Future of Joplin

FWIW I was a very long time premium Evernote user, and switched to Joplin at the start of this year, after experimenting with both Notebooks App and Joplin.

In my view Joplin is not just in the same class as, but already better than, Evernote - at least for my purposes.

  1. It allows for an infinite hierarchy of notebooks whereas Evernote restricts you to one level of notebooks which can be arranged in 'stacks'.
  2. Joplin's use of markdown is rock solid in the way it presents notes. Evernote's EML is regularly flaky in the way it screws up formatting.
  3. Evernote's export feature flattens all notebooks and stacks and gives you an unusable set of uncategorised notes. Joplin's JEX format retains all the metadata and folder/notebook structure, ready for re-importing.
  4. Joplin's web clipper is infinitely better than Evernote's in its ability to save a simplified version of a web page with logical markdown formatting.
  5. Joplin allows me to directly edit the markdown in any note, making the process of fixing something easy and straight forward. Evernote does not give you any direct access to EML.

I teach online media. I use VS Code for my coding work. I use Joplin for my academic work. I use it as a way of archiving and categorising material I will need later. It has about 4000 notes at the moment. I do not need the two applications to start merging.

Having said that I am aware that VS Code can be used for anything if you are willing to bend it to fit. I use Scrivener for my writing. Here is a post that describes how VS Code is much better software for writing novels and academic papers than Scrivener. As I say you can use VS Code for anything if you have a mind to :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Scrivener for you, eh? Nice article describing using VS Code for novel writing. Eventually, I should write a blog post digging deeper into how I draft with Joplin: Writing Novels and Non-Fiction with Joplin, perhaps. I kinda already do, but it is not a clean and simple article.

2 Likes

Scrivener is the best app I have found for writing the way I do. I use it on Windows and iPad and it works well. I have look at alternatives from time to time but I have never found one as good. That said, I was very intrigued by the VS Code set-up described in the Medium post.

And if you ever do make a blog post about your way of writing with VS Code then please let me know. I am persuadable :slight_smile:

. . . with Joplin, that is. :slight_smile:

Hello,

Probably I'm repeating many things already being said, but in the past used Atom for some years to take notes, and it was a good experience but not complete. At some point, it turned out to be unpleasant because it slowed down and It had far too many bells and knobs.

I chose Joplin among many alternatives just because I could import my data and also export it again, so my data was not locked in.

After a while using Joplin, I think some advantages over atom are

  1. With Joplin is faster to 'move around' when you have, let’s say, more than 1000 notes. (also it 'opens' faster)
  2. I can take an area-screenshot and just paste it into a note. The image is converted, stored, and linked without hassle.
  3. I can interlink notes, just copying the link into the text (this could be better though)
  4. There is a community around Joplin that is interested in note-taking

Atom and vs-code are designed to be general-purpose tools, extensible to do whatever you can think of. Joplin is a very good note-taking app, excellent to write notes. I never use the TODO's feature in Joplin, because for that I use Trello.

I think is important to be able of using different tools to manipulate our data, (vs-code plugin is super-useful!!).

Regarding the future:

Joplin notes have a UUID, which allows us to identify them universally among applications. This means we can mint links to notes in Joplin and give them to other people, use them in other apps, or even paste them on the Web. How cool would it be?

For me, notes are super important, because they are extensions of my own memory.

Cristian

3 Likes

Now, I have implemented a basic joplin-hexo integration tool, if you are interested, you can try it

1 Like

Rather than starting a new thread, I figured to post here. With the recent changes (I am using 1.5.14) there are many improvements and changes that are really peaking my interest. I wanted to also give credit to Laurent for how often this software is updated. That is becoming rare for developers... many staple Linux libraries are becoming stagnant and developers are beginning to start charging for their software and removing more and more of their products from the FOSS community. I believe that my hesitations on making this my final choice are solved.

A few items....

Regarding the database, I have some questions. First, Joplin currently uses SQLite. If I could ask sort of a poll question.... how many notes (I know a poor measure) have people placed into it? I also wonder if the database could use MySQL. Personally, all of my computers have MySQL server installed local, replicating with the MySQL on my NAS. I understand that this might seem far out of scope for many, and to that I would agree. I mention only because I use MySQL for so many things, for example my home intranet page, it would be neat to integrate notes from Joplin in there as well. I am also well aware that SQLite is more than capable of handling more notes than anyone would imagine placing in Joplin.

I see an issue with the synchronization process, and I also understand why it is there. There is a sort of memory of prior syncs... so if I sync to A, then switch to B, then back to A, it treats A as a current sync vs a new sync location. I completely understand the issues of syncing and the dangers of mass data loss that can happen. What I wonder is if there could be a sync control panel of sort in settings. For example, If I enable A and B, I could then click to configure A and B separately from the main sync target. The new additions would then become sort of a tab of their own in the admin. This would allow m to use Sync A, switch to B then delete A from Joplin's management.

I have also tried the encryption again since I started this thread. While it works, I still have hesitations. One reason is that once I set a password, I cannot export it. Sort of like how I can create a keyset in GnuPG and export my private and public keys as needed. That said, it would be neat to use existing GnuPG keys in there as an opinion. There is also no easy way to delete a prior key, although this can be done easy enough direct in the DB.

A question regarding note history... I have admittedly not checked to see. Is the note history done incremental or full? Meaning... say I change one letter in a note each day for 10 days. Does that retain 10 full copies of the note, or just the diff of the current to that change?

@rxliuli - I will try this new tool you have added. I believe I have a perfect use for this tool, especially if it handles the images in notes well. I may also fork this, and if I do, would you like to see edits as requests to your main, or just keep as an independent fork?

At present, it can process the note reference links and attachment resources inside joplin normally.


If you have any bug fixes or suggestions, please submit pr

I have had this question on my todo list for far too long. :slight_smile: I'll share, and if someone is interested, maybe that will inspire me to write the document!

The main script I have is an interactive CLI tool (written in fish script) that I run each day that:

  1. Asks me a bunch of set questions about my previous day's activities
  2. Creates a new note in a certain folder with those answers + pulls in a checklist based on a question in the CLI (It asks if I want the "daily", "weekly", or "monthly" checklist which helps me remember recurring tasks).

I find it a nice way to start my day! As part of that, I build some helper scripts to add a note, lookup a note, and search notes, but I rarely use those directly.

5 Likes

@rxliuli I needed to uninstall the VSCode Joplin plugin as the Insiders edition is not supported for some reason.

Sorry. . .

No problem. I just wanted to let you know. I still believe the issue is the difference between code and code-insiders. I took a brief look at the code, but the format is not familiar to me, so I could not verify quickly. I can say that nothing of it works, not even the refreshing of the list.

I simply checked the code insiders. After setting the token, it looks normal. Is there any more detailed error information?

All I get is this error: "command 'joplinNote.refreshNoteList' not found"

Restart VSCode, do you see these errors?

I do not. If I need to look in a specific place, please advise.

OK, I may be a bit late to he conversation here.

My Linux server runs a job at 2am daily. It runs for about 90 minutes and generates logs in Dropbox. At 6am daily a Python script runs on the iMac to combine the various logs into one file, "markdown it" and write it to Joplin. Whereas there was a single daily file that was overwritten, now I've got a record of logs that I can keep for as long as they're useful. Big improvement.

2 Likes

Not at all late. This sort of turned into a user's support thread. I too have noticed many changes that have improved this software. Enough to the point that I no longer question its use. I believe it is very helpful for people to share their experiences as has been done here so far. I have found it very useful!

I've tried a number of note taking apps over the years. Like so many I started with Evernote but stopped when the price went up substantially. I tried Bear but never really took to it. Recently I've been using Drafts and it's pretty good, but now it's a big set of ToDo lists. This isn't a problem, but somehow I never considered using for anything more. No notes database for example.

Joplin is my "go to" tool for note taking almost without effort because it just works for me. I still need to make a few more adjustments to the CSS, but it's not critical (the default table layout takes up way too much space IMHO).

However, there's one feature of Drafts that I do miss - you define a Workspace in terms of the tags it needs. And notes were automatically associated with the correct Workspace just based on the tags you set. Looking at a Drafts Workspace as a virtual Joplin notebook, is this something that Joplin can support? Would others consider it a useful extension?

1 Like

As Joplin matures (and it looks like there are more developers involved?), I think the next step would be to look at incorporating ideas from Obsidian and the like (Roam, RemNote, Zettlr (probably the most similar), and others). There is some great innovation in the note-taking world now. Joplin is my go-to for nearly everything (especially since I write a lot of longer documents, but there are workflows that Obsidian tackles that are hugely valuable: they focus on the interconnections between notes and more or less implement Zettelkasten.

And citation management. It is mentioned in another thread. Joplin needs to plug into a citations management platform: Zotero and BibTex I think are the most popular.