothing was converted on the way out. On Android, Settings › Export data saves the JSON alone; on an iPhone there is no export, so sign in to the web app instead.
The easiest way
- Export from the web or desktop app, and unzip.
- Count the
.txtfiles against the number of notes Simplenote shows. If the export is short, run it again from the web app; it has been known to stop early. - Rename every
.txtto.md. On a Mac, select them all in the Finder, right-click, choose Rename…, and replace.txtwith.md. On Windows, in a Command Prompt opened in the folder:ren *.txt *.md. - Decide about the
trashfolder, and delete it or keep it. That is your folder of notes.
Each note’s title is its first line, and the apps you move to will read it from there. What this loses is the tags and the dates, which live only in the JSON.
With a terminal, for tags and dates
Jimmy, a free converter delivered as one program for Mac, Windows or Linux, reads the zip and writes a Markdown file per note with its tags, and, with --frontmatter joplin, its created and updated dates, in the front matter where Skysa Notes reads them. Its Simplenote page lists what carries over.
jimmy cli notes.zip --format simplenote --frontmatter joplin(The download is named for your system, such as jimmy-darwin-arm64; the command calls it jimmy.) It writes a folder named for the moment it ran.
What to check afterwards
- The count. Said twice because it is the one thing that goes wrong.
- Notes that were not Markdown. A plain-text note with a line that happens to start with
#or-now reads as a heading or a list. Rare, and easy to fix when you see it. - Duplicate first lines. Two notes beginning the same way want the same filename; the export numbers one of them.
Then bring them into Skysa Notes
Once you have a folder of Markdown files, the rest takes a minute, and it works the same whether you use the free app on one device or have storage connected.
- Open Skysa Notes. In the storage panel, open the menu (the gear, or the ⋯ beside a source) and choose Import a folder, then pick the folder the converter made. Import files takes a zip or loose .md files instead.
- The app shows what it will add and asks first. Nothing already there is changed or replaced; a name that is taken gets a number.
- The folder’s subfolders become notebooks, as deep as they nest. Every .md file becomes a note. Every other file, pictures and PDFs included, is kept beside the notes at its own path, so a note’s
still shows the picture.
Titles and dates. A note’s title is the title in its front matter, else its first heading, else its filename. Its dates are the front matter’s created and updated (modified, date created, date modified and lastmod are read too), which is why the guides favour converters that write them: a note without them is dated the day you import it. A tags list in the front matter is searchable. Front matter and the rest of the file are kept byte for byte until you next edit the note.
What renders. CommonMark and GitHub-flavoured Markdown: headings, lists, tables, task lists, strikethrough, footnotes, code, and HTML left as written. Not rendered: [[wikilinks]], math and Mermaid diagrams, and a note with reference-style links opens as raw Markdown. Callouts show as plain quotes. Files larger than 25 MB, and hidden files and folders (names starting with a dot), are left out.
On Dropbox there is a second way in: copy the folder into Apps/skysa-notes with the Dropbox desktop app, and the notes sync in. On Google Drive the app can see only the files it made itself, so use Import there.