
Joplin – an open source note taking and to-do application with sync - throwaway3157
https://joplinapp.org/
======
merricksb
Big discussion just 3 months ago:

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

Also 2 years ago:

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

------
pololee
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/](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](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](https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes)
Nice, clean UI. But the render is buggy.

\- Bear App: [https://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.

~~~
tmikaeld
Have you tried [https://www.notejoy.com](https://www.notejoy.com) ?

It has e2e encryption, 2-fa, markdown, fulltext search and collaboration and a
super-clean UI.

It's missing tables feature though, but it's on their roadmap as currently
being worked on.

~~~
wkornewald
This doesn’t look like real end-to-end encryption. There is no mention of the
encryption keys staying only on the client device. The description sounds very
shady as if they’re intentionally trying to be misleading.

------
shum1
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.

------
philips
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.

~~~
tanin
I had the same idea and built git-notes for this. I've been using it for 6
months now.

It's a dumb golang app that monitors changes, commits, and push.

Maybe you will like it: [https://github.com/tanin47/git-
notes](https://github.com/tanin47/git-notes)

~~~
bhl
> The file changes are detected by running git status every 10 seconds.

Isn’t this a bit too fine grained? I’m working on storing notes with git as
well, but I haven’t figured out a good “user experience” of when to commit. I
think it’s because with Google Docs and most tools, I’m not used to batch
saving edits.

~~~
tanin
Yup. Batch saving is a fundamental git operation.

I was trying to make it detect file change instead... But it seems the
notification mechanism isn't reliable across different types of OS.

------
keithnz
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

------
xorzarle
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.

------
killjoywashere
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...](https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/96361-unified-improved-
notehandwritingpdf-editing-experience/)

------
crystaln
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.

~~~
seized
Standard Notes might be closer for what you want. Syncs to a database (that
you can self host), encryption happens on the client. Has plugins including a
spreadsheet.

~~~
papyruskaleido
Ooh, this looks interesting. I'm a pretty happy OneNote user, but it'd be nice
to have something encrypted and with native support in Linux. I don't suppose
you know if Standard Notes supports multi-user databases, does it? I couldn't
find anything on that. My wife and I share a household OneNote notebook and
that's been pretty handy to have.

------
hypertexthero
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.

------
anticodon
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.

~~~
diego_moita
> Electron app.

Agree. Just tried Joplin. It is slow and consumes too much memory. Removed it.

~~~
tritones
You can also run it from the terminal

------
dddddaviddddd
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](https://github.com/davidschlachter/plaintext-notes)

------
mysterious_hat
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.

------
8589934591
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.

~~~
8589934591
Found it -
[https://github.com/hakanu/pervane](https://github.com/hakanu/pervane)

Looked promising to me.

------
gregwebs
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

------
vex
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.

------
bobajeff
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.

~~~
goatherders
Same. I even went to paid Monday. Will give this a gander.

