I liked Todo and reminder features but maybe can be improved.
I want to see:
I select a text inside a note
right click
Add link
(A small box opens) I start typing
Note titles appear
I select/click the title I want
And the text I selected becomes clickable.
When I click on this selected text (depending on my setting) I go directly to the note, or a small preview window appears, or a new panel, tab opens on the side. I read easily.
The interface should be further polished. Although Joplin has a simple and beautiful interface, Obsidian, which I met later, winks at me.
The only thing missing for me is 'outlining' where text can be 'folded' and also sections can be easily moved around, along with their 'children'. For exactly what I mean see the app 'Folding Text'. https://www.foldingtext.com/
I jumped over from Evernote about a year ago due to the price hikes and nervousness about where the company was going after the buyout. I imported all my notes to Joplin, but still kept my eye out for other options, since there were a few things that bugged me. Nothing else fitted the bill though.
Over the course of 2023 and early 2024 a few additions have happened which have closed the remaining gaps with Evernote, and I am now a very happy user. The great things that have now cemented me into a longer term Joplin user are:
Preview of Notes in Note List - so great to finally have this in place. The thumbnails and text summary in the note list is working great through the plugin. Kudos to @JackGruber and of course the Joplin team for extending the API.
OCR - game changer. Thanks @laurent this is awesome. One of the biggest things I missed after moving from EN.
Customisation via CSS - Not really a 2023 development per se, but I am one of those people that likes the interface to be the way I want it. I know officially unsupported, but I really wanted to give the interface a bit of finesse. For those interested, my Joplin interface looks like this:
And just as a bit of extra info, I was missing ways of clipping emails or web pages exactly as I found them into Joplin. I spend most of my time in the markdown editor and hardly use the viewer at all, so I wanted some way of seeing those clipped items in the markdown editor. So I use
Fireshot (free) - which snips web pages as an image through a browser extension. The image can later be scanned by OCR of course. I get clips showing exactly as displayed in my browser. The image is easily saved into my hot folder and imported into Joplin.
The Rich Markdown plugin then allows me to view images in the Markdown itself - so I pretty much never look at the viewer, except to view PDFs.
In 2024, I would like to see
As many people have mentioned here, the mobile app does need improving. Waiting for the sync when you open the app, before you can give the hotel receptionist your booking reference number is a bit embarrassing...! I have also noticed broken image and PDF links in the mobile app, when the files look fine on the desktop. Just needs a general overhaul.
More viewers/editors for common productivity apps or websites. Maybe a contentious one, and likely something to be done as plugins rather than bloat the core build, but I did like the fact with Evernote that a link to a youtube video would show a preview of that video in the note... or you could see a preview of an attached Excel file without opening it. These are just two examples.
PDF viewer in the Markdown editor. I know this will be a contentious one, but as I mentioned, I never go into the viewer, so it would be huge for me to see either a thumbnail clip or the PDF preview itself embedded in the MD, just like I have with images.
I would like to have the option to mark certain notes or categories in such a way that they do not get synchronized and are available only on one device. This is necessary so that work notes remain only on the work computer.
Joplin is not able to work the way you request it here. But you can create a second profile for work and work completely independent from your private notes. You'll find details in the forum or on the Joplin page. Just a sidenote: the data of both profiles is seperated. There is no way to interact with "the other" profile.
Not quite the PDF-viewer in the markdown editor feature, but ā¦ I emulate the page using CSS. I.e., in dark mode I create a white-backgrounded, US-letter-sized rendering that turns out to be close to the final result. It doesn't page, of course, but ā¦ it's a close approximation. This I do with some far-trickier-than-one-could-imagine CSS in the userstyles.css file.
And then, because I am a writer, I generate manuscript-ish renderings for sharing with critique partners and whatnot. I do this with a whole stack of CSS I pull in from an external source.
An in-app PDF renderer would be a nice-to-have for me. But I wanted to share with folks what is possible ā¦ What I used to fill in that need for myself.
Currently there are two search functions, there should be only one. The first generates a list of notes that contain the search term. The user then has to open one of the notes, even if there is only one to choose from. Then the user has to click EDIT. Then a magnifying glass icon will appear and the user has to click that icon. Then the user has to re-type the search term and tap on the magnifying glass again. No display of the total number of hits, so the user has to tap tiny arrow icons to jump to each instance. To revise the search term requires the user to backspace and retype because the X icon just closes the search box without clearing the search term field.
An example of how simplified search should work can be found in the Chrome web browser.
I only began using Joplin in December 2023, so all of last year's features were probably already there.
I am very grateful that Joplin exists! From 2015, I had been sharing the family recipes (two notebooks: one of < 600 notes and the other < 400 notes), by way of shared Evernote folders, and was horrified that Evernote had decided to so severely restrict what would be available in future to free users and that the cost of everyone in the family still having access to the files would be so prohibitive. Thank you to the creator of Joplin and to all who are working to make it even better!
I said in another post that it would be nice to be able to mark a notebook and/or individual notes as read-only. I am sharing a library with family members, each of whom has their own personal folder, but also read-write access to all the other folders. We share a lot of trust between us - I don't think anyone would do anything malicious - and I make regular backups and have turned on the feature that saves previous versions - all of that is really good - but there is one folder that is of interest to all of us as a reference, and it would be good to protect it from inadvertent change, or accidental deletion, or even well-intended intentional change except by selected members/admins.
Another feature I would like to have is to be able to click on Tags and see, in a big area to the right of the Tags list, all of the Tags that currently exist - as many of them in one window as possible - so that I could see all of them at once without having to scroll down in the list on the left.
I would prefer to use the Joplin Cloud, but it was unclear to me how that would be charged. If only I would be required to pay and everyone else could share for free, I would pay. I tried to ask if all of us would have to pay an annual fee to use the Joplin Cloud somewhere in one of the discussion categories, but no one ever answered me, so since my partner has a paid Dropbox subscription with almost limitless space (we only need about 1 GB), we are using that for the cloud. Everyone has to connect to his account to set up the link, but it's just a one-time operation for each device (unless they lose or replace their device, then it would have to be done again). The downside of this implementation is, as I said, that everyone who is sharing the library has full editorial control over the whole installation and could even delete everything accidentally, so I'm making backups every day, sometimes twice a day. I have three profiles - the one for the shared library which is connected to the paid Dropbox account, and two others which are connected to free Dropbox accounts. I use one of these for my private notes, and the other one for testing of the import/export files, and also for playing around with how to organize and name the folders in the shared account. It is on my to-do list to make a donation to Joplin on behalf of all of us at some point, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
Not really. Some of us are more active than others, and we are in different time zones so, at least so far, there have been only two users at one time in the library. What kind of issues do people have? Maybe things have happened that I didn't notice.
I agree that syncing in some circumstances takes far too long time, e.g. using OneDrive because there's no delta sync in place. But one of the advantages of Joplin is its default offline mode: Everything is local, unless the user chooses attachments not to load automatically.
So when you open the mobile app frequently enough your booking number should be there right from the start, even if the phone is offline...
