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

Like Sophia, my biggest change is shifting to more of an outline view with notebooks, sub-notebooks etc. and less tags I could never remember anyway.

2nd biggest one is a better clipper. So, webpages I did clip were better and could now be edited because MD is understandable and I’m not stuck with stuff from a page I don’t want.

3rd biggest improvement was being able to access all my notes on my Android tablet even if off-line.

4th. I think I use it more because it is quicker.

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I budget, keeps special work notes and am looking to build a blog from some of my content. I used to use OneNote extensively but its lack of official Linux support and yearly price gouging made it harder and harder to keep renewing my Office 365 subscription. Also, setting up my own nextcloud server was a blast; I learned quite a bit from it. :wink:

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On the desktop, the look and feel of Joplin is different from all native applications, so it requires a mental switch when using Joplin.
Among many things, I find the multi-pane approach (desktop) unintuitive. For an overview of my notes I need a folder hierarchy (left pane), a notes list (middle pane), and one or two editor panes (yes, the WYSIWYG editor is an improvement).

It would be much more logical and intuitive to have a single notes tree view:

Notebooks
+ Projects
  + Project 1
- _Overview
+ Design
  - Designdoc
  - Report
+ Progress
  - Note
  + Project 2

Right click on a folder in the left panel should give the option to create a new note here.

So I find myself mousing and clicking more than with my current note apps. Even invoking Joplin from the system tray requires two clicks instead of one.

Also, the Synchronize stuff should go to a status bar.

Also, the tags should be a separate part of the left panel, with a fixed (though user movable) separator. Now the tags move with the folder view, and go out of sight if I expand too many note folders.

Also, not using system fonts is ugly:

x

Even though I try, things like described above make me still use my current note apps.

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I used to use Evernote as a massive archive for all my PDF files. The ability to search in PDF files was valuable to me, or at least I thought so. I decided to switch away from Evernote mainly due to wanting to own my data. Evernote was also relatively expensive. I exported all of my PDFs from Evernote and now keep them all in a self-hosted Nextcloud - and to my surprise, I do not even use my PDFs all that much. I can still easily find my PDF files when I do need them.

I use Joplin to organize my thoughts, to keep an archive of text notes, web clips, and a lot more. My sincere thanks to the Joplin author and team for the amazing work they’ve done!

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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.