Plugin: Save Note as MD

I started using Joplin earlier this year and have been really liking using it for both my own personal notes/journal, as well as for my professional coding work - It makes it easier for me to quickly write up documentation that I can share with my colleagues when necessary. However, unless I am missing something obvious there is no built in way to just save these files as md files to use elsewhere or to share. I can export all my notes and rifle through them, or I can open in an external tool like vs code and save it there, but I cant do it from the editor, it takes extra resources, and it adds extra steps. Edit: turns out there IS a way to do it. This plugin is just slightly quicker as it doesn't prompt you for a folder structure every time and is built into the toolbar.

Today to solve that problem I wrote a quick little plugin that allows just that! You set the output folder in settings and then it adds a little button to the toolbar to export to a file in your selected folder.

Hopefully anyone who needs it enjoys it! If there is anything you would suggest just let me know! If it fits the scope I'll be happy to update it!

@joshthor welcome to the forum.

Apologies if I have misunderstood you but in addition to exporting all your notes in bulk, if you right-click a Notebook and select Export > MD - Markdown you can export the entire contents as Markdown files (as well as other formats). Likewise if you right-click a single note in the note list and select Export > MD - Markdown you can export the contents of just that note as Markdown (as well as other formats).


Export Single Note

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Wow!!! I was looked all over this application multiple times trying to figure that out. I couldn't find that through google searches, I couldn't find that by clicking around, I couldn't find any relevant tools or settings for it, but it was just in the note list.

I was worried I was missing something obvious

If I knew about this I probably wouldn't have made the plugin.

I was just seeing things like the file > export all, and the open in external editor button. I think that option should probably be added to the main file window as well, as that was not intuitive as a user.

That being said, I think my plugin is still helpful, even if it only lets me be a little lazy and not have to deal with setting the output folder every time. And now i know how to make plugins so next time i run into a feature that ACTUALLY doesn't exist ill be able to build something for it!

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If you use to Joplin to export notes or notebooks as MD files it also exports any attachments and modifies the links in the Markdown so that they work outside Joplin.

I only mention it as your one-button export into a set folder will likely be of value to some users' workflow, however they will probably want the attachments as well :slight_smile:

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Makes perfect sense! I didn't even think about attachments, it might be something I look into a bit down the road.

In my work I work with a bunch of different clients, and depending on the environments those clients want me working out of sometimes I have to provide documentation and install instructions for new feature sets I build. Markdown has made it really quick and easy to generate those to send out in a readable way, but I haven't yet had a use case yet where i had to export anything with attachments.

Ill have to play around with that and maybe add that as an option

Would the export to PDF option be of any use in this situation? They are text and so searchable, images would be included and any hyperlinks to external sites or within the document would work.

Many of the teams I work with work nearly exclusively from the command line (I have watched SO many hours on calls of them opening my files in vim to copy and paste things), so in those cases markdown is preferred. However, PDFs are definitely more preferred by their bosses - and now that you showed me the built in export tool, I will definitely be using that in the future for the business side clients.

Ya export as MD seems not really user-friendly for me.
Open Markdown file after Export, don't automatic link image to the _resources folder.
And after Copy and Paste Image, it would be nice if there were only the Image input without the Image names...

[Edit] the Image name problem is fixed by disable Allow to set image size and caption in Enhancement plugin.