Joplin

If the first you did when reading "Joplin" was thinking of this singer, I already like you. Janis Joplin was amazing.

Alas, this post is not about her, but about the program called Joplin.

It's what Evernote does, just a bit different. Joplin is open source, which is my preference.

Joplin allows for synchronisation through various means, like NextCloud and AWS S3, and also their own Joplin Cloud.

Great for use on many devices. For a while I used Joplin Cloud, to give back to the people who are creating the software and the service. After about a year I moved the sync to Nextcloud, which works perfectly. I now make occasional donations to the maintainers of Joplin directly.

I've been playing with Obsidian for a while too, and that's really good, with clever options and tricks built in, but I kept missing Joplin. After some searching and with the help of comments from people on Mastodon I went back to Joplin and installed a few plugins. What a difference that makes! The benefit of Obsidian to create easy links is now also in Joplin.

The whole back and forth to Obsidian and back was very easy. From Joplin you can export all your notes to markdown directories, which is what Obsidian uses. Files with markdown code.

Going back to Joplin was easy too: import a markdown directory and you fill a new notebook. (Joplin stores its information in a SQLite database.)

For some reason Joplin feels/works better for me, even when the Obsidian interface seems a bit slicker/smoother. I guess it's what one likes. That's why it's good there are options. Open source options. 😁