Happy New Year to the developers and Joplin users!
Another year has passed and Joplin has further matured, with added native features and plugins. For 2025, as a user, my remaining wishes are actually mostly for iOS.
There is still No WYSIWYG editing for tables.
There is still no web clipper.
There is still no style css.
On the desktop, I wish there are continued useability improvements.
I wish there is a plugin that searches for externally linked images and downloads them as local images.
I wish there is a "Recent" button along with "Notebooks" and "Tags" on the left pane. When you click it, a list of notes will show just like when you select a notebook or tag. (I know there is a nice plugin, but it seems to take extra space. Can one put a recent note list half pane below the "Notebooks" and "Tags" pane? Edit: the DDDot plugin is really good.)
I wish the web clipper has a nice way to clip YouTube videos (e.g., as a markdown link with a screenshot). [Note: a workaround to copy a markdown link is the "Markdownload" browser plugin.] If a web page has an embedded YouTube video, the link is lost when captured by the web clipper.
If the tag list can show the tags in multiple columns, that will be a more efficient way to display hundreds of tags.
I wish there is a button to collapse all notebooks to the top level of each notebook.
I wish pressing the enter key produces a line break with single spacing instead of double spacing so I don't need to do shift+enter.
But hats off to the developers for the hard work in 2024! You are really doing a great service to the personal knowledge management community.
I wish there is a button to collapse all notebooks to the top level.
There is, isn't there? If I click on 'Notebooks', the entire lists collapses. And a notebook with subnotebooks has the little triangle shape in front of it that basically does the same thing (v3.1.24 win32)
Thanks. It looks I didn't make it clear. I don't want the entire list of notebooks to disappear (which is how the current way works). What I meant was to click this button and all notebooks are collapsed to level 1. So if you have 10 notebooks, the pane will still show 10 notebooks, but each notebook is collapsed, not showing its subnotebooks.
The user case for this is when you have many notebooks with several levels of subnotebooks. When you work on them, you open some subnotebooks here and there. Soon the tree of subnotebooks will become very long and it takes time to scroll to another top-level notebook. But if you have such a button to collapse all notebooks to level 1, it's much easier to go to a particular notebook from a 10 item list than a big tree. (For example, Obsidian has this "Collapse all" button.)
One way to approach managing a large list of tags would be to have the ability to search tag names with partial matching. You can use search anywhere to display a list of notes which use a partially or fully matched tag name, but you can't filter the list of the names of the tags themselves. That's the number one feature I felt was lacking for me when I switched from Evernote.
But for additional reasons I have stopped using tags in Joplin entirely and now use a plain text inline tag workflow and I maintain a note containing a list of these tags (which I am then able to search from within the note containing this list of tags)
This is interesting. May I ask for more details, like any formula in choosing the name of your tags? Do you then search for them just like any other keyword search? Do you find it inconvenient that you can't click on a tag and immediately see the list of notes? I guess it's extra work to make sure any new tags you add is not a small variation of an existing tag and you have to remember to add any new tag to the tag list note. I ask this because I also use OneNote, which doesn't have traditional tags.
It definitely is extra work, but I get very quick at doing things that I keep repeating, so it's not so much a bother to me now.
I define my inline tags in a format like this:
(cooking tips)
So I basically put that within my note. If a tag is relevant to the whole note I put it either at the top or the bottom of the note, or if it is relevant to a specific part of text in the note then I put it within the text or above or below the paragraph. It's probably better to use square brackets instead of round ones, which will be less likely to conflict with searching actual note content, but I have used square brackets in the past for other things in my notes and my tags are usually phrases or combined with key words to make conflicting with note content unlikely.
Then I have a note which I list the tags, which I just add the tag to the top of when I add a new one (I can't be bothered to put them in alphabetical order, but I always search tags by at least 1 word so it's not that big of a deal). Then when I want to find all notes matching a tag, I search the note containing the list of tags and copy the tag I want. Then back in the note list, in the search bar I search for the tags like this:
/"(cooking tips)"
That will list all the notes containing (cooking tips) in it. Note that in order to match the text exactly, it is required to surround it with double quotes and prefix with the forward slash in order to include any special characters (such as the brackets) and spaces as a single search token to search by. The search however is case insensitive, so you don't have to worry about matching the case of the tag
Thanks. So Joplin actually allows one to search for special characters, but OneNote doesn't. So you have to name the tag like "00cookingtips" in OneNote.
Nice system, @mrjo118. I'll add to the thread that there is a plugin for managing and searching inline tags in a way that is compatbile with many other note apps. Tags are displayed in multiple columns and can be filtered / searched to narrow the list of tags.
I did come across this plugin before. At the time plugins were not available for mobile though and I am mostly a Joplin mobile user. I've just given that plugin a go on mobile and there doesn't look to be any GUI implemented to be able to search the list of tags unfortunately
I just did a little experiment with OneNote for Mac.
It should be suitable to define inline tags like this in OneNote: #cooking-tips
Then search for it like this:
"#cooking-tips"
While it's true that special characters are ignored in searches, the hash character is not. The hythen is ignored, which means searching "cooking-tips" would match "cooking tips". However if you include the hash at the start, then it would match "#cooking-tips" and "#cooking tips" but not places without the hash at the start. If you had another tag called "#cooking-tips-2" though, then searching for "#cooking-tips" is going to match both tags. You can avoid this by defining your tags like "#cooking-tips#" with the hash on both sides instead
Interesting, Windows users have complained for years and it's still impossible to search for # in Windows OneNote. I just tried and # works on iPad too. Well, I will have to keep using 00, which is not too bad, if one is diligent enough to manually maintain a list of tags. Thanks.
It looks like I was looking at the similarly named 'Inline Tags' plugin, not the 'Inline Tags Navigator' plugin. That's pretty neat, particularly because it shows the context of where the tag is within the note when you search
