Plainva
← All posts

Plainva 0.5.0: a way in — import from Notion, Evernote, Keep and more

July 25, 2026

For a year the honest answer to “can I move my notes into Plainva?” was: sort of. If your notes were already Markdown files, you were fine — point Plainva at the folder and you were done. If they lived in Notion or Evernote, you were on your own.

0.5.0 fixes that. It is the biggest release so far, and the headline is simply: there is now a way in.

Import from another app

There is an import wizard now. You reach it from the command palette or by right-clicking a folder in the file tree. You pick the app you are coming from, point at the export, name a target folder, and get a preview before anything is written.

Six sources ship in this release:

There is deliberately no Obsidian importer, because you do not need one: Plainva opens an Obsidian vault directly. Choose Open vault, pick the folder, done.

Notion gets the deep treatment

Notion is the one I spent the most time on, because Notion is the hardest one to leave. A Notion export gives you HTML or Markdown files and some CSVs, and everything that made your workspace work — the databases, the relations, the property types — is gone.

So Plainva talks to the Notion API instead. You create an integration token, connect the pages you want, and Plainva walks the workspace properly:

The file-based path still exists for working offline, but it is honest about its limits: pages come across, database contents do not. The wizard tells you that before you start, not after.

Being honest about what does not come across

This is the part I care about most, and it is the part that took the longest.

An importer that quietly drops your attachments and then reports “everything imported” is worse than one that refuses to run. So every importer in Plainva declares its limits up front — in the preview, before you commit — and every run writes an import report into the target folder listing what arrived in full, what arrived incompletely, what was skipped, and why.

The limits are real and I would rather you hear them from me: attachments and images are not imported from ZIP archives, Evernote attachments stay behind, Logseq files are copied verbatim without converting key:: properties, and the Simplenote trash is skipped.

And nothing in your vault is ever overwritten. The import writes into the vault you have open, so if a note name is already taken, the imported note is numbered instead of replacing what was there. Same if two notes in your export share a name.

Encrypted workspaces (experimental)

You can now turn a vault into an end-to-end encrypted workspace and share it across your devices — QR pairing, a printed recovery code, revoking a lost device, rotating keys.

I want to be straight about the status of this one: it has not been independently reviewed yet. The design is written down, the tests cover tampering and replay and partial listings, and it works — but “I wrote crypto and my own tests pass” is not the same as “an outside expert looked at it.” Until that review has happened, treat it as a preview. Try it, keep a backup, and don’t put anything on it yet that you genuinely cannot afford to lose.

I would rather ship it labelled honestly than either hide it or oversell it.

Deleting that understands connections

Deleting a project used to be a small act of faith. Were there tasks hanging off it? Notes in a linked database? You found out afterwards.

Now, when you delete a note or a .base, Plainva shows you what is connected to it — assigned items, database entries, linked databases — grouped, with a count, and you decide group by group what goes along. Anything shared with another note, or belonging to more than one database, is excluded by default. References in the notes that survive get cleaned up.

Also in this release

Calendar and email caught up on the small interactions that were missing: right-click menus on events, multi-select and bulk actions in the mailbox, an unread filter, and a live formatted preview while you write a mail or an event description.

Per-vault settings can now travel between your devices if you want them to — daily notes, templates, task database, backup retention. No credentials, no machine-specific paths.

On mobile you can set up encryption directly on the phone, the QR scanner is a live camera view instead of “take a photo and hope”, and a stack of layout problems is gone: system bars are readable, safe areas are respected, the keyboard behaves.

And after an update, Plainva now tells you what changed instead of leaving you to guess.

Getting it

Desktop installers are on the releases page; if you are on 0.2.x or later, the updater will offer it. macOS builds are signed and notarized. Windows is still unsigned — that is next on my list.

Android is in closed beta and needs 12 testers to stay in for 14 days before Google will let it into the Play Store, which is a low bar that I keep not quite clearing. If you have an Android phone: two steps, here. iPhone runs on TestFlight.

Everything is still plain Markdown in a folder you own. No account with me, no subscription, and no format change — your existing vaults and .base files open exactly as before.