Joplin – an open source note taking and to-do application with sync

Big discussion just 3 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21555238 (368 points, 151 comments)

Also 2 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815040 (474 points, 206 comments)

I've tried the following:

- Evernote: didn't support markdown so gave it up

- OneNote: UI is too much, like PowerPoint. It's not a text-based note app.

- Quiver: https://happenapps.com/ I bought this app. It's great. I've been using it for a long time. But I gave it up when I found notion.so. Quiver doesn't allow me to sync multiple notebooks. Under each notebook, you cannot have a sub-notebook under a notebook (like a folder inside a folder). It doesn't support global search.

- SimpleNote: bad UI. The render is buggy.

- Notion.so: So far it's my favorite. But the desktop app is slow. Especially for work, I need to take a lot of quick notes.

- Joplin: quickly tried but gave it up. Slow and bad UI.

- Notable: https://github.com/notable/notable Nice, clean UI. The render is fast. A great feature of notable is that it has a "copy block" button for the code block. I love the feature. But the problem is I cannot use cmd + w to close the window, it always pops up a confirmation modal. (IMAO, modal is the worst UI ever invented on this planet.) No updates recently. I am willing to pay this app if a new version comes out.

- Fsnotes: https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes Nice, clean UI. But the render is buggy.

- Bear App: https://bear.app/ Nice clean UI. But the weird thing is in all the other markdown I've used, "-" is for a list, "[]" is for a to-do list. But in Bear, "-" is for a to-do list, "*" is for a list.

I ended up paying two apps, Notion for personal stuff, Bear for work.

First, a huge shoutout to @laurent22 who still tirelessly pushes out new code for the community.

I use Joplin everyday, I switched over about a year ago from a Dropbox-sync'd markdown files edited in Sublime.

I really like Joplin for a few things:

- Source files are in markdown, no vendor lock-in*

- It has the actual HTML rendering in the editor, and allows you to toggle easily

- Android version works quite well, even the syncing!

- Supports tags

- You can add links to different notes by right clicking on a note and selecting `Copy Markdown Link`

- Of the many open-source solutions I've tried, it's probably the only one that works out of the box with a nice mobile app! Kudos

It's not meant for

- To-do list: I tried putting my todo-list in here. It's a bit too free form for that, with no support for dates

A few things it does, which should be of note:

- *Note are not stored nested in the way they are presented on the left in the notebooks. Rather everything is a markdown file (including notebooks) with metadata stored at the top of the markdown file

- You could individually edit files and there is a 'watch' function to open up the note in another editor, it's not really possible for external editors to edit the whole notebook.

I love that people are building tools in this space.

I do wish there were offerings using git as the backend since a full versioned can be backed up and mirrored to so many hosts so easily (GitHub, gitlab, etc). I simply don't trust non emphemeral data (journal, blog drafts, etc) exclusively to Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

Personally I use pass for notes and journals but the UX isn't great outside of my laptop.

I have tried a bunch of things, but I've ended up just using markdown files structured into folders on a cloud drive. I use whatever editor I fancy at the time and use git to version/back it up. All the things I thought would be nice with note taking apps I just found I didn't really need. There's usually a simple way of doing it inside a file. It's easy to add code into subfolders, pictures, scripts, etc, if needed. Mostly however, all I ever need is text editing and keeping to a reasonably standardized markdown notation

Ive been using Joplin for all my productivity and note taking and Ive mostly been having an "it just works" experience. I use syncthing to share my notes accross devices. The only issue Ive had is with decrypting all my notes where certain notes remain encrypted requiring entering a password which in turn enables encryption...

The command line version is nifty too with vim-like shortcuts.

I do miss spreadsheets and drawing tools present in OneNote but it plays with external applications so still works miles better than plain text.

I'm a researcher. I read articles and book chapters. A lot of them. And it should surprise no one that I have machines running Ubuntu and Windows and OS X and iPhoneOS and iPadOS, and Android.

I want a cross-platform Notability. And not Evernote. Evernote's on-PDF annotations are trash compared to Notability. If they fixed this one feature, I feel like I and many others would drop Notability in a minute. But they won't even acknowledge the feature request thread (1), which has been puttering along since 2016.

At some point, Evernote should say "We haven't regained traction doing anything else, let's just try fixing annotations in the era of Surface and Apple Pencil, give it 2 devs and a user-story, let's aim to rock this out in 2-4 sprints".

Unfortunately, Notability didn't exist or wasn't on my radar for most of residency so I put years of daily reading and lecture notes in Evernote. If anyone knows a way to transfer Evernote content to Notability, please let me know.

(1) https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/96361-unified-improved...

This looks awesome, especially with the e2e encryption feature. Unfortunately it’s a long way from competing with Notion, my current everything app. I don’t think I will be able to use a a note app that doesn’t also include database and spreadsheet features again. I would love to see a client based e2e encrypted open source Notion/Airtable. I suspect that may be a while, tho this is a good start.

Excellent!

Feature suggestion: Wiki support so one can link a note to another while writing.

For example, I want to write something like NoteTitle in a note and have the word automatically turn into a link to a new or existing note called Note Title.

I currently use nvALT on Mac synchronized with Simplenote on iOS. nvALT lets you type [[Note Title]] to create a link to a Note Title page, but you cannot do the same in Simplenote.

Electron app. I don't like Electron so much that I use just a bunch of markdown files synchronized using Syncthing. On Android there's a great free app Markor for editing markdown.

I'm also using a directory of text files synced with syncthing. On desktops I edit them in vim, and for my phone I made a nodejs app to edit them in-browser: https://github.com/davidschlachter/plaintext-notes

I've been using Joplin for the last 5 months. My primary use cases are:

1. Simple journaling with some preamble (e.g. location, mood, weather, etc) from iOS Shortcuts app followed by free text I enter into Joplin direct

2. Archiving website content using the Joplin Web Clipper (body copy and images) for offline reading

3. Tagging all of the above to help easily locate the information I need

For Item 1, it works pretty well. The only challenge I have faced is in relation to Item 2, that being Electron-based, the iOS app doesn't have good library support for "Open in" type share sheet actions. As a result, I have just resorted to making a to-do list with the URL and I process them manually when I have some time on my computer (with the full-blown Web Clipper tool).

Overall, the killer feature for me is the ability to sync between devices with E2E encryption and effectively self-host this (I'm using WebDAV on Fastmail with no obvious issues). Like anything there are gaps, but considering it's open source and a passion project for the devs (from what I gather), it far eclipses something like org-mode (which was initially my first choice), albeit for my specific needs.

They are also involved with the Google Summer of Code which should prove interesting. Hoping we get some good new features out of it.

I have also thought about trying Notion but haven't gotten around to it quite yet but it does pop up quite a bit in discussions around personal knowledge bases.

I use vimwiki which is good. Only challenge I face is running it on windows. I am not sure if it works with cygwin, haven't tried it yet. Currently I use virtualbox with Ubuntu.

I have used standard notes and found that it needs extensions. Missed the last sale they had last year.

I came across another alternative on HN which I don't remember right now. It seemed very good. Self hosted, privacy focused, a pretty front end, flask backend. Looked promising to me.

I switched from SimpleNote to inkdrop for the vi key extension. But I can't stand the web view getting reset when I switch apps, and the price is noticeable. I realized i can use a SimpleNote cli app sncli with vim.

Joplin can also open an external editor. The 5 minute sync interval worries me though. Simple Note syncs immediately.

I am going to try out Standard Notes now as well

I switched to Joplin from folders of text files in dropbox. I'm on Windows and I don't want to pay. It's barely better.

The fact that it forces you to write in markdown, or use external WYSIWYG editors is a massive downside. Even if I wanted to type in markdown, that means I have to keep switching between a markdown pane and a preview pane, like straight-up LaTeX. That's wayyy beyond what I want to deal with for notes.

Notes should be quick and easy. If they did this I'm sure it would be much easier for people to switch.

I've been wanting something like this to replace Google Keep on my phone. In the past I tried to create one myself. I'm glad someone else out there did it.

Update: tried it. Sorry to say I will still be using Google Keep for the time being.