[HN Gopher] Joplin is an open source note-taking app
___________________________________________________________________
Joplin is an open source note-taking app
Author : cimnine
Score : 142 points
Date : 2024-03-03 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joplinapp.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (joplinapp.org)
| ck45 wrote:
| Past thread (2021): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520906
| delichon wrote:
| I'm an Evernote refugee struggling with Joplin and Obsidian this
| morning. I've got thousands of PDF notes going back decades, and
| the ability to search on their OCR has kept me on Evernote for
| years. But the latest Joplin includes OCR out of the box, and
| Obsidian has the Omnisearch/Text Extractor plugins to add it.
|
| Both of those use Tesseract to do OCR locally. I've got it
| working on Joplin fairly well. But it hardly works at all on
| Obsidian. That's unfortunate because Obsidian seems to be a much
| more user friendly and responsive app over all. Since I need the
| OCR search capability so badly though, I'm about to settle for
| Joplin. That's not a terrible fate, but the grass seems greener
| on the Obsidian side.
|
| I wish I could replace Tesseract with some industrial strength
| OCR though.
| Zetobal wrote:
| That's not really what these tools are made for. Look into
| zotero or devontjink and use the note taking app for notes.
| delichon wrote:
| Thanks for the leads, but I need it on Linux and Android. You
| appear to be right about this use case being a stretch for
| Joplin/Obsidian.
| tomrod wrote:
| Zotero for the win then.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| How do you work with a Zotero collection on Android?
| s1291 wrote:
| https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/110371/available-
| for-be...
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Could recoll help?
|
| https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...
| wdb wrote:
| I have worked on note-taking app but sadly I am not smart enough
| to get table editing support under iOS/macOS with NSText
| hu3 wrote:
| I use Microsoft's OneDrive free account to keep Joplin synced
| between devices.
|
| Works like a charm. Currently using 0.7GB out of 5GB.
| funOtter wrote:
| Same here! And you can encrypt the sync so you know Microsoft
| cannot get access to your personal information.
| nyreed wrote:
| My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really
| shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst
| ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which
| displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite
| satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well.
|
| I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve
| is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I went from Notion to Joplin for note taking: I drop 1000s of
| images in a note and annotate them and publish them. Notion
| crashed all the time; so badly that support apologised and had
| to delete things for me. Joplin has 0 issues with it; it
| scrolls super fast, is a pleasure to work with. Also on a m1. I
| cannot say I noticed any bad behaviour compared to others,
| included Obsidian.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I went from Notion and Joplin to Obsidian mostly because
| Obsidian stores stuff as regular files on my filesystem and I
| can easily interact with them with external programs and
| scripts.
|
| Joplin, while being open source itself, has a
| "proprietary"[1] storage format I can't be arsed to figure
| out how to interact with.
|
| [1] Meaning non-standard in this case, Joplin is the only
| software using Joplin's storage method
| moneywoes wrote:
| is there anything with a lightweight learning curve akin to
| Obsidian that uses a accessible format?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Any text editor with markdown support should work. Just
| VS Code with a Markdown viewer is a decent replacement.
|
| You don't _need_ all of the fancy plugins that Obsidian
| has, but some of them are genuinely useful.
| rubymamis wrote:
| That's exactly why I'm building a note-taking app in Qt C++ and
| QML that is vastly more performant than other note-taking
| apps[1].
|
| This degradation of software by web apps shows in the lack of
| optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful
| chips of recent times.
|
| [1] https://www.get-plume.com/
| ukuina wrote:
| Plume looks neat!
|
| What is the pricing model you have in mind?
| rubymamis wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| It will be a subscription model. $25 paid yearly or $3
| monthly (that's the idea for now).
| bleomycin wrote:
| Plume looks very interesting! One place I personally find
| many apps in this category fall down is their ability to
| handle pdf's embedded or attached within notes gracefully.
| This applies to desktop and mobile apps.
|
| This may be a slightly weird use case but I accumulate tons
| of pdf's that are often relevant to my notes and want them
| easily embedded and viewable in a first class way. Obsidian
| is a great example of how not to handle a pdf locking it to a
| small portion of the window and not allowing it to be full
| screened.
|
| Forcing the user to dump all of their pdf's into something
| like google drive locked away from the rest of their notes is
| a crappy experience and h fortunately keeps me using apps
| like evernote purely for this functionality.
| rubymamis wrote:
| Thanks! Hmm, I've seen many open-source Qt apps integrate
| PDF support, so I guess I can study them. I'm adding this
| to the to-do list. How do you usually add a PDF to your
| notes? Drag and drop? What's the ideal way you look to
| interact with it? You said no full-screen, so what it does
| look like?
| fiforpg wrote:
| If you need pdf viewing and management (indexing,
| annotations, citations), it might be useful to look into
| citation managers, which are built to do exactly these
| things: check out Zotero.
| limandoc wrote:
| I am working on a knowledge structuring tool as well; will
| silent release soon: limandoc.com
|
| You can put all your documents/PDFs there and structure
| them as you wish. And it will be syncing locally only!
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Nice that's exactly what I'm looking for, as I use KDE and Qt
| apps fit in so well.
|
| Will the client side be open source? I hope so because I'm on
| FreeBSD so you probably won't make a compiled version :)
| rubymamis wrote:
| Plume is actually based on my open source note-taking app
| Notes[1]. You can already get it on Flathub, Snap Store
| etc. Notes uses just a simple plain text editor while Plume
| has a completely revamped block editor that I built from
| scratch. That parts of Notes used in Plume will remain open
| source (per the MPL license) but the rest of the code will
| be closed source. At least for the time being.
|
| [1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ah too bad, I do need a rich text notes app (and no
| markdown, I hate markdown, under the hood it's fine but I
| don't want to deal with it :) ). Also hate kanban and
| agile methodology by the way ;) Luckily I'm not a dev
| otherwise I would have to work with all of those lol.
|
| But perhaps you could do the monetisation via the sync
| service only and make the app open source :) That would
| be great, at least for me so I could compile it on
| FreeBSD. Some others do this, like Obsidian, for which
| there's an actual BSD port. But it's electron, sadly. But
| I understand... It's a tiny niche. I'll keep looking.
|
| Of course I can't use flatpak and snap. And I can't stand
| snaps so no way I'd use that. Flatpaks are a bit better
| but not working on BSD.
|
| I really used to love tomboy. It was fast, rich text,
| would automatically hyperlink notes together as you
| typed, it was so great. But they stopped development on
| it. There were a few reboots but they were complete
| rewrites and lacked all the speed and smoothness I loved.
| rubymamis wrote:
| Is it a deal breaker for you that the app isn't open
| source? What if I create binaries for FreeBSD/your distro
| and there's no telemetry/option to disable connecting to
| the internet (even for updates)?
| coldblues wrote:
| I support your app so much I would pay a monthly fee
| instead of a one-time purchase. My notes are as valuable
| as my life. I don't mind the app being proprietary if it
| gets the love it deserves. If you can accomplish the
| goals you set out, like providing good functionality and
| performance, then I'm cheering you on. My needs are very
| basic, just the minimum to accomplish Zettelkasten.
| rubymamis wrote:
| That's nice to hear. Same here, I have thousands of
| notes, it's my second brain. Sign up for the waitlist,
| I'd love you to try Plume when it's out.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That would work perfectly yes! It's not the internet
| connection that bothers me (in fact I'd probably use the
| sync).
|
| But usually developers don't care enough about the tiny
| userbase of FreeBSD to even consider that. If you would
| do that, I would really like it, though I can imagine
| that from a time/gains perspective there is no point.
| Which I do totally understand.
|
| One thing I like is that your monthly fee is very
| reasonable. Obsidian costs double the price of my entire
| Microsoft 365 subscription :) Besides it being electron
| that's another issue for me. Especially because it's just
| not really that great.
| rubymamis wrote:
| That's awesome to hear, then. I'll see what I can do (:
| tvshtr wrote:
| There's Qownnote too, it's really nice and open source.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Oh yeah good point. I never checked that one out because
| I don't really use owncloud but it's worth a look.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > This degradation of software by web apps shows the lack of
| optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful
| chips of recent times.
|
| A-fucking-men. Web tools are for building web apps, software
| tools are for building software. I avoid all these goddamn
| electron things like the plague if at all fucking possible.
|
| Garbage on phones, garbage on computers, garbage on tablets.
| Garbage.
| rubymamis wrote:
| It's unfortunately very hard to avoid them. But indeed, on
| macOS, I try to find only native or native-like apps for my
| needs. It's the difference between a healthy diet and junk
| food for my computer.
| moneywoes wrote:
| will the mobile all be fast as well?
|
| my issue is i can't find a platform with a fast mobile app
|
| it seems they're all react native
| rubymamis wrote:
| I didn't yet try to create a mobile version, but I don't
| see why, as Qt Quick is very performant. I guess we'll have
| to wait till I port it and do some testing.
| Liquix wrote:
| Does Obsidian feature a way to seamlessly sync between devices
| that doesn't rely on a propreitary service or external tool
| (Syncthing)?
| SteeCee wrote:
| Obsidian has a built in sync feature if you pay for it.
| https://obsidian.md/sync
| refactorguy wrote:
| Every time I see a post about a note-taking app, Obsidian
| is mentioned in the comments. I don't know if the app is
| really good, or if those are just paid comments. At this
| point I'm not even surprised anymore, especially when
| conversations always end with a mention of Obsidian Sync.
| grantc wrote:
| It's because there are two ways to sync content across
| devices, paid sync through Obsidian vs. git. Given sync
| is a p0 feature, it seems logical that both get mentioned
| when the question arises.
|
| Also, the app's really good, and I pay for Sync -- git
| works well, but it's a bit clumsier on iOS. Never posted
| a paid comment in my life.
| iamtedd wrote:
| That's not all the ways to sync.
|
| I share the vault folder between devices with syncthing.
| Free and open source.
| bccdee wrote:
| It's the biggest & most popular app in the note-taking
| space. It's closed-source, which I don't love, and I've
| tried to look for alternatives, but there just isn't
| anything else that's as good as Obsidian. In a situation
| like that, you don't need to pay people to talk about
| your product. People will evangelize it on their own.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Try SiYuan Note.
| tmoravec wrote:
| I sync Obsidian with iCloud Drive and it's been 100% reliable
| and very fast so far (a few months).
| ncrmro wrote:
| You can use a plugin to sync to git repo. Folders in obsidian
| are really folder on disk and. In git.
|
| At this point you could hook up ci for instance to publish a
| blog folder etc
| tasuki wrote:
| Hmm, why not do one thing and do it well? Is there much
| benefit for each and every app to reimplement its own
| seamless sync?
| kidfiji wrote:
| I think in a lot of cases it's a means of monetizing an app
| where everything else is essentially free/full-featured
| without being behind a paywall
| oven9342 wrote:
| I wish I could compile those electron apps from source a la
| FreeBSD's ports or whatever. I'd rather have the laptop
| compiling for a few days than using electron
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| How does compiling from source help you avoid electron?
| vunderba wrote:
| yeah, it goes to show you that Electron based apps can be done
| in a reasonably performant way but it does require extra
| care/attention as Obsidian is an electron app as well.
|
| I have about 13,000 notes (with embedded media PNGs, MP4s, etc)
| across 50 folders/subfolders on my Mac M1 and searching across
| all notes in Obsidian is for all intents and purposes
| instantaneous (less than a second).
| lbotos wrote:
| Joplin released an ARM build a few months back -- so if you
| were using the pre-arm build it was bad, so just throwing this
| out there for folks who maybe had similar experiences -- make
| sure you are using the arm build (it should happen
| automatically now)
|
| Disclaimer: I've contributed to Joplin in the past, and I use
| it dozens of times a day with no big speed complaints.
| shortformblog wrote:
| I like Joplin's sync server, which can be self hosted.
|
| I just wish it didn't require having the app loaded to use. I
| actually use it with another editor on Linux. (It works
| surprisingly well with VS Code for example.)
|
| But it's the best we have for Android, sadly.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| I chose Joplin over Obsidian because they offer webdav sync and
| it's trivial to set up sync with a synology NAS. Obsidian
| doesn't offer it as it competes with their sync commercial
| offering.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| For a long time Joplin's support on Android was buggy and late
| on releases, it's why I switched away. Is it better now?
| funOtter wrote:
| It works fine for me. I've used it moderately and never had
| issues.
| devsda wrote:
| Joplin works well for what it does and is good enough for regular
| note-taking. Has most features like live view, webclipper, sync &
| plugins for that extra missing functionality.
|
| What you don't get is a "polished" UI with a WYSIWYG editor.
|
| The storage format is markdown, but it has its own way of
| organizing files[1]. If your notetaking process includes multiple
| editors(other than joplin apps) then joplin may not be the best
| choice.
|
| [1]. https://joplinapp.org/help/faq/#is-it-possible-to-use-
| real-f...
| moralestapia wrote:
| I came to the comments to find some insight about the format it
| stores notes on, so thanks.
|
| That's a big advantage for me as usually the issue I had with
| other note taking apps in the past is how hard they lock you
| in, particularly after years of using them.
| yborg wrote:
| Joplin has a WYSIWYG editor mode.
| https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/rich_text_editor Joplin also
| can use external editors.
| https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/external_text_editor
| devsda wrote:
| Sure there's the rich text editor but it has limitations and
| you lose the functionality of some plugins. The rich text
| editor mode had bugs the last time I tried it.
|
| By external editor I mean editing the markdown files directly
| without opening joplin app first. There can be many reasons
| to do that like editing in a terminal or auto
| generate/manipulate notes using a tool. We can still do it of
| required but we need to be careful not to touch the Joplin
| metadata.
|
| PS: I use Joplin regularly. These are not complaints about
| Joplin, but just an fyi to help someone make an informed
| decision before they switch.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| My only concerns about using Joplin were security-related, when
| handling sensitive notes (financial data, logins, etc). The
| interface looked awesome.
|
| Have Joplin plugins been secured/sandboxed yet, or are they still
| able to exfiltrate data? That's one reason I never used it for
| very secure notes, same with Obsidian. Joplin also used to store
| notes unencrypted locally, not sure if that's still the case. Of
| course most people don't mind, but I was investigating the
| highest-security note tool I could find at the time.
| Groxx wrote:
| It absolutely boggles my mind that anyone releases a plug-in
| system without sandboxing nowadays.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Engineering effort
| Groxx wrote:
| Which should be left at zero unless you can get over the
| "you actually do have a responsibility to take basic safety
| measures for your users" hurdle.
|
| Instead we routinely get zero security at all _and also_
| heavily encouraging people to install entirely unchecked
| stuff in a built-in and implicitly-trusted first party UI.
| chaseha wrote:
| Would appreciate any folks here who have tried both Obsidian and
| Joplin to summarize the key differentiators for them and which
| one they ended up on.
|
| (on x platform, Windows/iOS use case here, but just post your
| needs)
|
| I tried to move to Obsidian from Evernote after they raised the
| subscription price but wasn't able to onboard successfully -
| Obsidian seemed powerful but was _too_ customizable for me, had
| to get back to more pressing day job needs before I could figure
| out a setup that would work for me, ended up just paying the
| Evernote fee another year.
| tmoravec wrote:
| I was suffering with Joplin for years and finally found the
| time to migrate to Obsidian a few months back. So far I'm much
| happier and more importantly, more productive.
|
| The biggest points are about the UX. My workflow requires
| switching between multiple notes rapidly (e.g., TODO list,
| Project 1, Project 2, Employee 1, Employee 2, Meeting Notes 1,
| and so on) and Joplin doesn't have native tabs. The plugin is
| only so so but it works only on desktop (I'm on Mac).
|
| On mobile it's a disaster. Doubly so on iPad which is just
| stretched phone version - working productively on iPad (which
| is otherwise just fine for my job) is impossible with Joplin.
| Plus the mobile app has awful design and awful navigation. Who
| on Earth would put the most used button to the top left corner?
| Swipe from the left doesn't work of course because the
| following:
|
| Neither desktop of mobile app follow the system patterns.
| Keyboard shortucts, if they exist, are different. Navigation is
| different. Everything is sort of clunky.
|
| I used Dropbox for sync and while it does work, it's very slow
| and there's no background sync. On a regular day I have to sync
| about 50 items (some of them are history I guess) which can
| take a minute or two, which is the time I don't have when I
| open my phone and want to quickly add an item to the TODO list.
| Couple that with no conflict resolution and a recipe for data
| loss is born :-) .
|
| Initial sync on a new phone took me eight fucking hours when I
| had to keep the phone open and the app in the foreground.
|
| What I do appreciate is the native encryption. Now I do all my
| work in Obsidian but keep Joplin for the secrets.
|
| So this is the main problems I had with Joplin. Rant over (but
| you asked) :-)
| dstorm1 wrote:
| The mobile design does leave a lot to be desired. It does fit
| my needs however because usually I am just jotting down a
| quick idea or reference for later. I can see how switching
| between multiple notes quickly can be difficult.
|
| Not related to the parent comment but I have been using the
| math plugin and I love it. It does unit conversion and lots
| of other things!
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I tried both, my Joplin experience is a few years ago so grain
| of salt and all.
|
| Joplin is open source, doesn't really have a plugin ecosystem,
| has a custom storage format for its data and is _really_ easy
| and reliable to sync with WebDav (I had mine set up with
| Fastmail's webdav while sipping my morning coffee)
|
| Obsidian (my current system for going on 2 years) on the other
| hand is the closest I've gotten to org-mode with a modern tool,
| with all the pluses and minuses.
|
| The plugin ecosystem is completely crazy, you can find a plugin
| for pretty much everything. And you'll lose days of actual work
| progress bikeshedding the plugin system =)
|
| Data is stored as regular standard files (Canvases are the
| exception, but there really isn't a standard for stuff like
| that).
|
| Syncing with third party tools is ... workable if you don't
| switch platforms quickly - basically if you make a note on your
| phone and immediately switch to desktop, the note might appear
| or might not, depends on the phase of the moon. iCloud takes a
| while to sync and sometimes just freezes, works fine if you let
| it work. Dropbox, OneDrive etc aren't officially supported and
| tend to have conflicts.
|
| I actually ended up paying for their sync service and it Just
| Works - even though it's not the cheapest option, but _for_me_
| it's worth it because I regularly use multiple devices in short
| succession on the same notes.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Joplin - an open source note taking and to-do application with
| synchronization_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520906
| - June 2021 (74 comments)
|
| _Joplin - an open source note taking and to-do application with
| sync_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22439485 - Feb 2020
| (36 comments)
|
| _Joplin - a note taking and to-do application with
| synchronization capabilities_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21555238 - Nov 2019 (150
| comments)
|
| _Joplin - A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop,
| mobile, terminal_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815040
| - Nov 2017 (204 comments)
| cupantae wrote:
| I have been using Joplin for a couple of years, first for work
| and then for everything else.
|
| I love that it's formatted, but it's also just text. I normally
| leave it in markdown mode and edit that directly (learn the
| syntax, it's easy). To paste into email, documents etc, put it to
| display mode and it'll paste html. Good.
|
| @cimnine The key feature for me is global search (ctrl/cmd+p) but
| it doesn't work well enough!! 1. it doesn't favour exact matches
| and 2. it doesn't jump to the match. I use vi-mode if that's
| important.
|
| Overall it's excellent IMO. There are clients for all major
| platforms.
| luspectra wrote:
| Joplin is great for what it is, but it does not exactly fit my
| need. I have two things I want in my editor, but no two editors
| seem to have both:
|
| - WYSIWYG editor: rendered text and editor are in same window -
| Vim Bindings - Bonus: Terminal integration (TUI)
|
| The second has come to be even more important than the first, so
| I now take my notes in (neo)vim. I wish it was possible to have
| WYSIWYG in the terminal, but that seems to be an impossible task
| (rows of text all being the same size is baked into the terminal
| ecosystem).
|
| Having a GUI WYSIWYG with vim bindings is probably pretty doable,
| but the lack of terminal ecosystem has discouraged me from
| looking into this (even though it is not that important, but I am
| a perfectionist).
| vunderba wrote:
| Joplin is a decent open-source note app but I absolutely hate the
| way that they structure your notes.
|
| If you have thousands of notes in a folder
| ~/my_notes ~/my_notes/work ~/my_notes/music
| etc.
|
| Joplin takes them and stores the notes internally as a SQLite
| table with UUID named markdown files. It makes it very difficult
| to use bash tools, finding them, other IDEs, etc to work with
| your files after Joplin has ingested them.
|
| Compare this to apps like VS Code / Obsidian / Logseq (also open
| source) which don't mess with your markdown file organization.
| You can just point them to a root folder and they'll work
| natively with your markdown files.
|
| Furthermore, embedded media are also renamed to GUID.ext files
| and then are stored in ~/.config/joplin-desktop/resources which
| is terrible since now are notes are split from their related
| media.
| suprjami wrote:
| This is the reason I don't use Joplin either.
|
| Obsidian can handle an existing file structure.
|
| I use Vim and folder sync to Nextcloud.
| rubymamis wrote:
| Where do you expect embedded media to be stored? For example,
| if I have the following note: ~/my_notes/art/renaissance.txt do
| you expect images in that note to be stored in ~/my_notes/art
| or in ~/my_notes/media, or something else?
| herrherrmann wrote:
| In Obsidian, for example, you can choose where your media
| data is stored (and there are options to store them alongside
| the Markdown files, e.g. in a hidden folder). I guess OP's
| point is that this would be a better way, or at least to
| store media in the same root folder as notes and not some
| arbitrary folder far away from the notes.
| BooneJS wrote:
| https://www.craft.do on macOS is a great text+media notes app,
| but I still use Obsidian for pure-test use cases for some reason.
| mp05 wrote:
| I installed Joplin once but the icon in my dock was so garish
| that I immediately uninstalled it.
| cba85 wrote:
| I currently use The Archive app (Zettelkasten style) :
| https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/
| account-5 wrote:
| I've found nothing better than zim-wiki. The only issue is no
| mobile client. For brainstorming I like treesheets though.
| Self-Perfection wrote:
| Markor supports zim-wiki format.
| https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor/
|
| Basically my setup is: Zim + Syncthing for synchronization +
| Markor on android
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(page generated 2024-03-03 23:01 UTC)