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Taking Notes with Joplin

(lwn.net)
108 points sohkamyung | 2 comments | 19 Apr 25 06:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.425s | source
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vunderba ◴[19 Apr 25 17:48 UTC] No.43738065[source]▶
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.

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1. ashishb ◴[21 Apr 25 20:18 UTC] No.43756015[source]▶
> 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.

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2. worble ◴[21 Apr 25 23:09 UTC] No.43757506[source]▶
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.