Plugin: support Excalidraw in joplin

Plugins
21

v1.2.0
Support excalidraw dialog

It seems that the panels are not very easy to use, so excalidraw panel will be discarded.

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image2560×1390 130 KB

2 Likes
22

I was very happy to find an Excalidraw plugin for Joplin. I'm a big Excalidraw user on my Nextcloud instance. Thanks for creating it. :heart:

At the moment I've installed version 1.3.0 but it does not seem to be working on Joplin 2.9.17 (prod, darwin).

I see in the github repo an issue it's not working for others.

One question - is there anything (startup logs, etc) we can provide to help debug the problem? I'll have a look today myself to see if I can figure out what's goung wrong.

1 Like
23

possible solution (worked for me):

  1. open Help-->Toggle development tools.
  2. look in the log for an error similar to the following one:
joplin.plugins: Uncaught exception in plugin "com.joplin.excalidraw": Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, stat '/var/folders/z8/6_9tvj2d6931fmn5q64r1xjm0000gn/T/joplin-excalidraw-plugin/'
  1. create the missing directory.
  2. restart Joplin.
2 Likes
24

Hea @shikuz thanks very much for that. I didn't see that in the github issue thread, or anywhere else. I'm going to post that in the thread in case it helps people there.

@artikell are you interested in some usability and UI suggestions?

25

Welcome, I don't have a good idea at present. The current goal is to meet the needs.

26

Fascinating plugin. You made me discover this app. Thanks.
Just have a naive question to be sure. The excalidraw file, made with this plugin in Joplin is local and doesn't require internet, right?

27

Yes, you're right

28

I have been an excalidraw user and love the simplicity compared with say Miro canvas. Then I came across notion and obsidian about the same time. After hitting the block limit with Notion, I stayed with obsidian. I was searching for a better text presentation of the notes and I landed up here with Joplin. I am glad that I came across this product which seems to have a better notes document rather than plain vanilla markdown due to its rendering capabilities.

Excalidraw panels are very easy to use and are excellent for color pallet, sending layers back etc. Excalidraw is the most popular plugin for Obsidian, another note taking app. If you can implement full fledged excalidraw support without any changes that would be great. If any, supporting markdown links from Excalidraw back to the notes would be a great integration.

1 Like
29

This is a great plugin, and on Ubuntu 22.04, I got it to work after adding the missing directory with mkdir /tmp/joplin-excalidraw-plugin/ as the current user (not root).

The problem I am finding is that I have to do this every time I reboot my laptop, which is a shame. So something must be removing the directory, unless, I need to be using root and changing permissions.

Any help much appreciated.

2 Likes
30

What you need to do do make it work:

  • disable & delete plugin from Joplin if it was from official repo;
  • clone GIT repo of the following fork which fixes the minor issue
  • make sure Yarn and NPM are installed
  • navigate in terminal to root of cloned repo

Set the NODE_OPTIONS environment variable

Windows (Command Prompt):

set NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider

Windows (PowerShell):

$env:NODE_OPTIONS="--openssl-legacy-provider"

Linux/macOS:

export NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider

After setting this environment variable, try running the build:

yarn install
npm run dist

It will log at the end of last command the path to generated JPL file.

  • copy file from mentioned location

Install the Plugin in Joplin

To install the plugin, you can manually place the .jpl file into Joplin’s plugins folder.

On Windows:

C:\Users<YourUser>.config\joplin-desktop\plugins\

On Linux:

~/.config/joplin-desktop/plugins/

On macOS:

~/Library/Application Support/joplin-desktop/plugins/

Big thanks to @gnsiva and @artikell!!

1 Like
31

No worries @executed! Thanks for the write up!

32

Keep coming back to this post, just noticed the update - Thank You @gnsiva

I am afraid that I am not understanding the above instructions @executed . I have cloned the repository to my Ubuntu 24.04 Laptop, navigated to the excalibur-joplin folder and used the
export NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider
I then ran yarn install and I get
00h00m00s 0/0: : ERROR: Syntax error: unknown step: command printf %s\\n "$NPM_GLOBAL_MODULES"
Running with sudo - same result.

Not sure where to go from here. Any help much appreciated.

TIA

EDIT: I removed excalidraw from the plugins folder first!