Thank you! I shared my opinion with doubt should I do that or not. But I am interested in a community opinion. If someone needs a locking feature, why not? It is not a very sophisticated feature to implement. Much simpler than snapshots, of course.
Note that some file systems
This is a reason I wouldn't say I liked the idea in the first place. In file systems, you have "someone," not you (e.g. another user, application, or your ignorance to the system files) who can destroy the whole system by messing up with important files. In Joplin, we have only one person and do not have catastrophic consequences of accidental actions.
But let's wrap it up. I shared my opinion that snapshot is better and can substitute a locking mechanism. Nevertheless, you think that we should have a locking mechanism. Ok, I am with you. Locking is better than nothing. I know how I will use it in my work and study.
What I wanted to state is that both features have their use cases but with different objectives. And I like both and I would also use both. If I were to decide between those two, however, I'd prefer snapshots as you do. Because I could (mis)use them to emulate locking (as you suggested) and I would get versioning for my notes.
I see. Sorry for protesting against the locking feature. I created a new post Snapshots for notes, where everyone can discuss it. For me, it is a substituting feature, but it is only my personal opinion.
Support for locking notes would be a massive change to the way Joplin works and would affect all the applications. As it's quite a niche feature it will not be implemented I'm afraid. Also not possible to create a plugin since changes would be required everywhere in the code base.
The note history is there to retrieve old versions of a note, or you can have your own backups.
with regards to locking a note so that it cant be edited - I may have an easy solution to implement this.
Just dont show the markup editing pane, only show the preview/display pane. Toggle this with a button next to the 'markup edit' button thing in the top right. Make the icon a lock icon, and when you click it the default view for that note is just the preview/display view - no markup.
Just wanted to add a use case for that feature. That happened to me a few times, so I started searching about "read only" notes and found this thread. The situation described below is caused by my loss of attention after working for a while.
A note stores a temporary password for some test VPN, that I has to copy occasionaly during the day (the VPN client does not save the password). At some point after selecting and copying the password, I press some key in the keyboard and the password is replaced with a character. After a while, I notice that the password is gone and the note is synced, so I have to restore the previous version in the Nextcloud.
You can enable note history, to be able to get at that password directly from joplin.
Personally, if I had this problem, I would use the Persistent Editor Layout and set that note to always open in read mode, so it wouldn't be possible to randomly change it.
This is an old post but I am new to Joplin and found for myself a workaround on desktop at least to leave the Markup Viewer layout turned on and to edit the note to switch the the full text editor. This prevents editing all notes. I am just mentioning it for others who are new to Joplin this may work as it locks me out of all notes editing so I don't edit notes accidentally if all I wanted to is to look up some information. Editing by accident happens often if I leave note open and go do other stuff like searching in Spotlight etc and end up overwriting the text in the note. That happened in Evernote routinely.