Any suggestions on what plugins could be created?

Another thought: the capability for plugins to add to an area above mobile/tablet keyboard when displayed (for adding shortcut buttons, such as tabs for indenting lines).

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spreadsheet editor with formatting and formula support could be useful
thanks

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I doubt this is ever going to happen. I think spreadsheet editor is a much more complicated kind of app than Joplin (how many open source note taking apps vs spreadsheets are there?)
Some things are better left to specialized apps.

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Yes, using iframe preview may be a correct solution, professional things are left to professional tools to do

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I thinking something similar to Emacs Org mode as spreadsheet:

Org as a spreadsheet system:

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A Pandoc-wrapper plugin that allows to

  • export to the different file formats that pandoc supports. either directly to a file (.odt, .html, …), or to the clipboard (when exporting as mediawiki markup or similar)
  • (much less important, but why not…) import “foreign” files or formats as markdown / joplin notes (again: from file, or from clipboard)
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Paste Special

We had previous discussions about adding Paste Special
e.g. if a spreadsheet is in the clipboard or a csv so that it then would be translated into a markdown table and pasted.

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Hi,

I’m not exactly sure how you’d do it, but it would be handy to have some way to hook Joplin up to IFTTT or similar. Being able to automate the population of Joplin notes via external services would be helpful.

UPDATE: Two ideas on how this could possibly be implemented:

  1. Create a plugin that adds “auto import” functionality. This would be a one-way movement of data from a nominated location/folder where items are staged, and these are ingested into Joplin. Either the items include metadata describing how to configure the import into Joplin (which notebook, title, tags, etc) or the plugin just ingests them into a nominated import notebook. IFTTT could be configured to write the items to the ingestion location (e.g. a OneDrive folder).

  2. Setup some form of command queue using a well-supported cloud based service, and have the plugin reach out to query that queue for instructions to execute. This may include more advanced features than above and could allow for two way communications (e.g. announcing new notes that had been created). There are lots of options that could be used for the command queue (Google’s Pub/Sub, IMAP, …) but ideally in the first instance it would be something that most automation services could work with if the user was willing to do some configuration/setup themselves.

Thanks, Matt

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  • add colors, to highlight a word in a note
  • add Pen-Support, to be able to draw a note
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I would like to see something that gives me the ability to reformat tables in the unrendered markdown code.
So that a table that looks like this:

| Lorem Ipsum | is |
| --- | ---: |
| simply | dummy |
|text of the printing | and typesetting industry. |

Can automatically be reformatted into this:

| Lorem Ipsum          |                       is |
| -------------------- | -----------------------: |
| simply               |                    dummy |
| text of the printing | and typesetting industry |
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I have two suggestions on the very top of my list:

  • Zotero / BibTex integration for bibliographical references - this is a killer feature for students, academics, journalists, and many other people. Zettlr has that feature, but I prefer Joplin which is a much better note-taking platform overall. Since Zettlr is open source, maybe their implementation could be easily adapted for Joplin?

  • An implementation of the Zettlekasten method allowing easy two-way linking between notes to connect ideas. This is increasingly becoming one of the most requested productivity features for note-taking software, and having this in Joplin would be amazing. (Zettlr also happens to have this feature, so maybe their open-source implementation could be easily adapted to Joplin.)

Apart from these two extremely useful features, I already find Joplin vastly superior to every other note taking software out there. It has quickly become a indispensable tool in my workflow, so let me take this opportunity to thank you for your fantastic work!

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I am very grateful to you for leading me to Zettlekasten! Thank you!

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Hi Laurent, all,
thank you for this phantastic app!

Here my 0.02 €, for some features ideas:

  1. ctrl-g search-while-you-type for
  • insert inter-note and notebook links
  • move note to notebook,
  • tags
  1. Navigation history, back and foreward movement like vim’s ctrl-I ctrl-O, also between notes

  2. Multiple per-notebook sync-accounts for private/team notebooks.

  3. “what-links-here”-back references

  4. flat list of notes across all notebooks to order by date/last edited

  5. Zotero integration, reference mangement

  6. Vim/neovim integration

  7. Footnotes

  8. TOC

Would like to pitch in addition to donations, but am not sure where to begin is there a plugin-howto?

keep up the awesome work and excellent community!
Jakob

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This came up a few times, but every time I look at it, I'm not sure exactly what's needed. Any chance you could explain what a Zettr feature would do? What button should be added, what would the button do, how will the note be changed, etc.?

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Hi Laurent, thanks for taking the time to look into this!

It's all explained on this page.

Essentially, there is a setting that lets you link Zettlr to your bibliography in BibTex format (.bib). (There is an extension for Zotero, the leading open-source reference management software, to automatically export one's bibliography in .bib format - the resulting file can be linked to Zettlr).

Once this is done, you can include a reference in a note by typing '@', which automatically triggers a drop down menu to autocomplete the reference you're looking for. Each reference in a BibTex bibliography has a unique citation key, like "SmithStatisticalMechanics2015" for a paper called "Statistical Mechanics" written by Smith in 2015.

So for example, if I start typing "@Smith" in Zettlr, it automatically presents me in the dropdown menu with "Smith 2015: Statistical Mechanics" as an option. If I click on it, it autocompletes the reference "@SmithStatisticalMechanics2015" in the Markdown file, and automatically formats it for display as "(Smith 2015)" (as it would be in a paper).

Since Zettlr is has a built-in wrapper for pandoc, it can also preserve the bibliographical references when exporting to .docx, .otf, .pdf or .tex. So for example if a PDF of my note, I would have the sentence "Statistical mechanics describes how macroscopic observations are related to microscopic parameters that fluctuate around an average (Smith 2015)." and the reference "(Smith 2015)" would include a hyperlink to the full bibiographical reference at the end of the PDF: "Smith, Robert (2015). Stastistical Mechanics. Journal of Physics." or something like that.

This is a fantastic feature, because it makes it super easy to include sources for ideas in one's notes, or simply references for further reading, or for research, etc. Zotero has a web extension that lets you grab the references of pretty much anything (academic papers, videos, even webpages) for later citation, so the combination of Zotero + Zettlr is very powerful for referencing.

But again I much prefer Joplin to Zettlr, and I think it would be amazing if this feature was implemented.

Do let me know if anything is unclear or if you need more info! Happy to explain how Zettlr's Zettelkasten implementation works too :slight_smile:

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I want this feature, Joplin with Zettelkasten-like feature + Zotero would be amazing!!! :heart_eyes:

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Thanks for clarifying @109767345. I’ll create a spec based on this so that at least we have something to go to if it ever gets implemented (I’d like to).

For the Zettelkasten method, isn’t it just about adding support for back-links, or is there more to it?

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Making links easier to create would also be useful (autocomplete by title, etc).
It’s useful even for general usage but looks like for Zettelkasten it’s almost essential.

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I’ll create a spec based on this so that at least we have something to go to if it ever gets implemented (I’d like to).

That's great to hear, thanks for taking this on board Laurent.

For the Zettelkasten method, isn’t it just about adding support for back-links, or is there more to it?

That's the gist of it yes! Essentially it would allow users to use Joplin like a Knowledge Base. It's arguably a superior way to organize ideas without worrying too much about directory structure (and losing notes buried deep into sub-notebooks).

As @roman_r_m mentioned it would be really helpful to have some autocomplete feature when creating bidirectional links. In Zettlr, when you type "[[", it prompts you with a drop down menu with autocomplete by note title. So for example typing "[[shop" would automatically show you the note named "shopping list", then clicking enter would create the bidirectional link [[shopping list]].

There is one more advanced feature implemented in some Zettelkasten-compatible software, which is the ability to view one's note structure as a graph where each node is a note, and each connection is a bidirectional link. For example, Roam Research and Obsidian both emphasize this feature. But I personally think this should definitely not be a priority: bidirectional linking is they key to an effective Zettelkasten workflow, the graph is bonus but not essential.

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For now I’ve added a possible spec for the Bibtext support there:

If you have any comment on it, feel free to post here or on the issue directly.

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