Joplin-mcp: Smarter & Faster

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Hey all,

We've overhauled the belsar-ai joplin-mcp server over the past couple months — it's faster, uses far fewer tokens, and gives you much finer control over your notes.

Here's what changed:

  1. Script execution instead of 1-1 endpoint mapping. We moved to a guided, semi-isolated JS VM execution environment, inspired by Anthropic's research on code execution with MCP. The result: better performance with significantly lower token usage.

  2. Human-readable tool output. Output is now pretty-printed with emoji formatting, so you can read it directly in the tool window. The LLM no longer re-prints everything, which cuts clutter and context bloat.

  3. Surgical note editing. You can now request a table of contents for any note — generated server-side, so only the TOC itself hits your context window. From there, you can read or edit specific sections of a note without pulling the whole thing. The MCP server handles tool selection automatically.

  4. Per-project notebook scoping (optional). Drop an mcp-config directory in the root of any project to set a default notebook and limit which notebooks the MCP server can see. If you're working across multiple repos or jobs, each one gets its own scope — better focus, better privacy.

TLDR: joplin-mcp is a lot faster, leaner on context, and now supports fine-grained editing and per-project privacy scoping.

Our team uses this every day for collaboration, so we're going to keep supporting and refining it. Give it a try, and if you run into any bugs, open an issue on GitHub — we're nice :slight_smile:

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Thanks for sharing this! I've been meaning to try it and will do so quite soon.

For those interested, here's the video which gives a good idea of the server can do:

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Happy to share! I’ve been using Joplin since the late 2010s as a broke, self-hosting student.

Now that I’ve got a team, we’re finding that notebook sharing with Joplin Cloud + mcp is such a great way to work. We’ve got admin/legal, onboarding, SEV response, product planning and dev notes all as shared notebooks over Joplin Cloud. And using MCP with that setup lowers the mental overhead of e.g. picking up another engineers work and getting up-to-speed really fast.

Kind of like a Joplin-spin on what folks might do with tools like Notion.

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