This was suggested / requested in October 2018 but was it ever included as an option ???
Regards
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A passcode on the mobile app or a password protected note i would to appreciate too!!
See point no 6 here - https://joplinapp.org/gsoc2020/ideas.html
I know this has been brought up numerous times before, and there's a very limited plugin (whose description makes me hesitant to trust it with information that I don't want to risk losing), but for me this is the last* remaining major shortcoming of Joplin.
I would love a native means of pin-protecting sections of text within a note (or whole individual notes, or whole individual notes including images etc.)
I remember that this has previously invited responses that whole-database encryption is natively supported in transfer, and that the whole database can be placed in an encrypted container. That's great protection against someone actively trying to access your data. But there are valid reasons to want just minor parts of your database to be obscured, e.g. against a colleague accidentally reading something if they walk by whilst you're flicking through recent notes. The philosophy behind this is obviously already accepted, given that notes can be set to "Confidential" to prevent previews showing.
*EDIT: One of the two last remaining major shortcomings, the other being capability for multiple pop-out windows of the native editor
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It looks like this is being introduced. The release notes for pre-release 3.2.1 state,
Improved: Multiple window support (#11181 by @personalizedrefrigerator)
I have not tried it myself, apart from doing just enough to get the above screenshot!
Amazing!
I had a quick look into "what is this Joplin thing?" about seven or eight years ago and decided it was too limited, not really worth it. Now in 2024 it's so close to ticking all of the boxes. Thanks devs!
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As of 2025 I am still looking forward to a solution for storing some extra very sensitive notes inside my large 10k notes collection in Joplin.
Typically an option to password protect (encrypt) very specific individual notes which works both on desktop and mobile.
In the meantime I am storing these sensitive notes in a convoluted system (gocryptfs container synced using Syncthing and accessed using Droidfs on Android).
The underlying idea is that the day I pass away, these sensitive notes disappear with me. The password will be stored nowhere. My family could access all my other Joplin notes but not those sensitive ones.
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On workaround would be to attach the text that you want encrypted a text file to the note. Then use an external text editor that supports encryption/decryption. VSCode for example has extensions like this one: GitHub - younthu/vs-encrypt-text: visual studio code extension for encrypt/decrypt selected text and there are probably others.
Thanks for the suggestion @laurent , do you see a convenient way to do this on mobile (android) ?
I use this plugin for that, hopefully it fits your need.
If you struggle to find a suitable encrypted text editor for Android, you could instead opt for using a password protected / encrypted Word document. There are for sure Android apps which support editing encrypted docx files, though you may need to put up with ads if you don't want to pay for a subscription to an app. One such supported example is WPS Office, while on desktop there are lots of open source options (eg. LibreOffice) which will support it
Joplin Plugin: EncDecModeV3
Careful with this plugin - it only gives you the illusion of security because cracking a XOR cipher is trivial.
Unfortunately I don't know of any solution on mobile. The problem with supporting encrypted notes properly is that it probably means we need to create a new type of notes, which is not easy. For example it would have to be excluded from the note history feature and be treated in a special way in various places.
I understand your challenge.
Personally, I don't need a high level of encryption for this (I plan to move the entire database into an encrypted container anyway, and run as portable).
If EncDecMode were to do the following, I'd be content:
- Not lose formatting
- Not lose linespaces
- Mobile support
- Any of the following:
- Allow direct interaction with encrypted text. So if you come to a note with encrypted text, enter its password, change some of the content and go away, the text is automatically encrypted with those changes
- Simpler than above, semi-permanent decryption. This shows plan text on the page but it's automatically encrypted again when you leave.
- Else, the dialogue box which shows when clicking "Decrypt" is formatted by its MD content, including linespaces
- Less important: Collapse the encoded text into a single line in page (even if as rudimentary as setting text size to 1pt) and reverting to e.g. default size when decrypted