Taking Notes with Joplin

Joplin is really nice feature-wise but the last time I looked at it a few years back I absolutely HATED the way that it structured your notes.

The way it worked was that they stored new/existing notes in an SQLite table with UUIDs. This of course makes it very difficult to use bash tools, other IDEs, etc. to work with your notes after Joplin has ingested them.

Further the related media was renamed "UUID.<related extension>" which were stored in `~/.config/joplin-desktop/resources`.

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. No syncing required.

Basically Joplin is an Evernote replacement. If you were a fan of Evernote, you like how it is structured, if you weren't, you probably don't.

I'm with you 100%. I wish there was an OSS tool that was like Obsidian and cross-platform (no cloud hosting required). Logseq is the closest but the markdown standard isn't fully supported, and they add a lot of custom syntax/metadata.

You said “like Obsidian”. Which parts of Obsidian are most important for you

I really think you’re trying to use the wrong tool for the job here. Joplin isn’t designed for your notes to be modified outside of the ecosystem, the notes themselves are markdown so you can export or transfer them, but you can’t simultaneously edit them outside of Joplin. For that you’re better off with a folder of markdown files which you can push to Git.

Joplin is essentially an open source version of Evernote and a great alternative for people who enjoyed that style of application.

Also Logseq is moving towards some sort of "database storage", which I think entails moving away from plain text files.

- Apps for, at least, windows and android.

- Storage of files in a folder that can be seen by the OS to allow sync by something like syncthing

- Moderately good UI (nice to have: live preview of markdown)

- Core features not behind a paywall (e.g. siyuan can't sync, notenook missing important features)

- Nice to have: push notifications for tasks/reminders

> Joplin isn’t designed for your notes to be modified outside of the ecosystem, the notes themselves are markdown so you can export or transfer them, but you can’t simultaneously edit them outside of Joplin.

Well, except for https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/external_text_editor/

I keep thinking about how much feature lists like this could be matched by the Finder/File Explorer and my favorite text editor.

Yes of course but not on android. Also I'd prefer the same app/experience across platforms.

> The way it worked was that they stored new/existing notes in an SQLite table with UUIDs. This of course makes it very difficult to use bash tools, other IDEs, etc. to work with your notes after Joplin has ingested them.

This is the real deal breaker for me for evaluating any note-taking tool.

If the Obsidian app dies tomorrow, my notes will be fine.

If Joplin gets abandoned, then I will have to deal with all the imports/exports into a new tool.

Bash tools are really powerful.

One can even take a git (not just GitHub) backup of one's Obsidian notes easily.

With binary files like SQLite, the git backups work, but they don't provide a meaningful diff.

Joplin can export all of your notes as markdown right now using the export feature. It is not how Joplin works with it internally, but if it did shut down tomorrow, all of your notes can still be exported as plain text markdown into another editor, such as Obsidian.

With that feature the external editor is launched via Joplin, so the editing is still happening in the ecosystem. You can’t just open the notes from outside Joplin.

True, good point.

> Obsidian

Probably not what you're looking for, but I'm having a wonderful time running a private instance of Mediawiki. It's only accessible to me in my lan (or through my vpn). It's been my private digital garden for a few years now and i like it very much.

The only thing I truly miss is the possibility of pointing a Wikipedia-like app (might as well be the same codebase of the official wikipedia app, but pointing at my private endpoint).

I'm not sure it has all the features Obsidian has (I haven't tried Obsidian) but it has a fairly large number of extensions: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:All_extensions