Yet another Joplin convert. But what a journey! (Plus a little whinge at the end)

Ok. I was an Evernote user for years, and was happy to pay their fees for what the program did. I'm a university professor (music) and I used it to keep my class notes and readings in. However, over the years it became slower and slower as it (presumably) became bloatware. Thus I embarked on a search to find a replacement.

The first port of call was Nimbus. I don't recommend anyone goes near this. It ended up being super-expensive and, worse, it really does lock your data up. I've found a workaround to import data, but it's slow and I have a few files there.

The next port of call was Bear. Some may have read my complaint on the reddit group. Bear is a beautiful program, but it's taken so long to add basic functionality (like, you know tables). That was sort of a dealbreaker.

I then tried Scrivener. This is great for long-form writing, but not great for a note taking app. However, I love its iOS app, which is beautiful.

I looked at Obsidian briefly, but it didn't vibe. I get the idea of backlinks, but that's not what I use it for. And something about it seemed a little off.

Finally, I checked out Joplin. I'd checked it out in a half-assed fashion years ago. No idea why I didn't take it up. I'm used to Markdown, and have written academic papers in it before. More than any other program, it ticked most of the boxes. It integrates with my workflow well. I can write abc music notation in it. I can export to web easily. It does plugins. It has tables. :slight_smile: It also has a forward momentum.

If I was to say what would make it perfect, these would be on the list:

  • Find and replace. This is fairly basic functionality. Hell, Wordperfect had it.
  • The iOS app. I do a lot of writing on the desktop app, which is as good (or better) than Scrivener or Bear, both beautiful programs. But the Joplin iOS app isn't a great writing experience. Yet. I do a lot of my mobile writing on the iPad (I'm a minimalist writer), and usually I write in Bear and transfer to Joplin. I understand that the Google Summer of Coding is looking at this, and I hope the iOS experience improves.
  • I do miss the heirarchical tags that Evernote had, but it's not the end of the world.

So thank you, Laurent. Thank you contributors. While my coding isn't at this level (yet), I contribute financially to the project. I'll hopefully be with Joplin longer than the decade I was with Evernote.

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The iOS/Android apps should have this in the next release (beta editor only).

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It looks like the rich text editor has find and replace in the desktop app, too:


(Try pressing ctrl+F)

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Have a look at the Enhancement Plugin for Find and Replace in the markdown editor.

For global search and replace, check here

Might fill a gap for you.

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That's great, Johano. Many thanks. :slight_smile:

DDDot has backlinks if that at all interests you. I have that panel in my sidebar, but I use the plugin pretty much entirely for its recently-used notes list.

What I miss from Evernote is notebooks including everything below them when selected. So, if I have a Code folder with different languages as nested notebooks, selecting Code would include all of them in the list. I could pare down if I wanted, or I could use some UI element that said what notebook the note was in to know what I was looking at -- like Joplin does when searching

You can technically accomplish this kind of thing in Joplin with "namespaced" tags, code, code/js, code/js/react, and so on, eschewing the notebook system entirely, but it somehow doesn't feel right. I quite like Joplin, and I don't suspect I'll be going elsewhere anytime soon, but something about its organization still feels off to me. :woman_shrugging:

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You can technically accomplish this kind of thing in Joplin with "namespaced" tags, code, code/js, code/js/react, and so on, eschewing the notebook system entirely, but it somehow doesn't feel right. I quite like Joplin, and I don't suspect I'll be going elsewhere anytime soon, but something about its organization still feels off to me. :woman_shrugging:

Yeah, I am hoping for nested tags on day.

I was an Evernote fanboy for years using it to collect bits and bobs for non-fiction books I was working on but when they went fully on-line it ruined it for me (besides being painfully slow) as I do a lot of work without an internet connection. Been very happy with Joplin for the last year or so.

Your mention of WordPerfect (which I loved) reminded me of a luncheon I was at when I mentioned it at the table and received a bevy of blank stares. Then I realized that everybody else at the table was probably under 40.

Whinge? Haven't heard that since I lived in Essex.

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Ha. I'm Australian, but maybe it's an import word from Essex. (Did they have criminals in Essex?)

TBH, I feel sorta foolish for going on the Nimbus route. It's such a closed system and it's such a pain to take everything out of there and put it in Joplin. Still, it's all a journey. Evernote was good at the time, and I had 4,000 notes at one stage. But Joplin suits me more. Working on backlinks at the moment.

WordPerfect 5.1, baby! Awesome at the time. :slight_smile:

Also Australian and of Word Perfect vintage and have done the evernote to joplin move. I find the Word Perfect / markdown equivalence interesting, as well as my return to that form rather than direct wysiwig editing.

The plugins for Joplin make it way more flexible than any of the proprietary note apps I've used.

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