Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

I have black Moleskine notebooks with me all the time, they are a miracle; I tried all kinds of notebooks and their paper does best with gel pens (even though they have moved their production to China iirc?)

It seems to be less common these days, but when I write down an algorithm or visualize it on paper it's so much easier to grasp - I always wondered why I can work with "real paper" better than with ePaper (et al.) even when it's a scan of my handwriting. Is that a thing of routine?

I love org-mode, though I struggle with emacs itself. Can you give me an example of how you layout your weekly org mode so that it interacts with beorg well?

I've used the format for a year where each day was a heading:

* <2016-12-12 Tue> Task1 with notes if needed Task2

and it does not work great with beorg.

I honestly don't understand the hype. Why Moleskin and not one of the in general better Leuchtturm products? Anyway, I personally went back to those blank exercise books I used in school decades ago. But then, I also run Linux and not some overhyped Apple.

I've been looking into Org mode recently, but, having never used Org mode or Emacs, I'm finding it a bit overwhelming.

There's a weird bug at the moment in the Option screen - if you click on a checkbox, the change is registered but the checkbox will still appear as ticked (That can be verified by exiting the Option screen and going back to it). So if you disable geo-location and for example auto-update that should already work.

The Option screen display issue will be fixed in the next release. The backend of these apps is quite reliable (I've never lost a synced note for instance), but there are quite a few ugly bugs like this one in the front end. That's in part because I wasn't planning to release this officially just yet (it got picked up somehow by omgubuntu and then here).

I used Evernote for years before bothering with the web clipper, but when I started running into dead links in my years-old notes I realized it was essential. Now I use it pretty often to make sure that a note doesn't become impossible to understand because its context is gone. It's also great for recipes, which I often find on personal blogs and other sites where you can't depend on a link being permanent.

The web clipper is the killer app for me as well. I've been looking for a replacement for a long time and thus far have found nothing comparable that is open, self-hostable, cross-platform & syncable, and saves web media or pdf natively. I will also kick in to a Patreon if a web clipper is promised.

Yes, Evernote is pretty clunky but I’ve got a good 8 years of junk in in and that web clipper is a beast.

My Evernote file is over 20GB, thanks to Web Clipper. I've saved everything from recipe to interesting articles, dating back almost 10 years ago. For me, it is cool to be able to save web pages without worrying that the page / link will disappear in the future.

The only other alternative is DevonThink, which is pricey, but well worth its cost.

Guys if you're looking for a Web Clipper feature alternative my friend made a dedicated service called PageDash recently. Check it out! https://pagedash.com

That looks nice. Does it have keyboard shortcut with fuzzy searching to open other files in side panel?

Simplicity, freedom to really migrate your data.

Sure, you theoretically can migrate your notes from, say OneNote to Evernote (and vice-versa), but doing so is a great experience in frankensteining. I'm not even very confident there isn't outright data loss in some places, and with a high volume of notes, it's not feasible to check manually. Even with no loss, lots of stuff look ugly and/or do not work anymore, even if there is an equivalent on the target platform.

>I don't get the underlying fascination with using markdown

As a programmer, most of the notes, I take, have code snippets. With markdown notes, I get nice code highlighting in my notes.

Also a lot of times HTML/RTF notes end up having hidden invisible characters. So it messes up commands. That's why I prefer plain text notes over rich formatted notes.

I think for most people it is portability. I can use my .md files in any Markdown editor and reasonably expect it to look the same.

If there isn't an editor to hand it is easy enough to read as plain text.

I've used Voddoopad for years. It was amazing. As a person who organizes content and research based on links instead of folders, its wiki like structure was perfect.

I had high expectations when Gus Mueller sold the app to plausible, but they haven't invested enough on it since 2013.

https://www.plausible.coop/voodoopad

I used to disagree but not anymore. I think maybe the assumption is that you will be dissatisfied enough w the app to want to use another editor, and also that's easier to write Markdown than use the UI. Assuming good exporting facilities or lack of a proprietary format and quality UX, I'd much rather have the best possible editor than be able to write Markdown. It's much more important to e.g. add images, resize them, add sketches, graphs, and/or tables, or perhaps link multiple notes together. All of this is painful or impossible with Markdown (and editing Markdown on mobile is sucky). Markdown I think is an attempt to merge markup and content in a way that retains both, but it sucks for anything beyond simple header/paragraphs/lists.

How do you handle syncing in orgzly? My current approach is "remember to hit the sync button", but apparently I suck at that. :) At least it's easy to fix sync conflicts in Emacs using ediff.

How stable and usable is LineageOS on Fairphone 2? I also have one and am intrigued to try it.

That's exactly what I just built for myself. Flatnote, on the windows store (and soon on mac/Linux/mobile) is a rich-edit note app which stores files as .md files in the file system. Sync is handled by just putting your notes folder in Dropbox

Hi, I'm the author of this app. The notes on each client are stored in an SQLite database for performance reason. If they were stored directly as text files it would be slow to query them, it would be very hard to make it work on mobile (and even slower), and you wouldn't be able to easily create relations between notes and tags, notes and notebooks, resource links, etc.

It's when exporting them or syncing them that all the app entities (notes, but also notebook metadata, tags, etc.) are converted to plain text files. One advantage of this is that the notes are not locked into an obscure format - it shouldn't take more than 1h to create a script that read and convert these text files to any other format.

>Why is this better than Orgmode?

Not having to bother with Emacs is a huge plus.

Mobile?

EDIT:

There is a Android App - https://github.com/orgzly/orgzly-android

First, it’s markdown based. That’s probably not an advantage for you, but it’s a syntax people are used too.

Secondly, syncing is built in. Sure you could use git on your org mode file, but that’s requires effort.

Thirdly, this handles attachments and images.

Fourth, the user does not have to learn EMacs.

Fifth, it runs on phones.

So it does have advantages for some people. If your already an orgmode master, it may mean less for you.

The obvious advantage is that all platforms share the same code. As such it's easier to add new features. While for org mode emacs, orgzly, etc are separate projects that have to be kept in sync

Outside of using emacs, which I don't, orgmode is rather useless in my experience and at some times even a major pain.

It should also not be forgotten that the project linked has some features in addition to just note-taking and to-do lists, so it's definitely not directly comparable either.

Who said it was?

Why did you click on this link? Are you unhappy with orgmode? Why? If not, why bother writing a comment?

These "questions" invariably come across as "this thing sucks because it's not the thing that I am used to".

To counter this a bit, I would rather run an Electron app than be greeted with this as the default interface: http://www.qownnotes.org/var/bekerle/storage/images/_aliases...

I'll take an app that uses a bit more resources over something that looks like an IDE instead of a note-taking app any day.

Currently using Inkdrop[0], which is not open source (but subscription based) and has a rather basic Android client, but it's cross-platform (macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, Ubuntu and other Linux-based distributions), has a pretty intuitive interface (as in, doesn't look like an IDE), backs up its database to my Nextcloud instance, and supports dragging and dropping images.

[0] https://www.inkdrop.info/

I think I'm going release an Electron app called "shitty". Imagine all the free press I'll get on HN comments!

Not the author here, but my guess is that it's named after the composer since the software deals with notes.

Also, though Scott Joplin's ragtime musical style has a lot in common with some very informal music, his own approach was more educated, sophisticated, and precise. Every note was in its place for a reason, and he was known to prefer his pieces to be performed exactly as written. So you could say that compared to the people who came before him, his notes were more organized.

Me too! WHOAREYOU :)

I'm giving this a try, using Seafile for synchronization with encryption instead of the app's own system. As an extra, I can self host it and I can revert any changes if I need to.

Check out Standard Notes: standardnotes.org

I just send an email to myself. If it's something ongoing, I'll leave a draft open for a few days.

Wow, that's amazing. I've been following the GTD related space since I first got on IRC (about 15 years ago) and find more analog solutions (Hipster PDA etc.) so fascinating, but this one really wins.

I'm using Dynalist, which is definitely an improvement over Google Keep, but I'm starting to find it quite restricting that everything has to be in bullet point lists. What I really want is something thats between Dynalist with its Zooming mechanism, and Typora with its super nice markdown editor.

I also use Keep and agree it's not ideal. Would be nice to easily export all the notes to file. Would be even nicer if could store and make changes to notes on local filesystem and have them sync to cloud, google drive style.

I have tried a bunch. Notion is super cool, but doesn't do tables at this moment (though they seem to be working on it). Some apps have one level of nesting only, which is not enough structure for my use case. By now I have settled on Dropbox Paper.

Also, having a WYSIWYG editor is cool, in raw Markdown links and images just do not look good for my taste (and tables, and more, compared to Dropbox Paper or Notion). The number of files for which they support syntax highlighting is small though. In particular Elixir is not in the list as of this writing.

You may like Dynalist.io which is inspired by Workflowy. I never used the latter but I really like the former.

I used https://ticktick.com/ for quite some time and then moved to Memorigi - https://tinbits.io/ (Android only). I have tried wunderlist, todoist and some others but nothing clicked except these two. Recurring tasks are what I use todo apps most for and these two supported it best

> "no computer, no paper"

Sounds like you really just ought to make a habit of keeping pen and paper near you, or your mobile phone. Either of these fit your use case nicely at (probably) no extra cost.

Not an app, but I have used ifttt recipes for this in the past, where I call the number and leave a message, then receive an email with transcription and link to audio in case the transcription was bad. Then I was automatically tagging those emails in Gmail to be able to go through my notes. The IFTTT number was saved in my contacts with an easily pronounced word. So when driving I could tell Siri "call Bender" and then not have to worry about any launch/navigation etc, just start talking

Google Keyboard has speech-to-text, that should work with any note-taking app.

I have. It works fine, just like a myriad of other note-taking methods.

I don't know that I'll ever settle on just one note-taking method. I'm too everywhere to have a single system.

I'd think a todo is a task that needs to be completed, whereas a note is just a set of information that needs to be stored.

For you.

As one example: Those notes are unlikely simple to access when you're on your phone away from your terminal.

....most, if not every single windows application makes this assumption.

Good point, so far I've just used the default build options but I see there's a "allowToChangeInstallationDirectory" option so I'll enable this on the next build.

Janis Joplin was an icon of American music culture. I wouldn't be surprised if this program was named after her.

Not to be insensitive to other cultures, but "this name sounds vaguely like this vulgar thing in another language" is not a strong reason to rename a project of this kind.

Just use the terminal client then.

Useful tip (that I didn't know until recently) is you can also access your notes via any modern browser at https://www.icloud.com/

I recently moved to a Windows machine as my day-to-day home machine and thought I'd have to abandon Apple Notes (which I use on my phone and my work Macbook) but the web interface is basically identical to the apps.

Me too, and my favourite is the sketches. Add a little doodle, use the ruler for crisp lines - all in your basic little note app.

You can get a lot of the export features (pdf, html, ePub, LaTeX, docX) with markdown if you just use pandoc [1]. Pandoc’s description from their website is, “If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife... Pandoc is free software, released under the GPL.” It truly is an amazing program to me. I use it all the time for my school assignments. It’s a command line tool and for the most part you can write ‘pandoc -s <input-file-name> -o <output-file-name>‘ and it will guess how to convert it based on extension. I do my markdown editing with visual studio code, because it has a previewer that also supports LaTeX math mode in the markdown (vs code does the LaTeX math mode through KaTeX.) Pandoc also supports latex math mode in markdown so I can export math related assignments to pdf and such quickly.

[1]: http://pandoc.org

Fastmail enables you to use their service to sync your Notes from OSX& iOS. i think with CalDAV.

The biggest con for me is that it's impossible to reliably observe what incremental changes are made by collaborators on a shared note.

No tags.

> Apple has my data, and I need to trust them.

You don't need to let Apple have your data to use Notes. Notes syncs through a standard IMAP account.

If you have your own domain, you can just create a notes@example.com e-mail account and Apple Notes will happily sync all of its data through that. That's what I do.

Same here (I would pay, that is). I've been using SimpleNote for text notes since I switched to Linux, which seems to sync as well as Notes - but I really miss the simple sketching tools (and that great ruler!) for jotting down ideas on the train, and drag & drop images for "borrowing" ideas from the internet during the day.

Boostnote - https://boostnote.io/

I have been using it for a few months and it is working good for me with resilio as my sync tool but it works with dropbox also. So security is up to the way you sync your files.

Works on Linux, Mac, Windows, iOS and Android and is open source. Takes a bit more to setup but I like this app since it reminds me of the old PIM Programs of old and has a good markdown system. It also exports as plain text or markdown.

Since the number of Electron apps probably isn't going to decline anytime soon, I think I can save you some work. I could write you a little application that scans HN a few times every day and if it finds a discussion about an Electron-based project it will post a comment letting everybody know that you won't be installing it because it uses Electron.

If you are interested, let me know. I can knock it out in a day or so and it will work on any platform you use because it's based on Electron.