Joplin 4+

I was looking for a tool that I could use to organize and access my burgeoning collection of notes, and this app is ideal for me. I can use Markdown within my notes to easily create tables, etc. I can easily add jpegs and pngs to my notes. I can easily create links from within one note to another. I can easily rearrange my notebooks and move notes around without breaking links between them. I can easily access and work on my notes on my MacBook Pro, my iPad Pro, my iPad Mini, and my iPhone. I decided to try the app‘s reasonably priced Joplin Cloud, and it’s working beautifully. I‘ve got end-to-end encryption that is nearly invisible, in terms of how long it takes for things to sync and open. Did I mention the healthy community of plugins available, or how much I enjoy being able to also call up Joplin and run it from the command line when I‘m programming? When I was first setting up the app, I had to work through a couple of glitches, which was made much easier byte developer’s responsiveness and the app‘s active discussion boards. Right now I’ve got 482 notes in 42 folders, revised 1,024 times (?!). Some are quite short and others are vey long. The app has never choked or lagged, and searches are very fast. I love this app and use it all day, every day.

The name says it all. I grew tired of Evernote and wanted to switch to a FOSS alternative that I could self host. It doesn’t match Evernote feature for feature but in terms of my core needs, I have no complaints. Pleasant interface, cross platform, nested notebooks and tags, end to end encryption, multimedia notes, decent search. Importing from Evernote was very easy.

The things I miss about Evernote are the OCR to search within PDFs, the better polish around their search UI and smarter search in general, and the ability to share notes via the web app (Joplin doesn’t have a web UI). All in all, I can live with these trade offs considering that this app is completely free and I own all of my own data.

The app mostly works, but has a cumbersome UI and is full of annoying bugs which demonstrate a lack of ability or willingness on the part of the developer to properly test the app. Examples include inserting multiple new lines when you hit enter once, deleting the wrong character, messing up indentation and capitalization, graphical glitches, inserting images into the wrong place, etc. You can’t tap the end of a line without it selecting the last word on the line for no reason. If you select a block of text and perform some operation on that selection, like turning into a bullet list, the app will change what you have selected and perform that operation on what you didn’t even have selected. There is no way to undo, so hopefully it didn’t ruin your document. Sometimes the controls will simply disappear for no apparent reason and you’ll need to restart the app to get them back. The date format is day/month/year regardless of the device’s date locale settings. Also, the export function just fails silently. Most of these bugs can be reproduced every single time, so the only possible explanations are that the developer never bothered testing the app or simply doesn't care enough to fix them