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Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

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Re: Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

#51

Post by roryisok »

laurent123456 wrote: post #34
roryisok wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I just built for myself. Flatnote, on the windows store (and soon on mac/Linux/mobile) is a rich-edit note app which stores files as .md files in the file system. Sync is handled by just putting your notes folder in Dropbox

That's interesting, I've tried to use plain text files at the beginning too but it didn't quite work. Also if I'm not mistaken on mobile Dropbox sync is not built-in so you'll need to implement it on top of their API (including conflict handling) which is probably the most difficult part in any app like this. That's also why having a local SQLite is useful because you can more easily compare your local state to what…

You're right, when I build mobile I'll have to build my own sync to dropbox, but there are plenty of libraries for that. Hopefully one that already does conflict handling =(

I do have a local database store, but the Windows Store app is written in JS so I'm using NeDB which is basically just a mongo style interface for a JSON file. At the moment I really only use it to track recently opened files.

On other platforms I'll probably use SQLite, but I won't be storing the data in there, just the metadata (access times, paths, previews, wordcounts etc)

As one dev to another I have to say I love what you've built in Joplin. I love the name, I love the terminal app idea (Why didn't I think of that!) - its really a great achievement. You've built for multiple platforms and here I am hijacking the thread to peddle my half-built markdown-editor-with-a-file-list =D

Re: Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

#52

Post by [deleted] »

smichel17 wrote: post #46
fxn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried a bunch. Notion is super cool, but doesn't do tables at this moment (though they seem to be working on it). Some apps have one level of nesting only, which is not enough structure for my use case. By now I have settled on Dropbox Paper. Also, having a WYSIWYG editor is cool, in raw Markdown links and images just do not look good for my taste (and tables, and more, compared to Dropbox Paper or Notion). Th…

Imo, raw markdown links look a lot better when you use [this style]. It's marginally more effort to write, but reads better and is easier to edit. [this style]: https://example.com

[deleted]

Re: Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

#53

Post by Philipp__ »

Currently I am very happy with my note taking setup, it consists of 3 modules:

1. Black Moleskine notebook where I write down ideas, and explain myself some complicated code for example. I use it more as a "mind-organiser" if I may say so...

2. Emacs' org-mode, where I write down my dev. progress on weekly level, lay down monthly plans and goals and write down some of the random stuff that I like to order into lists. And I use it more since I found out really good iOS app for org mode called "beorg". It is really awesome, I sync it with Dropbox and it works really, really well.

3. Apple Notes as my scribble kind of thing since synchronization works instantaneously between my iPhone and Macs. I use it mostly as my iPhone on-the-go noting system, and later on if I find something important I pass it to the org file or write it down into the black notebook.

Re: Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

#55

Post by tomlong »

This is very close to ideal for me. I've been moving away from Google Keep (and google in general recently, using Fastmail, microg fork of LineageOS on Fairphone 2, orgzly, vim org-mode Nextcloud etc etc) and the one thing that I missed was easily been able to dump photos and images into notes.

I've had a play with this briefly and I will be using it full time. As soon as it offers nextcloud sync it really ticks all of my boxes. The terminal client is a really nice touch.

Re: Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

#56

Post by wikibob »

beaconstudios wrote: post #30
norswap wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity, freedom to really migrate your data. Sure, you theoretically can migrate your notes from, say OneNote to Evernote (and vice-versa), but doing so is a great experience in frankensteining. I'm not even very confident there isn't outright data loss in some places, and with a high volume of notes, it's not feasible to check manually. Even with no loss, lots of stuff look ugly and/or do not work anymore, even…

writing your notes in markdown is a bit ass-backwards though - it's great as a storage medium but having to manually reformat a markdown document because you're not live-editing the output is a needless pain. I'd much rather write using your usual rich text interface and have that export markdown for me.

There are some editors that live preview your markdown. It’s pretty nice.

Take a look at Bear on Mac & iOS, and DayOne (my favorite but lacking full markdown support). Also Dropbox paper is interesting and live previews markdown and has nice table support

Re: Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

#60

Post by Grumbledour »

laurent123456 wrote: post #33
Grumbledour wrote: post #8

Since I can't test it right now: Does this use some kind of database to store the notes? The readme talks about syncing, including to the file system. Why are the notes not simply stored as files in the first place? Would this not be much easier than constant exporting/importing to various providers?

Hi, I'm the author of this app. The notes on each client are stored in an SQLite database for performance reason. If they were stored directly as text files it would be slow to query them, it would be very hard to make it work on mobile (and even slower), and you wouldn't be able to easily create relations between notes and tags, notes and notebooks, resource links, etc. It's when exporting them or syncing them that…

Thanks for the info!

I personally feel the only truly non obscure format are plain text files and it should be possible to use hierarchies, tags etc. with a combination of folders and front matter on the files itself. But I am a bit extreme in this, since I just don't like to migrate my notes yet again and have to install app after app on every device I need to access them. I was quite taken with projects like grav, that can provide functionality with just markdown files. But I haven't investigated to far on performance, especially not on mobile.

And you are right of course, that SQLite is quite preferable to most propitiatory cloud storage solutions.

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