My Attempt To Leave Evernote For Joplin - ATTEMPT NO #3

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My Attempt To Leave Evernote For Joplin - ATTEMPT NO #3

Hello. I'm writing this because, for about the last 3 years or so I have been celebrating an annual holiday known as Evernote-is-crazy-hiking-their-prices-uhhhh-is-Joplin-good-enough-to-use-yet. Or EICHTPUIJGETUY. I have written a previous thread similar to this back in 2024.

I am a woefully seasoned Evernote user, who has used it since **checks notes** 2009?!? As you might rightfully assume, I have an absolute shitload of notes.
Also, Evernote has shit the bed forever ago, in a way that was cute to entertain just so long as V5 still worked and sync'd ok. But since they forced everyone to V11 a couple years back, lines were crossed, and I decided I need to get out.

I like Joplin. I'm literally coming to you Joplin begging, pleading, wanting with all of my spirit to be able to use Joplin. I've tested every single note taking application I could find for 3 years and Joplin is basically THE WINNER, in terms of trying to approach something remotely on par for Evernote. I like Joplin because it is a solid open source project that feels it is trying to be a genuinely useful human tool and not trying to shove me towards a dark pattern behavior like Evernote has been. My "second brain" as it were, is not held ransom to a subscription fee with Joplin. Paying Evernote feels like paying a ransom.

Why it's been so frustratingly hard to leave Evernote.

I have tried out a CONSIDERABLE amount of note taking apps in the last 3 years or so, and I am extremely disappointed that they all seem to revolve around extremely basic and (frankly) blank looking layouts + tools. Obsidian for example, is a heavy text application and doing intensive like inserting a lot of images into a note or creating a gallery of media/images clipped, it falls apart quickly. I'm a multi media artist, my Evernote is a hog of pngs, jpgs, gifs, mp4s, mp3s. I believe a good modern note taking app should be able to handle all these relatively well- to be able to keep all the relative ideas & sketches, in whatever reasonable multimedia form they may take, in a close & accessible place.

Evernote has always been very good about handling images and audio files (after all it's one of the rare note taking apps that lets you clip the screen quickly into a note, which is HUGE, that ability changed my life). But since V11 their bugginess and dark pattern usage has significantly increased, and has been a loud and clear sign to get out of a roach motel before the door completely closes. I feel their peak design was V5, and I would live in V5 forever if I could (or if someone could figure out how to hack it to sync with Dropbox sanely). I am literally running V5 still for its screenclipper is simply that good, and I haven't found anything that matches it to be able to replace it.

I've attempted switching to Joplin multiple times during these last 3 years, but for various reasons I hit points that made me not want to fully commit, and just pay the Evernote ransom 1 more year instead. Thankfully, Joplin has been improving itself, making me always come back. Don't mistake me, I've also come to a certain amount of acceptance that a decent amount of my workflow will need to change, which is fine and natural, just so long as my core functionality requirements can be met in one way of another.

So here are the things I find myself stubbing my toe on while, for the 3rd attempt, converting to Joplin

Joplin Things That Are Annoying A Tiny Bit

  • Cannot open the Options menu in a separate window, it has to take over the whole main program and block you out from using it. Initially I thought, so what? But when I was trying to look through and setup my keyboard shortcuts (or see at least what they even were), it was a very tedious process. I ended up having to take screen shots and make a note of the all the shortcuts so I could view them and try them out at the same time.
  • No native ability to combine notes (fortunately there is a plugin that seems to save the day here)
  • The Note List Preview plugin is not something built into Joplin, because as someone with a visual media note library, it is one of the critical must-have features for me to want to realistically switch. Tragically the Note List Preview plugin does not work on the mobile version.
  • Cannot double click an image to quickly just open it in the associated OS viewer/editor (this is my bread and butter because I use XnView to quickly do things like resize and crop images when cleaning up notes)

Things That Impede Me Somewhat But I Can Learn To Live With (Probably):

  • Pressing Return generates a HUGE space (I'm assuming a <p>, and shift+Return is a <br> ). I don't understand this bizarre philosophy of ignoring general word processing interface standards for 40+ years- the only other place I feel like I've seen anything behave this particular way was like, Dreamweaver. Joplin is obvs a program that involves a huge amount of typing and organizing notes, and this is something that makes me really twitch just a bit every single time I press Return. In all fairness, Evernote NOW seems to do this as well, but the space it creates is not as obnoxious. I might have to edit the CSS to get this to a point that won't drive me insane, but frankly I would (if I were designing this app myself) just make it Setting, so that pressing Return would do a regular return and not a significant <p> one.
  • Need ability to use Windows key for the keyboard shortcuts. For example I always would use Windows + N to start a new note in Evernote, that way I could just fling a window open into focus and start typing immediately as the thought comes.
  • Cannot nest tags, but eh that's semi-fine because
  • The tag browser is pretty bare bare bones. It's just a vertical list. The good news is Joplin doesn't have to feel bad, everyone's tag browser is pretty terrible. The only one that truly impressed me with it's UX and great functionality was Evernote V5, and they got rid of it long ago. Screenshot here for context.
  • No ability to automatically send newly created notes to a specified default notebook. I find this crucial to my flow, because I will need to rapidly jot down a thought or a note and then close it immediately and get back to what I was doing. In Evernote I have it go to into a notebook named "Notes To Process", which is like a sort of inbox I review regularly to go back through, clean up the note, tag it, and file it into the relevant place. With Joplin, it appears to always make the new note in whatever last notebook I have selected, and as a result I have made new notes and then forgotten completely where they were because I was in the middle of working between several notebooks (my only hope is to go into All Notes and try to find it there and move it to where it should be)
  • As mentioned, there's no screen clipping tool for the desktop version. I've long already accepted this as something most note taking apps ignore, but it is incredibly incredibly useful.

Things That Are Making Me Considering Switching Back To Evernote:

  • TBH, the Pressing Return create a huge space instead of a next line, is borderline there.
  • Search functionality is extremely limited. Things like being able to limit searches to barebones traits like tags, notebooks, and date ranges are missing. I've come to realize (esp when tolerating Evernote's buggy search) what good are taking notes if you cannot ever find them?
  • No keyboard shortcuts to be able to select a body of text and set it to rapid access things like H1, H2, H3
  • No ability to set font size. I do realize this must be a product of Markdown, but I am a typographic layout nerd sometimes with my notes and having only H1/H2/H3 for my choices is woefully boring.
  • Joplin seems to support HTML but making a new note in a HTML format is not obvious (or possible?), and as a whole it seems to be pushing more towards Markdown. I need HTML support, as I have old notes that are extremely precious, in that they were clipped from websites that long no longer exist, possibly even from people that no longer exist. I chose Joplin specifically because it seemed to have the best importer, and mangled these the least.
  • ALL of my imported Evernote internal note links to other internal notes are now dead. I have hope I might be able to work on a basic plugin to help repair these, but it has taken 3 years of attempts to get to the point of saying I'll accept having to repair all these if Joplin can meet me on most of my core needs.

And Finally... The Unfortunate Thing That IS Making Me Switch Back To Evernote:

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I've managed to get mobile & desktop sync to work finally since writing this, so Joplin is back in the running. I'll leave the original details as follows:

I actually didn't plan to write this section when I began this post, but in the process of the whole evaluation I hit a snag that is an absolute deal breaker. If I cannot resolve it reasonably quick in the next week or so, I'm giving up, going back, and hopefully will have better luck next year.

  • Cannot get mobile sync to reliably work. I've made a separate thread to debug this in, to not distract from discussion (so please post fix suggestions in there).

    Anyways, my note library is fairly huge, easily over 27gb and I am using Dropbox to sync notes between desktop and mobile. After waiting for 2 days for everything on both sides to get pretty situated and uploaded/downloaded, it still throws a ton of errors about some items cannot be synchronized, and any attempts to Retry them seem to just fail again. I have no clear info from the app to go off here to know what to try.
    Additionally my very very basic test of "Will my new mobile Joplin note I just created show up on my Joplin desktop?" has completely failed. On top of that, a significant amount of notes are not displaying any of their images/attachments (huge deal breaker). The sync feels like it is never ending, especially on mobile that is always fetching items well into the 12,000s with every sync. To me this all sort of suggests that Joplin cannot currently handle a media database this big, reasonably. It's possible that if I switched to Joplin Cloud it would improve, since I've heard tales about similar programs like Obsidian being extremely clunky to use with Dropbox as their sync, but suddenly work like a dream when using the native cloud syncing service. But idk if I'm curious enough to pay for it just as a test to find out.

Honorable Joplin Mentions

I previously aborted out of switching to Joplin for a variety of reasons, BUT those reasons were surprisingly addressed in a way that got me excited to try out Joplin again. Things such as

  • The iOS application got a major facelift with the Rich Text Editor that made it a lot more reasonable to try and use. Having an okay/decent editor for mobile was one of my must-haves.
  • Notes can now be opened in pop out windows on desktop. Being able to have multiple notes open for cross referencing was another absolute must-have.
  • Tabs are now a thing. Not having tabs or indents in text was just too weird and it was made me abandon the attempt last year. So great work finding a solution.

Key Things I do like about Joplin:

  • Coming to Joplin after using the miserably slow and clunky Evernote V11 is refreshing, because everything loads quite fast even with my large database. With Evernote V11, visiting every single note feels like going to a clunky bloated webpage that is trying to load way too many javascript libraries.
  • Plugin functionality, this is a huge one. This gives me the hope and agency to be able to at least try to add in the functionality I feel is missing.
  • The open source structure is very encouraging. Even though I have never contributed to an open source project in my life, it's good to know that there IS a possible path there.
  • Is very privacy focused and is not actively trying to shove AI features down my throat
  • I can add tags to notes without modifying them and changing their modification date. This is HUGE. This absolutely drives me nuts in Evernote V11 where adding tags will update the modification date, especially since they also removed the ability to manually edit the modification date field. It ultimately made me avoid updating the tags on notes, which is stupid. Thank you Joplin for handling this RIGHT.

Anyways, that's my story. I'm posting this in the hopes it can provide some sort of useful feedback for areas to focus on and improve. I've worked in UI/UX design in the past so I am forever cursed to think about these things with every single program I ever use. Feel free to ask me for clarifications, and honestly let me know if I'm missing some possible solutions for some of these points. I'm also extremely willing to try and help when & where possible.

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Have you considered cutting down your note collection to currently relevant notes and keep an archive of the old ones?

Some people have made Joplin work with a massive note collection, but in all honestly it's not worth your time and effort to sync such a big collection with Dropbox / Onedrive, as the throttling makes them so incredibly slow to sync. Even if you did go for Joplin Cloud instead, I still think it will be easier for you to deal with a smaller note collection and you might not get these sync issues.

You could keep your archived notes in a separate profile in Joplin which is not connected to the sync and you just have access to on one of your computers. Then just make sure to make a jex backup of the profile in case anything should happen to it, as it's not synced.

Regarding the limited search functionality in Joplin, it is not that limited, but you have to know the syntax for relevant search filters. See Searching | Joplin

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Unfortunately it's pretty difficult to determine what will be currently relevant when it comes to certain interests, and having to search both a live system and then search an archive sounds frankly, not too enjoyable of a move.
It would be interesting to see a note taking application that would let you have integrated archives. For example there are plenty of notes I need only for reference now, and would like to lock & mark as read only, as I constantly have to be precious to not accidentally edit them and update their create/edited dates (in both Evernote and Joplin)

That's troubling to hear. I feel I'd be more willing to try and troubleshoot the sync issues if I could get a grasp more on what was the cause of them. I have no doubt importing 27gb of Evernote data is going to create a lot of cruft.

That's incredibly useful, thank you! I had tried the tag: syntax but wasn't completely sure based on the UX feedback if it was recognized/working.

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Try this plugin Joplin Plugins - Joplin Evernote Links Replacer

Yeah, I see. It's understandable. The alternative I can offer you is to use your favourite external editor (typora?) or Markdown editor in Joplin.

Shift+Alt+1/2/3

More Shortcuts Overview - #40 by Daeraxa

HTML is supported in Markdown editor instead of RichTextEditor (the one you're probably using). There you can just write\paste\use shortcuts to enter HTML tags to format the note the way you want. Switching to RichTextEditor should leave all the formatting intact

again, HTML tags in markdown editor

image
image1041×537 34.4 KB

Community members created several implementations of shortcuts for adding new notes. Off top of the search autohotkey one: Global shortcut key to quick-add new note - #2 by LeoW
It's fairly easy to preset specific folder where this shortcut will create new note. So, I think if you stay with us this time, I bet you'll handle it :wink:

Probably autohotkey should take care of this as well. Alternatively, you can automatically import screenshots you take natively (i.e. with OS/screenshot tools) to Joplin via hotfolder plugin

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I've made a similar move myself from Evernote and its clipper bringing around 13k notes at just under 5gb, and strongly suspect a good portion of your data must be images.

If you have an elaborate tagging system you may be able to search them efficiently, but I'd encourage you to consider whether you really need to keep them in a note taking platform.

If not I suggest 2 options. Either all export notes to markdown and re-import into a new profile retaining clean text notes, or second try to clean up your attachments and delete noisy stuff, in which case this may be useful:

I am personally holding off on this tool until I see a little more feedback, but if you have not yet made a commitment to joplin you have nothing to loose! Please share any feedback.

Good luck

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Alas I gave that one a solid go in my conversion attempt last year. After talking to the dev on here it seems to no longer be developed, and the logic it operates on is very much click & pray. I did try to use it for this conversion attempt and it failed to fix a single link, sadly. That said, I do have an idea for a plugin to repair these links if I am able to successfully stick to Joplin this time.

Sadly I don't think I can realistically do that. Having an extra step to editing every note by opening it in something else sounds like it would just slow down the process.

Oh wow THANK YOU. That was slowly starting to get to me. I will say though I REALLY WISH these were listed in the program, and were re-bindable. But for now I'll take just having a shortcut period as a blessing.

I'm afraid this is far too awkward of a workflow for me, having to manually write html/style code just for setting a font size, compared the word processing UX flow of having dropdowns to quickly set font sizes. At least having dedicated buttons on the editor bar to generate this automatically would be useful.

Thanks, that is useful to know as a means to tighten this up. I am getting the slight hang of having to press two shortcuts in sequence to get a new note window created and focused in the meantime.

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Yup, I'm afraid I really do. If anything, the process of trying every single note taking application I can find for the last 3 years, has truly hardened that.

Unfortunately going pure markdown/text is a severe deal breaker

It's difficult to know what is causing problems and what is "noisy" per se without much further insight on where the bottlenecks in Joplin's infrastructure are (though it still is amusing considering Joplin displays my data far faster than Evernote V11 dreams it could). But that tool seems possibly useful to at least take a look around. Thanks for sharing.

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You can use this plugin instead to clean up orphan resources. This has been around a long time:

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thanks, will take a look, but while I am not 100% certain of the definition of orphaned i joplin-speak, I'm pretty sure a lot of my image bloat was captured with the old evernote webclipper, and as such are likely not strictly orphaned but rather belong to a parent note. Will take a closer look tho, thanks!

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Well exactly! Your Evernote vault may be a highly prized archival resource, but if my experience pre-evernote migration is anything to go by, when it comes to search and retrieval fuggedaboudit lol. With Joplin you can actually find stuff and it is super quick and highly useable especially if you can remember tag names (wildcards also work in the tag:"xyz" search)

I did take a closer look at that tool recently but without installing it, and from what I could gather from the screenshots, what would make it significantly better for my use case is to have a way to multi-click/select items from the list for deletion etc (assuming I didn't miss that). Just in case the developer is lurking!

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The other trick maybe of interest is if you export your entire corpus using file->export all->md+ front matter, you will get a _resource directory containing all non-text related stuff. Another way of trying to 80/20 what exactly is chewing up your disc space, again with the possibility to reimport preserving metadata hopefully after having pared things down!

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Just a notable mention of this plugin

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Excellent points! I have recently migrated to Joplin and I am very happy. A have been a Evernote user since old times, but they really crossed a line recently. Glad I found Joplin. I imported all my notes and I am being able to work around the functions I find missing. A fair price to pay for liberty! I hope those issues listed in this post are someday implemented as soluitions. For now, congratulations for what is already in place!!!

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  • Search is fine. Learn to use it properly.
  • Notebook size has nothing to do with it
  • VSCode can be used as a super editor for Joplin
  • They ARE keyboard shortcuts for H1, H2, H3
  • HTML IS SUPPORTED
  • Create huge space can likely be solved with a custom theme
  • Screen Clipping - Joplin Web Clipper Browser Plugin
  • Joplin Hot Folder ingests anything as a note
  • Sync has worked fine for YEARS
  • Dropbox sucks, Go with S3
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I came from Evernote by way of lots of different apps in between. I think I left Evernote at version 4.

Anyway, many have already answered some of your original questions. Looks like most of the discussion after the OP was about getting all your notes over.

I am unfamiliar with how Dropbox works with Joplin as I have only ever used Joplin Cloud. But I did learn a very important lesson recently after a self-created disaster that required restoring from backup.

When doing the initial sync, MAKE SURE you set the Attachment Download Behavior to "Manual" or "Auto" - rather than the default "Always". This speeds up sync considerably and is the only way to initially sync to mobile unless you are willing to plug your phone in, turn everything else off (including screen timeout - keep screen on) and leave your phone for a few hours. Depending on your connection, whatever throttling Dropbox may use - it could be a long while.

Manual = have to manually download (click on an icon to download an attachment)

Auto = download attachments when you open a note.

Always = pulls in attachment with the note sync every time.

I do not know how these settings affect subsequent syncs. Someone with more knowledge of Joplin could answer. It may be possible to do an initial sync to get all the notes on your clients, then later turn on "Always" and bring over the attachments in a separate sync.

One last thing about sync that I wish was more widely published: the thousands of notes count reflects Joplin's versioning on initial sync. That's why you will see number of notes exceed your total notes count.

** I see your update that you got sync working. That's great. I hope the above helps someone who might be searching for help.

RE: other issues you mentioned

I am not bothered by the spacing so much because I spend 90% of my time in the Markdown editor or viewer. But I am particular about my eyes and what I have to look at for long periods, so I went into the app stylesheet as well as the Editor settings and experimented with different fonts and sizes until I landed on one for view and one for edit. (view is "pretty" and editor is a favorite monospace - the stark difference immediately tells me what mode I'm in).

One thing about resizing images: this is the only time I use Rich text mode. The reason for that is because in the Rich text editor I can click on an image and quickly resize it. It's less tedious than it sounds - I generally resize to 500 or 600px width, and just need to get close (within 5px or so), so I can resize pretty quickly. For me, this is done as part of the note clean up process. If your need is similar to mine (resize images to a reasonable/readable size in a uniform way across a note/page) then this may be your solution. I realize this is not the same as being able to click & edit - so actually editing the photo isn't possible. (I also use XnView)

RE: newly created notes to a specific folder

One solution to this is to install the Templates plugin. With that, you can set a hotkey to create a new note based on the default template. For you, it might be "Notes to Process" template. You can insert variables in the template including title of note, what notebook the note should go to, and any tags to add to the note. So you can put at timestamp in the title as you open the note, have the cursor in the body and immediately start typing. When you close the note, it will be in the notebook you designated and be tagged with whichever tags you have named.

If you don't like the template approach, you could use the History Panel plugin. It's a useful plugin that can be tied to a hotkey to show/disappear. It will show a history of notes that have been modified, grouped by day and sorted by most recent. So you could find a note created anywhere in Joplin if you know what day you created it. Assuming you process your quick notes daily, you only have to look at the Today grouping.

RE: Joplin search

Joplin UI search is woefully inadequate. That is, you cannot "build" an advanced search using buttons or drop-downs like you can in Outlook or Gmail, etc.

However, you CAN do very complicated searches if you know Joplin Search Syntax. It's tedious to have to always reference and type out, but there are a few workarounds for that. Using either the Favorites plugin or the Note Tabs plugin. Create a reference note with the Joplin Search syntax. I also use the top of this note for saved searches I can copy and paste into the search bar. Make this note a "Favorite" or using Note Tabs, make it a locked tab that will always be open when Jopin is open. (confirm both of these plugins work on Android mobile)

I absolutely adore Joplin. It suits me well, and the plugin architecture is a huge win for me. There are minor annoyances (like not having some kind of graphical "advanced search" and not having the ability to quickly and easily limit the scope of search to the current notebook or selected notebooks), but the positives outweight those annoyances by a very large margin (at least for my use case).

One final note: the Joplin community is one of the more engaged and helpful I've come across in years of online forums. This makes working through issues way less stressful. While the asshole quotient is remarkably low, so are the jokes. That might be my only complaint. The community can be serious. This is serious stuff. :smiley: