Promote Templates to a first class Item Type

Features
1

Templates are a way of creating a note or a todo based on a markdown template based on files that are in your joplin configuration folder.

However, the way things work now, these templates are only available on the device that actually has that template folder with the markdown files, and are not synced. This also means that (as far as I am aware) that mobile devices can't use templates at all

My suggestion is to promote these templates to a first class "item type", which can be just treated as a normal note in everything except the "item type " id, but show up in different spots (such as the 'new note from template' window).

With this change, templates would gain the following benefits:

  • will now synchronize across devices
  • the ability to use templates on mobile devices
  • can be versioned like normal notes can
  • can be encrypted along with the rest of the markdown files if an encryption key is provided
  • would help simplify code, such as removing the need to have filesystem detection of if the ~/.config/joplin-desktop/templates folder exists, refreshing to see if new templates have been added, and would prevent bugs such as the one I have reported where the refreshing sometimes doesn't work: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/3575
6 Likes
2

I think this idea is great!

But I can well imagine that for this not necessarily a new ID must be introduced. For example, each note could already be a template, which is used as it is. If special fields like "{{date}}" appear in this note, they will be treated special and filled in accordingly.

I already have three computers and my cell phone equipped with joplin, which works fine; but I see that with templates I have to synchronize extra between the three computers. Since this is too stressful for me, I have created a notebook for templates. Here are all "template notes" contained, which I only just copy to the relevant place where I need them. Afterwards I fill in all the special fields by myself.