What features did you like in 2023 and what do you want to see in 2024?

I just downloaded Joplin to see what it's was all about. I'm a Mac user that's been using Circus Ponies Notebook and later Notetaker for a couple decades. There is a UI paradigm that's become ingrained into my mind that Joplin doesn't appear to offer i.e. hierarchical disclosure triangles for collapsible paragraphs where you can easily reveal/hide further details. Between that and the apparent lack of formal iCloud support I'm going to pass on Joplin for now, but figured it couldn't hurt to post my reasons here.

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It would also be nice if the global and per-notebook sorting settings would sync with mobile. It seems like mobile only has one global sort option that doesn't sync with desktop (unless that exists somewhere and I'm just not finding it?) (I'm on Android for now.)

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Improving the UX in mobile is also the most important thing from my point of view, so it's great to hear that more things are planned here.

Above all, it would be nice if the sorting functions could be aligned with those of the desktop app:

  • Enabling manual sorting of notes
  • Syncing of per-notebook sorting settings between the clients

After that, more WYSIWYG capabilities for the mobile editor would be great, especially if the images were visible during editing instead of just their ID.

Improvements to the sidebar are also very welcome, I've already given some input on this:

It's very great that huge progress has already been made in mobile UX in 2023, including:

  • new text editor
  • parenting of notebooks
  • redesign of the settings dialog

Thanks to the developers for your great work over the last year!

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Excellent that search on mobile also catches partially matching strings now. Only whole words were matched previously. Now if you look for "seo", you'll see notes titled Seoul instead of just SEO. Thanks for the enhancement!

Can choose two top features? Joplin now defaults to AES-256. Upgrade was reverted because of performance.

I'd like to see external links to Joplin actually opening the correct note in the Joplin app on mobile. For example, a URI like joplin://x-callback-url/openNote?id=[ID] should open the correct note in Joplin.

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Thank you for this indispensable app. I converted hundreds of pages last year from Wikidpad, and will never go back. I auto sync to my OneDrive storage and am very happy with the UI.
I have two small (I think) requests. The first is a quick way to (recursively) collapse the notebook explorer tree on the left and close it all up. The second is to have breadcrumbs (a path tree) displayed for each note. Sometimes I'll do a search and find the correct note, but then don't know where I am in the notebook tree.
I wish everyone a great 2024!

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what features we should prioritise in the coming year!

I would love to see the following in 2024:

Desktop:

  • +1 for a trash folder
  • Multi-window support

Mobile:

  • Plugin support
  • Ability to share notes as PDFs
  • Ability to import from JEX
  • iOS shortcuts support

+1 for this!

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Best of 2023:

  • biometric protection
  • external url handler (desktop only), to link from other apps to Joplin
  • drawings

Wishlist for 2024:

  1. WYSIWYG on mobile.
  2. Good tag UI on mobile.
  3. external url handler on mobile
  4. OCR for drawings, like Samsung notes.
  5. mobile plugins
  6. plugin sync. Having to install the same plug-ins on each PC is horrible. There are a lot, some of them duplicate features, some require several restarts until properly configured. Besides, if we had mobile plug-in support, the same would happen with mobile and tablet.
  7. App layout sync. Following the previous point.
  8. UI modernization. Joplin really looks old.

In case there are technical limitations on having mobile plug-ins, these are the ones that I really miss in Joplin mobile: quick links, backlinks, link to anchor, sidebar TOC and link graph. Basically the right-hand bar of obsidian, which is a marvelous design. IMHO Joplin should have something like that out of the box.

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I liked this year

  • that I switched to Joplin Cloud and synchronisation was so much better!
  • that Joplin feels like a really safe place to keep my datat

For next year

  • Line spacing in WYSIWYG editor on Windows is still buggy - why are lines more closely spaced when initially writing a note then get further apart when you go back into edit the same note?
  • When you press Ctrl-V to paste a link. why doesn't it get pasted as a link? This would be better than making the user manually insert it
  • there's an issue where using tab to go through the cells in a table sometimes doesn't work
  • coloured highlighting (user chooses colour) in the WYSISYG editor would be great!
  • WYSIWYG editor to be able to show math block calculations
  • WYSISYG editor for iPhone app please!
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I hope to see it more like Evernote, with a top-down view, showing note titles in top, and contents in the below.

Also, have the option of changing font size and colors, for both the list and notepad.

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Actually I don't really have a thing that was best about last year. I think all the features I'm using were already there :wink:

There are only two little improvements regarding file attaching that come to my mind for this year:

  • There is an option to manually download attached files already. This helps to save space, but a option to locally delete a resource while still being kept on the server would be lovely! I have space problems on my laptop and once had to resync everything just to remove all locally saved attachments.
  • Somehow I don't like how the external opening of attachments works. As soon as you accidentally switch to another note and then save the externally edited file, it ends up in the Joplin directory and has to be manually retrieved from there. I don't know if that's a good solution, but perhaps you could activate and deactivate a permanent monitoring period in the context menu, which would then always check when the note is opened to see if there have been any changes and then apply them.

Thanks to all of you for your work and only the best wishes for this year!

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First I would like to thank the team for the excellent work.
Most extremely welcome in 2023 : including freehand drawing. This resulted in an enormously faster work process for me, compared to switching to a draw app, saving then including the drawing in Joplin. Indeed that's the first time in my life I went to using a prerelease app version in order to get this feature earlier on!

Two wishes for 2024 :

  1. when adding a picture within Android, the camera interface we get is the simplest possible -among others, impossible to zoom wth two fingers. So at this moment, including a seious pic in Joplin means switching to the actual camera app, zooming etc., taking the pic, getting back to Joplin and asking it to include that pic. A better camera internal handling would enormously save time, exactly like incorporating the freehand drawing did this year...

  2. being able to easily sync with two or more servers. I understand this is actually feasible through different profiles at this moment, but at least a clear step-by-step how-to would be helpful for me , including how to copy/paste or internally clone a note between two profiles.
    In my case this would help me to switch from my basic Dropbox server to the more serious Joplin ones without feeling it risky...

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Indeed, 'cloning' a note this way would be very useful between different profiles too, of easy...

I had to think hard about this because I love Joplin so much that I don't notice any obvious gaps but now that you mention it I think an improvement in the search would be welcome and possibly an advanced search.

There is already a "advanced" search, see Searching | Joplin and Search Filters | Joplin

Nice, I did not realize that already exists. I'll use this as needed but it would be a nice feature to have a traditional gui advanced search

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For me, the web clipper is still a great feature. Haven't tried pen support yet.

For 2024:

  • A better WYSIWYG editor. Current one is quite buggy and does not always convert well back into markdown. Maybe you can revisit the upgrade to TinyMCE 6 again?
  • Transclusion of notes would allow for a much more dynamic hierarchy
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And of course the other way round: ability to share PDFs into Joplin notes. I don't know about Android, but in iOS the only way to attach PDFs is to open a note, press "attach" and select a file. Perfectly ok as a workaround, but strange enough that the share sheet for PDFs doesn't include Joplin as a possible target.

Herve, I'm thinking of the way Zotero works, for example: the note can be assigned to multiple folders, but there is just one note, not a clone/copy. When the note is updated anywhere, it is updated everywhere.

@lee I fully agree, that'd be ideal for me. But I was thinking of duplicating to a different profile in fact, where no transfer is possible if I understand correctly...

Isn't that what tags are for? I realize that isn't the way most people use Joplin, but the tag paradigm is the solution to having things in more than one "folder".

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