Export all stickies at once on OS X 10.8?

Question

I am using Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). I have a lot of stickies, but have been unable to find a simple way to export all the stickies at once as either text or HTML.

Have I overlooked something obvious? What is the right way to export all stickies in bulk into a more open file format?

Answer 1

Export stickies created by Stickies.app

1. Install National Velocity (NV) and start the application
2. In Finder open your Library folder and locate StickiesDatabase
3. Drag StickiesDatabase into the list of notes in NV main window (see here for reference)
4. In NV select any number of notes and choose Export from the menu

If you prefer to write your own code, have a look at Learning Cocoa with Objective-C which explains how to reverse-engineer the StickiesDatabase format.

Export Dashboard stickies

Run this in Terminal.app

plutil -convert json -r -o - ~/Library/Preferences/widget-com.apple.widget.stickies.plist |
    awk '$1 ~ /-data/ { start=index($0, ":")+3
                        end=length($0)-2
                        sticky=substr($0, start, end-start+1)
                        gsub(/<.?.?div>/, "", sticky)
                        gsub(/<br>/, "\n", sticky)
                        print sticky
                        print "---" }' > ~/all-my-stickies.txt