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

[skullthug]

THE 2 WEEKS LATER POST

Alright, it has now been 2 weeks since this attempt began. I'm generally pretty pleased to say this year is likely going to be the one that sticks. I wouldn't call this without burden by any means, but even for all the warts encountered I've lost a significant amount of the temptation to stay in Evernote. I slowly found myself actually being excited to use Joplin and figuring out what it can do. I'm also much happier to take that $ that would have gone to Evernote and contribute it towards Joplin instead.

That said, there have been a lot of "oh I guess I have to live with that" warts encountered with Joplin. I am basically swapping the weird list of bugs I had to learn to workaround in Evernote for a new list of bugs I need to learn to workaround in Joplin, but with a better hope they can get addressed.

Things I've Discovered With Joplin That I love

• The whiteboard/vision board ability. Holy crap I have been wanting this feature for ages in Evernote, and seeing Obsidian doing it willy nilly has made me venomously jealous. So having this is a BIG selling point for me, especially for a visual & note taking library like mine.

• Jump to anything Ctrl+P feature

• This community seems pretty nice and helpful, I really appreciate everyone who has responded with plugin suggestions and tips. I've learned that Joplin search is actually pretty powerful, there are indeed shortcuts for the functions I wanted, and how to get my desktop & mobile to sync reasonably sane using Dropbox.

• Adjusting the CSS to make the huge new line spacing be far more tolerable (and closer to what Evernote V11 does) has brought me to the point of being able to make peace with it. Finding the CSS I needed to add though, was a lot of searching. I found the answer here For anyone curious, add this to your userstyle.css

  #rendered-md :is(p /* modify tags as needed */) /* affects Markdown viewer */,  
  #tinymce :is(p /* modify tags as needed */) /* affects Rich Text editor */ {  
    /* modify declarations below as needed */  
    margin-bottom: 0 !important;  
    padding-top: 0 !important;  
    line-height: 1.3em !important; 
  }
  

• I CAN EDIT THE LAST UPDATED TIMESTAMP ON A NOTE. Look, you might think this is silly but I cannot remotely stress how important this is to me, it was the initial fire that kicked me off to getting out of Evernote when they foolishly disabled being able to do this (and now talk about re-enabling it like it's going to be some sort of big innovation). I tried to live with not being able to do it, but I realize it just made me afraid of ever properly fixing/tagging my notes- that is no way to work.

• The plugin system, simply just existing. I've already begin experimenting with exploring and writing my own plugin to begin repairing some of the broken link holes created in the conversion from Evernote.

Further Things I Wish I Could Do With Joplin

(I understand these should be brought up as separate topics on the forum to be taken & discussed seriously, so I plan on doing that accordingly, but for now this is the gist)

• Put a link to a tag in a Whiteboard. Since Joplin doesn't support nested tags (and it sounds like it's not a simple task) theoretically with the ability to place tag shortcuts in a whiteboard, I could at least attempt to programmatically recreate something like this Evernote V5 tag browser in a visual whiteboard layout. Sort of like a grand Table of Contents for tags. Pan browsing a tag listing is much easier and faster than the rudimentary vertical list everyone shoves into the bottom left corner without thinking about how that scales.

• I DIRELY wish there was a means to be able to move a note that is currently open (in a new window) to a different Notebook. Like a button, or an command item in the MenuItemLocation bar. From what I can tell so far, the only way to move a note to a notebook is to drag it onto it ???
  This button appears in notes when viewed through a search, it feels like it would be a good potential button to bring up a Move-To prompt.
  

  

  Evernote V5 handles it in a way like this with a dropdown, and it is very convenient. This displays on every single note.
  

  

• Copy Tag(s) from one note and Paste their application to another

• Select some text and hit a button like Insert Link or Code Block, and have that select text auto-fill the resulting dialogue appropriately. This is fairly common UX standard.

• No keyboard shortcut for Strikethrough text???

Problems Discovered That On Occasion Make Me Wonder What-Have-I-Done

• Joplin seems to oscillate between very snappy and responsive, and then seizing up at random points. I've come to realize that this seems to correspond to the Synchronize function, that whenever it is running it will heavily bog down the responsiveness of the app. I attempted to set my Sync to occur every 10 minutes to accommodate for that, but it seems this might be a bug in the Sync interval is basically meaningless because I noticed Joplin will always begin a sync after editing and leaving a note. Right now I'm organizing, tagging, and moving a lot of notes, so am I very frequently triggering the sync to happen which makes interacting with the app frustrating.
• As a result there are many, MANY times, where the note I had selected suddenly was not selected, or something else ended up getting selected. Lots of weird UI responsive hiccups like this that can get frustrating, where it feels like I'm trying to click on a note up to 3 times because the list is currently in the middle of some weird update state.
• Sometimes having to fight the editor (see the culling space bug in the next section). Strange bugs where sometimes a note will get //'s placed in front of certain links every time the note is only merely displayed (not edited), and these will compound and I will find a note sometimes with literally ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// in it. I'm still working out how to reproduce this to be able to report it.
• The web clipper is decent, but it really seems to be a gamble whether HTML clipping or Markdown clipping does a better job, so I find myself doing both and see which result looks more tolerable to live with. In regards to preserving HTML somewhat reasonably, I would say Evernote's clipper does a better job (though I would never ever call it perfect either)

Bugs I'll Need To Report

I plan to report these properly via GitHub and such, but I thought I would mention them here in case anyone is familiar with workarounds or causes.

• Restoring a note does not restore the note with its original creation and modification date data, even though (at the minimum) the modification time stamp is clearly available since you use it to decide which version to restore
• Hour picker in the date created/modified UI is weird because it loops around, and it doesn't adhere to the 24 hour format settings in the options making it extra strange. In general this dialog is also buggy to interact with with.
• There only a "Permanently Delete Note" option in the MenuItemLocation Notes dropdown, but not a regular Move-To-Trash delete? I feel this specifically if I have a note open in a separate window and want to regular delete it.
• Converting a HTML note to markdown unfortunately does not preserve the former's noteID, so if anything was linking to that note before the conversion, that Joplin link is now broken. Since noteID can be assigned, this seems like it could be easy to fix in the Joplin converter code?? I'm currently converting a LOT A LOT of notes to Markdown manually, coming from Evernote, but this specific issue is also breaking my progress on attempting to make a Evernote link repair plugin, since if I repair the links but then later convert the note to Markdown, the links are broken again.
• Joplin will enter a weird state where it will aggressively cull the space I just applied in a note (like say after placing a period or a tab, it will auto-erase it if I don't continue typing after 1 second). Either that or it will actively jolt the typing cursor around, so that I'm suddenly typing inside the word I was trying to type out. This obviously, is crazy annoying, and I haven't been yet able to discern what weird circumstances are required to make it reproduceable. It seems to happen in notes with the Markup being Markdown, but notes that contain a mixture of things from HTML and Markdown (as a result being copy pasted or using the combine notes plugin)
• As mentioned before the Synchronization interval setting seems to be a little pointless? However it seems after I do anything (like move a note, tag it, or update a note and close it) the sync will kick off regardless.

At any rate, I'm pleased to say still interested in sticking with Joplin this time. There's a HUGE AMOUNT of potential here for this application, and I think with the right amount of fixes and polish put in a few places, it will go a very long way to improving the quality of life in the UX. While this would be my first time contributing to an open source project, I'm personally very interested in trying to figure out how to apply these fixes myself if necessary (though I also realize there is currently a pull request ban on anyone but core established contributors right now).