Joplin – An open-source note taking and to-do application with synchronisation

> If anyone has questions about how I use it or my workflow I'm happy to shill this app more, lol.

I've recently begun using Joplin and am still futzing my way around. Would love to hear about anyone else's workflow.

One question, not specific to Joplin, I always have with note-taking apps is what's the best way to organize content? Or do you not worry about that and simply use tags to create structure/relationships?

Vim keybindings are possible* with the exception of hitting :q to exit*. For that, you still need to type :exit.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/joplinapp/comments/ww4crz/vim_mode_...

** https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/236

> can't imagine using a closed source app for something as personal and important as my notes.

given that it's Markdown and local whatever you open it with at the end of the day doesn't matter much. That's the benefit of relying on a lightweight markup language, you're not locked in.

Joplin is great. But there is a huge gotcha if you start using it from iOS instrad of laptop client first -- you can never connect access phone notes from other device.

This was true last year, hopefully was fixed.

Thanks for the feedback. We plan to update the mobile app so it's good to know what needs to be improved.

> Specifically, things like swipes for navigation and for selecting or deleting notes.

Gestures / swipe-navigation gets me every time too. There’s also a new enhanced editor on iOS but it’s a little clunky so I switched back to the plain textbox one. I still use and love Joplin, but tolerate some rough edges on mobile because it’s truly open source.

Joplin on desktop with the MacOS theme-plugin is great. The markdown editor on an actual Macbook outshines whatever is packaged with Linux, but both are very usable. Several other nice plugins on desktop that I rely on are inline-tags, simple backup, templates and the outline sidebar.

Overall, love Joplin and can’t wait to see more improvements as time goes on.

What app do you use instead of Joplin for notes?

Agreed. For me, the simplicity and forward compatibility of syncthing and a markdown editor are too great to give up for Joplin.

I also write on the go and reference on the desktop later. What is your current workflow? Apple Notes would be great except my work computer is windows, and apple notes in the browser is not great

I jumped from Joplin to Logseq too.

Before it was Boostnote.

Probably the reason was both Boostnote and Joplin seems to have stopped developing the application and shifted focus to monetization.

Also I personally prefer the (much) more technical way that Logseq work. It is not a markdown editor, but a knowledge base that stores its data as plaintext files in a markdown-like format.

One question: do you have pointers to a good way to setup git sync and syncthing? I pay enough to LogSeq to have free sync but I prefer to self host and also the current sync model is somewhat flaky.

I looked at logseq as an alternative to joplin but there were too many little flags that suggested to me that privacy and being free might not be forever. I don't have a problem with paying for software, but I don't like getting embedded in it when I don't know what the cost will be. Privacy wise, statements like "The aim of Logseq is to establish a better environment for both learning and collaboration, enabling us to form a network that connects our ideas and enhances the collective knowledge of humanity." worry me. I don't want my ideas connected with humanity and I certainly don't want my notes used to train someones LLM. Maybe this is an unfair reading, as they do claim to be privacy focused, but I am worried that they will discover far to many interesting and fun things to do with user data and I just don't really like where that sounds like its headed. If Joplin could do better sharing (with eg a colleague or spouse) on mobile and better separation of work/private notes (like different storage locations) it would be just about perfect for me for a note taking app, but then my needs are pretty simple.

Do you have any idea on how can I import Joplin md's into Logseq?

A huge fan of Logseq here. I can’t imagine my workflow without it anymore. However, I still can’t have it on mobile because of sync. iCloud is awful, Syncthing doesn’t support mobile.

Until you deploy the web or electron apps and realize it beacons out to the internet.

How is the sync now? Does it only sync every 5 minutes, with the user requiring to manually press "sync" for every change? Or does it sync on changes automatically?

I'm asking because I used it in the past and the sync limitation often caused conflicts for my mobile and desktop clients

s3 sync is still broken for me. haven't had time to open a pr to fix it.

> Why not joplin? Mostly because joplin stores notes in an sqlite database instead of a simple folder structure making it not easily accessible by normal unix tools and editors.

But instead much more accessible to any kind of software, including a five line python script. While plain text files are useful, they shouldn't be taken to be the only true and accessible way of storing data, even textual ones.

Notable looks cool. The mobile apps are not ready, though. OK, let's try it.

Do you know how Noteless compares to GitJournal on Android? Thank you.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.gitjournal....

Great work. I love it.

Looks nice. Good to see that there are still native apps in development! Looks a lot like Joplin - which I like.

But: I couldn't find anything about syncing my notes or mobile clients / other ways to access my notes. Even in the "vision" document. That's a must have functionality _for me_. Probably not important for everyone... therefore, good luck with your project :)

Thanks for making this. I look forward to trying it tonight. A few thoughts:

1. Any chance for a mobile version with cloud sync? Qt compiles for mobile too, after all. I access my notes from my phone all the time so this is a must for me.

2. How come so many indie devs are off making their own notes app instead of pooling their efforts? For example off the top of my head QOwnNotes is a Qt widget note app, and a QML-based one I think is called Noter but which I can't find anymore now.

3. Judging from the UI I take it you're an Evernote user, or used to be? There was a post today about all the Evernote staff being laid off, so I feel pressured to move away ASAP. Other than Joplin do you have any recommendations that work on mobile?

Last I checked this did not provide an obvious way for links between notes. This is a crutial feature for many folks who work with lots of small interlinked notes.

Has it got math formula support?

Looks cool. Will try it. I assume it doesn't support images at the moment?

> Currently, it uses a DB

Nice little program. This is the reason I had skipped it after testing since I wanted it to use it on multiple platforms with syncing handled by me.

Btw, you're adding Kanban support?

In which way can it be exploited?

"Custom" would be the way Apple Notes or Evernote stores their data in opaque binary blobs. SQLite is standard and you can open it with plenty of third-party tools, but I see your point about plain text files being more convenient for certain tasks.

> Just give me an app that can handle nicely markdown files

You know what does that well? The filesystem.

I've tested pretty much all note-taking software out there. What ended up working for me is a bunch of markdown files inside folders, synced using Github.

I have search, formatting and preview thanks to VSCode, and I can access my notes on any machine that syncs with Github.

> Why bother? Just give me an app that can handle nicely markdown files

Markdown (and any other markup) really sucks for anything that is more than just plaintext with some formatting. The best markdown-app we have at the moment are those like Obsidian or Logseq, and they are very low-key compared with a proper richtext-app, like Notion or even a mature word processor.

And looking and the hard struggle of obsidian and their community-plugins, it might be really time to get a proper open richtext-format for the notes-space, to liberate us from markups and their limitations. Maybe something json-based, to bring the notebook-movement into the ring too.

I was never able to get encrypted syncing working with Joplin. I tried every year or something for a while but it never worked. I kept looking for an Evernote alternative for years. The closest that got there is Leanote, which is a Chinese company's open source product. (https://github.com/leanote)

I finally gave up the search. Switched to unencrypted plain text md files synced with syncthing. On Linux I use Kate. It has a directory tree view and recursive search in said directories. It works great. On Android I am using Markor to point to the same shared directory. I don't think I'll ever start looking for a note taking app again. I also found I don't really take notes much. So there's that. :)

I wrote my own note-keeping system[0] and very much wanted all of the notes to just be markdown files on the disk. It turns out that there are trade-offs to this. If you want plaintext markdown files on disk AND want fancy features like file versioning, a search index, tags, etc then you need to store all of that metadata somewhere and you're down writing a half-assed implementation of a DBMS.

Now, you can certainly bite the bullet and full-ass the implementation like Dokuwiki did, but that is really quite a lot of work and effort against simply `import sqlite` and writing a couple of tutorial-level queries. And it turns out that exporting all of your documents to plaintext, if you should so choose, is a one-line command away.

[0]: https://github.com/cu/silicon

I am interesting about this. storing everything in sqlite should have some apparently advantage, but other note applications discard.

I think it is a reasonable decision https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/crowdfunding-joplin-server...

Is SimpleNote something for you?

It only supports plain text notes (with Markdown rendering), but I've got years of notes in there, and it works on every platform. It's also owned and supported by Wordpress.

Which backend did you use for sync?

You usually get better sync performance by either self-hosting or using Joplin Cloud. I don't know of any good WebDAV provider, let alone a free one, and even the paid ones have limitations that make them unusable for sync.

OneDrive and Dropbox have a free tier and work with Joplin, but they throttle the connection. But I guess it depends on how many notes you have and how you use Joplin - a lot of people use OneDrive or Dropbox and it works good enough for them.

I got a large performance bump by increasing the number of allowed open connections from the default 5 to 20 in all clients. I’m syncing to a self hosted Nextcloud via WebDAV.

The funny thing about Joplin sync being too slow... years ago, I complained to the author that his markdown files weren't true markdown, and his rebuttal was that it was necessary to pollute those to get sync to perform well on Nextcloud/webdav. I pointed out how he might have just written a small NC plugin to achieve the same effect, at which point the thread was closed and I was no longer welcome to comment.

Maybe that's changed since though.

Also an extremely happy Zim user for desktop notes, projects & work journal.

Recently I was looking for a self-hosted equivalent to Google Keep (which I use mainly for lists, quick notes and web snippets), and tried out Joplin. It looked pretty good, but I wanted a web app frontend, which Joplin doesn't seem to have. I'm now trying out Memos [1] now, and it's pretty good so far (though I would love to see postgres support in Memos as well as the current sqlite DB).

[1] https://usememos.com/

Obsidian has everything but "Attractive web client", but it does have a native client.

The "database" is just a bunch of directories you can sync with any tool you want.

Do you _really_ need a web client ?

I use markor (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.gsantner.markor/) on android and it does everything I need. It's all a bunch of files, synchronized with syncthing, so I can use it on my desktop with any editor (maybe https://thiefmd.com/, maybe another one). No need for a server, I can use it while offline, it's lightweight to install and maintain.

Trilium

https://github.com/zadam/trilium

And while it does use a db backend, it allows you to extend the interface with inline JavaScript. It’s extremely underrated

What don't you like about the mobile app?

In my opinion it's not worse than the desktop app (but I don't really like both of them - I'm just glad it syncs successfully)

Contrary to popular belief, the mobile app is not forgotten - I count about 40 releases in total for the past 12 months.

We probably spend as much time working on it than on the desktop one, but unfortunately it is much harder to develop for mobile, especially when you have to make sure it works on the many different Android devices and iOS versions, plus the extra work to comply with the ever changing requirements from the Google and Apple stores. Many of these changes are not visible to the user, but without this boring never ending maintenance work the app simply wouldn't exist.

We do plan to update the UI/UX of the mobile app though, as we're aware it could be made more intuitive. I'm very keen on improving this and hopefully it will happen this year.

Link?

Joplin does have a Web Clipper

Not sure why "refused". We want to support it but it's not trivial and it doesn't help that we don't have the hardware to test this. It will be done eventually

Obisidian with icloud Drive sync is pretty sweet.

Same here. I only use note taking apps on my Mac, so syncing isn’t something I am interested in. For me the interface of Obsidian is really top notch. Typing headers and code block quotes doesn’t feel like it gets in your way.

My only complaint is that embedded images are saved at the root level by default. Would be nice if I could hide those or move them to an /Images folder,

Recently started using Joplin. I find myself reformatting everything I paste into it from the browser. I thought the long load time was just the program. Didn't realize it wasn't native. I find myself not using it because it does feel clunky and slow and just easier to take screenshots.

Think it’s a bit of personal preference to be honest

I tried both a couple of years ago and much preferred obsidian, although I know long term Joplin fans who have pretty tight workflows and love it

For me personally the only upside is that I don't have to pay separately for syncing the documents and can use Dropbox instead. Yeah I could use Dropbox on my phone too for obsidian but it's not a great experience when all you want is taking/reading notes without hassle.

Its easier to pick up and use without having to worry about data loss

Tried both for quite some time, Obsidian has better community plugin support, better sync (paid) and stores plain text files instead of using a DB. Most importantly the mobile app (at least for iOS) of Obsidian is 1:1 with the desktop app.

Switched from Joplin to Obsidian and haven't looked back. Both apps are great initiatives though!

I tried it out for a while, I'm sure that it's a great program and it's various free sync options & encryption system may immediately put it ahead, but as a basic user I found it much more complicated to the point where I couldn't figure out how to simply sort files into folders (and I don't know if that's something you can do). There's an interesting tagging system to search posts with and there's a ton of plugins out there if you want to do things you can usually do.

I really ought to give it a shot again when I've got a clear head.

If you want a FOSS alternative to Obsidian that's just as simple you could try Zettlr, but currently it's rather rough. You have to change the UI settings to get the folders/file view that Obsidian has, and I found readability to be rather poor. Initially there's no way to make in text larger without zooming in the entire UI, font, and the themes that are available aren't the best for writing or reading notes (and if you like one specific theme you're sod out of luck if you want a darker version of it) – if you want to change things to your liking you have to experiment with the experimental Custom CSS option.

Having started with Joplin, the three things that took me away were the (at the time) lacking mobile support, periodic syncing collisions, and probably most importantly, their non-standard file format. There was a tool that could extract files into standard markdown format, then repack them, but the overhead was tiring, and meant a few key environments lacked access, namely when I was accessing a server from the rack, and when the mobile app acted up. I actually moved to just using vimwiki style setup with markdown and a markdown editor app on my phone for several years, before I stumbled across Obsidian. I've since been using obsidian for about 9 months now, which is longer than my time with Joplin, and I will say that, once I got a stable sync going (I'm using the simple sync plugin and my own s3 compatible server), the plugin support, decent mobile app, and native markdown files have won me over. Though I'm still eyeing open source options with Logseq, just waiting on their mobile app to pick up and properly support plugins. I'll be more than happy to port everything as soon as it supports that.

As an additional note, I will add that despite Obsidian being closed-source, I actually feel more comfortable with my data there than with Joplin, primarily because all my data is just common markdown. With Joplin, if I archive content, I have no guarantee the notes on the file format will exist in 10 years (they probably will, but it's still a real possibility). With Obsidian, it's plaintext. There's nothing to need to rediscover, no file format to decode, just good old plain-text. In 40 years I'll still be able to read those files (though the storage media is a very different story). Sure Obsidian can change plans mid-stream, and I don't trust they wont, but all I gotta do is go back to my markdown editor and vim. No sweat.

Worse. I want to see the result when writing so I always had to have a separate preview window open which stole a lot of screen space. Obsidian solved this with the WYSIWYG mode where a paragraph transforms to markdown when you click on it, but the rest of the document shows the end result. It makes the experience a lot nicer when embedding tables and images that you can look at directly and write in-depth about without just seeing a filename.

> How does it compare to obsidian?

Definitely personal preference, in my experience the UX is terrible compared to obsidian but the pricing and company are much more consumer friendly

> How does it compare to obsidian?

Definitely personal preference, in my experience the Joplin UX is terrible but the pricing and company are much more consumer frienldy

Out of curiosity, why do you require that? On my desktop, my system account is protected, never left unattended while unlocked, and I've got full-disk encryption.

I can't presently imagine a benefit to an extra password for my notetaking application, so your comment makes me wonder whether I'm missing something or whether I just use it a little differently than you do.