Hi there, I'm a noob - I've spent the last couple weeks trying Obsidian, Notion, Trilium, MS Notes, Google Docs and have to say Joplin is best for my needs.
But now that I've got so many things in Joplin I'm wondering... can I just have it edit a random text file (like a config file) in place without moving that file into the Joplin data directory? It needs to stay where it is. I don't see any way to do this and admittedly it is outside the normal workflow. If not, well, I'll just keep using Notepad++ side by side with Joplin, no harm done. Thanks!
@sizer, this might be a partial solution—you can have links to local files in a note. When you click on the link the file is opened in the default application, and any changes you make are saved. The file is not saved internally in the Joplin notes database and always remains on disk.
A file can be dragged into Joplin while holding the Alt key, and this creates a link to the local file. Or, manually create a link to a file on disk by referencing it like this: file://path-to-my-file/on-disk
Not exactly what you're looking for, but might be of some interest.
That might just be good enough - I'll give that a try, thanks!
Basically, I'll create a note that's just links to local files of interest so at least I can bring them up in Notepad++ without searching through tabs for them.
Welcome to the forum, @sizer99! To answer your original question: best not to think of Joplin as an editor, but as a self-contained app to work with your notes. So no, you can't really use it to edit other things that are not in your notes.