Note history feature now in Joplin

laurent · 2019-05-23T22:29:53.514Z

The latest versions of Joplin adds support for note history. The applications (desktop, mobile and CLI) now preserve previous versions of the notes, so you can inspect or restore them later on as needed.

A common complain with many sync-based note taking apps is that they work in an opaque way - sometimes notes are changed or they disappear and it’s not clear why…

Full post over there:

Patreon

Note history now in Joplin | Laurent Cozic and contributors on Patreon

Official Post from Laurent Cozic and contributors: The latest versions of Joplin adds support for note history. The applications (desktop, mobile and CLI) now preserve previous versions of the notes, so you can inspect or restore them later on as...

tessus · 2019-05-24T03:29:46.958Z

Great feature and thanks for the nice article.

There are 2 scenarios that should be explained as well:

how to delete revisions manually (this will come up a lot, maybe we should also create a FAQ entry or add it to the doc)
what will happen, if one uses 3 devices, but disables note history on one device

Then there is one sentence in the article that peaked my curiosity: Behind the scene, this is essentially already done since whenever a note is deleted, a final revision of that note is preserved. What’s missing is a user interface (i.e. the recycle bin) to view these deleted notes.

I think it’s very important to keep in mind that this final version must not be deleted when the days-to-keep threshold is reached.

Tekki · 2019-05-24T12:20:32.476Z

Maybe you should limit the number of old versions too?
Yesterday I had an issue after I’ve edited many times a big note (> 1000 KB encrypted). Joplin ended up freezing 5 seconds after the start. Not sure if it’s related to the history. Unfortunately I had no time to look closer at it, just wiped out the directory and resynced.

laurent · 2019-05-24T12:45:43.159Z

Tekki:

Yesterday I had an issue after I’ve edited many times a big note (> 1000 KB encrypted). Joplin ended up freezing 5 seconds after the start. Not sure if it’s related to the history. Unfortunately I had no time to look closer at it, just wiped out the directory and resynced.

Mobile? Desktop?

Tekki · 2019-05-25T04:41:02.827Z

laurent:

Mobile? Desktop?

Desktop, Win 10 Pro.

laurent · 2019-05-26T16:04:01.171Z

Tekki:

Maybe you should limit the number of old versions too?

Normally it saves a revision only every 10 minutes, and only the text that has been changed, so limiting the number of revisions should not be necessary. However it's possible there's a bug and too many revisions are created, but I would need more info to figure it out.

Tekki · 2019-05-27T06:52:18.059Z

laurent:

...I would need more info to figure it out.

I copied content from a html file again and again into Joplin and finally it was broken. Unfortunately I can't give any more information because I was a bit nervous and just went to WSL to type rm -r. After that I could add the same content and everything was fine.

peter-sc · 2020-04-25T09:52:36.943Z

Would it be possible to include a comparison view for note history revisions?
Something like diff, where one could see one note revision on the left, another note revision on the right and could easily see the differences, colorfully distinguished.

coderrsid · 2020-04-25T10:53:47.314Z

That’s a great news. The app development is getting better every day.

rxliuli · 2020-06-25T07:13:03.898Z

Awesome feature, hope to support web api calls, this is a great feature for vscode plugin, all modern text editors should have history function to avoid unexpected errors

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couches200000 · 2020-07-30T20:19:39.735Z

This is long after the fact but I am really liking Joplin. This feature saved my butt today. I will be sure to support your development.

stoffejs · 2020-09-15T17:47:25.740Z

Just signed up for Joplin after accidentally deleting an Office "Sticky Note" on android by somehow highlighting the entire note text and then when I tried to click somewhere else to unselect, the onscreen keyboard popped up right underneath my finger. So now my important list of things that I needed for work, is just "f"....

laurent · 2020-09-15T19:55:57.256Z

@stoffejs, it's probably too late now, but there's actually an undo button in the mobile version, so normally it would have been possible to recover the text.

diibv · 2020-09-23T00:03:32.618Z

Great new feature!

peter-sc:

Would it be possible to include a comparison view for note history revisions?
Something like diff, where one could see one note revision on the left, another note revision on the right and could easily see the differences, colorfully distinguished.

I agree, the diff highlights would make it much easier to see the differences between versions. This is especially useful, as the typical use-case would be (I guess) finding a particular piece of text that was lost in the latest version of a note.

For simplicity, diff can only show the difference between current version vs any selected old version. There can be a button to activate/deactivate this diff mode.

MapleLeafRag · 2022-01-04T16:40:56.704Z

Do exports preserve note history?

tessus · 2022-01-04T18:32:20.932Z

No

richarno · 2023-05-04T16:52:35.021Z

Many Thanks for this feature!

I was about to change to another tool just because of this (severely) missing capability.
I am now happy, but there is still some work to do on its integration into the clients.
BR

Carnarts · 2024-06-07T16:41:54.357Z

Hi, I just had an issue where a note I was writing directly into Joplin desktop on my PC was overwritten by an earlier version removing the passage I had just written, note history does not show anything. Not any previous version to go back to, the previous version is blank. What can I do to stop this from happening again as I will lose confidence in writing in Joplin if the text suddenly disappears....?

micmalti · 2024-06-08T16:34:59.707Z

Do you sync your notes across different devices?

laurent · 2024-06-08T16:48:30.452Z

This was a conflict so normally the version you're looking for is in the Conflict folder.