"Drafts" as a frontend to Joplin

Features
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On the Mac Appstore there is an application called Drafts, you guessed it from the name, a "sort of" note taking app (has nothing to do with the drafts app on Playstore). And interestingly enough, it does a few jobs very well for which Joplin is not ideal, while Joplin does a lot of work for which Drafts wouldn't and couldn't work well. This is hard to explain if you don't work with Drafts AND with Joplin for a while. But here are a few clues:

  • Drafts is much faster in many ways, but not best for keeping and managing many notes
  • Drafts integrates better with osx, and provides more options ... but ... as said before
  • Drafts has a (I think) more versatile editor ...
  • important to me: search on Drafts works like a charm
  • Joplin does a great job in taking, managing, and encryptinh & storing (E2EE) solid, long-term notes,
  • Jopin is not limited to text
  • Drafts is (so far ? ) single platform, but very light on resources (can always run in the background), while Joplin offers multiple platforms ... at the cost of being very resource hungry
    The list is much longer.

What matters is this. Drafts is to me the perfect front end to Joplin, running in the background all the time, starting in split second, integrating well with other applications. So I use it for

  • quick thoughts and in order to keep a(nother) copy from the clip board
  • temporary notes and text bits I need to feed into emails etc again and again
  • handling everything which may not stay for long on my device.
  • and when a note becomes mature, or is for the long term by its nature it goes into Joplin as before.

Joplin is king, Drafts is the knight at the drawbridge.

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That's especially true when it comes to the mobile editor.

That's what I use Drafts for as well (on iOS and iPadOS). It's actually easier to transfer content from Drafts to Joplin than from iOS Reminders.

Although it has taken huge steps forward recently, I think that Joplin as a proper Markdown editor on Android and iOS has to catch up a lot.

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It's actually easier to transfer content from Drafts to Joplin than from iOS Reminders.

Interesting. I don't often write in the Joplin mobile app, as I'm not a fan of the mobile editor. Are you just copying/pasting the contents of a note from Drafts to Joplin on the iphone?

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I copy/paste, or clip contents from other applications to Drafts, edit in Drafts, and decide later whether the note is worth keeping. If it is I copy paste it into Joplin after I created a dedicated note.

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I use the share sheet which creates a new note in Joplin with a blank header and the shared text as body. Select all, copy, paste will do as well.

I think Drafts offers a better writing experience than Joplin on mobile. Unfortunately, standard iOS things like the scroll bar are still pretty much unusable, which is a pain when editing longer notes.

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