What do you do differently in Joplin in comparison to other note taking apps?

Wouldn't that be too chaotic? I have more than 30 notes under some notebooks.

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You don’t have to unfold the folder unless you need to work with its notes.

In my (still) primary note taking app I have folders with 100s of subfolders and notes. Never got in the way.

@zen-quo, @sciurius is like me here. We both have problems with the UI and most of our issues are probably never going to be fully resolved. Mine are a compulsion to cut down UIs as much as possible (because i do not like most UIs). I’m not sure his full stance. Ha

My use of Joplin changes after a while.
First, I use it to replace DayOne (a great diary app on macOS I left when it came to the subscribe model).

I try then to use it as my only note app but it fails or I fail ; the amount of my job notes is too big, it needs a specific app to deal with, and Joplin stay better to be my side notes app, thoughts, ideas, writing drafts… ; I choose fsNotes to be my work notes app for a few month, and for the moment, the duo Joplin + fsNotes works.

What I frequently use in Joplin is the webclipper, which is very very useful to pick up an article you want to read deeply and cite a lot in a work. I use Joplin for that, in addition with Zettlr for the hard writing (if you’re a Markdown and open source lover writer, you should try this).

Thought the notebooks and sub-notebooks works right, I don’t use it as deep as I used it in MWeb, wich was my work note app, essentially because of the way Joplin stores notes, which is not transparent to me (cause of the json encapsulation). The way I loved in MWeb was that files and folder are stored simply in the Finder, and you can use the same folders and files with another app, without having to export them from Joplin. I would stay with Mweb but have a financial litigation with the author about an activation code that refuse to work and he refuse to hear about.

Finally, Joplin totally replace DayOne and help me to reorganise my notes, separate direct work notes from thoughts and drafts, and make notes shareable between the 3/4 apps of my eco-system of writing.

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This is a difficult problem to solve. To really improve the UI, we would need a skilled designer to look at it in depth over a long period of time, and unfortunately this is not cheap, and then that design has to be implemented, which often is also a huge task.

Software features can be improved incrementally over time by multiple developers, but that approach doesn't work for design - we can't add a padding here, a line there, it needs to be looked at in the context of the whole app. It's an all or nothing basically.

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Hi @laurent, I have pretty good experience in creating web UIs and Electron won’t be much different. I have created an illustration of my idea of Joplin’s UI.
Check this post I made in forum Here

Few features like Multiple tabs and Split screen, I haven’t seen these feature in any note taking app and would be great to implement

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Multiple tabs, split screens . . are wonderful features of Ulysses, the markdown writing and filing app that I constantly use . It’s MacOS and IOS only. But it’s so good, I even pay subscription to support it. And am willing to use a proprietary tool. rather than an open-source tool. It’s the one to compare with, I suggest. It’s not a note tool but a complete markdown doc writing and filing environment - better at the latter than Joplin, and better at the former too.

There’s no way I could substitute for this in Joplin, as is. The reason I remained in Evernote so long, and have now switched to Joplin thank goodness, is because Ulysses hasn’t managed to implement a web clipper that would enable me fluently to manage clips within Ulysses too. The features of Firefox don’t seem to enable them to create a clipper - their devs say (I don’t know what they need, since the Joplin Firefox clipper seems very good). And Safari is too mean with workspace, the Ulysses devs say, to implement a full clipper within the OS/browser environment. I did switch to DevonThink for some months, but it’s bloated and the UI isn’t wonderful. So Joplin is where I sit at present.

I don’t know how justified the perspective of Ulysses devs is, clipper-wise. But I continue to operate in two environments, Ulysses and Joplin. I suggest that you might study the features of both? The markdown editor and file system is great, and as a writer/drafter I won’t leave Ulysses. As a researcher, I’m happy to have Joplin. I can live with that, but having both environments combined . . is a fantasy I don’t spend much time in. I clip, and I write.

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Good input with the [toc].

I use Typora for long Texts also due to the better Export to Word capabilities.
I love Joplins functions and the plattform independence.

I´d love linking to a reference Managemtent tool or Zotero for the purpose. (just fantasizing)

I came to Joplin searching for an alternative to oneNote . This is as far as you might want to get… even better in parts (handling of external documents)

Michael

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I recently started using Joplin regularly. Had tried it a while back, but never really got into the different views for editing and previewing. I loved everything else about it - open source, multi-platform availability, flexible sync options, etc.

Now, I use Mark Text an external editor when I need to work on longer notes. The experience is just so much better. All I need now is a decent editor on Android, and I’ll be good.

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I was OneNote user until I found that it scans the text on images and I was concerned about that.

I tryed many other apps but Joplin was the best fit for my needs. I started with the version 1.0.177 and all of my wishes have been fulfilled on each new version.

As external editor I use notepad++ just to rearrange paragraphs and join lines but it is not too often.

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That is my experience as well. Well, most of my wishes :slight_smile: But in all truth, I started to use Joplin in conjunction with Evernote (keeping double notes for a while) because I tried so many other apps and always went (sometimes ran) back to Evernote. I tried OneNote, Dropbox Paper, Zoho Notebook, Notion and probably a number of others I don't even remember anymore... none came even close so I was very worried about Joplin at first.

Then I found about a week later that I had no intention of going back to Evernote... in fact I preferred Joplin in almost every way. So I stopped using it altogether and Joplin has been my main driver ever since... never looked back.

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I did not know about the [toc] feature; I'm glad you posted that. But when you say referencing to other notes files and folders, what do you mean? Is there a way to create links to other notes in Joplin? I haven't found out how. That is one feature (the only feature) I do miss from Evernote is being able to hyperlink to other notes.

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Right-click any note in the list on the left-hand side, select "Copy markdown link" and paste to another note.

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I understand what you mean.
I would love to have an editor that shows the formatting without hiding the Markdown code.
Or at least let's me write in Markdown and then shows the output directly.

This would be another nice improvement for Joplin.
Start to write a link in a specific form and it begins to auto complete the names of your notebooks/notes/titles like it is possible in Emacs org-mode.

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Yeah, this has been requested a few times here and on github.

In windows you can drag the note from the note list and drop in another note and Joplin creates the hyperlink for you. I don’t know if it works in other platforms.

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I installed Evernote only to migrate my notebooks from OneNote to Joplin. Evernote has some cool things such as thumbnails in the note list but, to me, that is a kind of “cosmetic” feature that I can live without.

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Joplin is my go too light weight way to grab some code snippit or take a quick screen shot of something. the web clipper is a nice tool especially for building a reference library. the app looks nice but I use it in the termnal mostly

I have tried to use joplin and other note talking apps and methods and about 4 years ago I used one note. Then I tried Org-Mode.

Yeah its not light. Yes its got some wierd keybindings… but because of what org is, and the fact that it is an editor thats actually a lisp interpreter… can org do… yes. the answer is just yes it can.

once you get you head around todos in your notes, with scheduling and deadlines, refiling single items form any note to any note. The easy cross linking and back linking its just incredible. and markdown is no problem for org to work with.

so joplin and other note taking tools always seem to be laking next to org and in my hands become extensions of org.

org-mode.

the org-roam package is getting insanely fast updates like 2 or 3 per day these days. also Deft is a sick packagke and with zettledeft can make links to links that link links blindly fast and you can build a second brain in days