Taking Notes with Joplin
17 comments
·April 19, 2025vunderba
jayflux
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.
darkmuck
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.
terminalgravity
You said “like Obsidian”. Which parts of Obsidian are most important for you
jhbadger
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.
flkiwi
After looking in vain for a browser-based Logseq (i.e., the way logseq used to be before APP EVERYTHING!!! began the downward spiral -- the next version won't even use markdown files), I've gone full Leeroy Jenkins on Silverbullet. It's not refined. It's not stable. But it's good enough, it lives in a browser, and it creates markdown. It's also incredibly customizable with Lua, but that's not necessarily a net positive for someone who wants an environment that works simply.
msm_
Since Evernote died, I've been looking for a thing to replace it with. I've tried dozens (not exaggregating) note-taking solution.
Right now I've reverted to the good (?) old "plain markdown files in a git-synced repository. Of course it comes with its own set of downsides, but after migrating (and sometimes leaving behind) my notes so many times I like how portable and universal plain-text is.
(I want to give a shout-out to Tiddlywiki. It stands out among the plethora of solutions I've tested, and I still sometimes use it for my mind-maps or designs).
sebastiennight
What do you mean by "Evernote died"? To the best of my knowledge they are still up and running?
Probably even released some new ToS to scrape all user data for AI training, I imagine.
grepfru_it
Trilium.
mdaniel
https://github.com/zadam/trilium#trilium-is-in-maintenance-m... seems relevant, and that's above and beyond the license difference between the two (I'm not looking for trouble, I'm only saying they are different)
lf-non
There is an ongoing community effort to revive it: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes
whalesalad
I’ve been running this in my homelab since 2021. Can’t live without it now.
brokegrammer
Happy Joplin user since 2020. Self-synced using Syncthing. Great note-taking tool overall.
har777
I've been using Joplin for years. It was always a bit slow but I recently updated it and now the app takes over 30 seconds to load :|
It's sync feature is super seamless though!
swah
Another alternative to Joplin is Upnote. It just works too.
azaras
Org-mode is the way for Emacs users.
terminalgravity
The reason I learned emacs. I absolutely love it.
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.