Joplin

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Keywords: notes

Why Joplin?

I was looking for a note-taking app and found that everyone hypes Notion these days. I used to take notes on Google Keeps, OneNotes, and Mac's Notes. All these apps are limited in feature compare to Notion, and it also has nice and clean UI for enjoyable user experience. However, it is just a yet another freeware which has no native app support for Linux. For a FOSS supporter, this is a bad impression, no matter how good it is. So I looked for an alternative and ended up with Joplin. It is an open source and has all the features I wanted.

  1. App for Linux
  2. Multi-device Sync
  3. Markdown Support
  4. Publishing the notes to Web
  5. Drawing Support (draw.io and excalidraw)
  6. Knowledge Graph

1. App for Linux

It is available in AppImage and easy to set up. Just download the AppImage file, set execute permission, then double-click on the file.
Another option is running the installer script in Shell. It creates the desktop icon as well.

wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/dev/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash

2. Multi-device Sync

Joplin provides the commercial cloud service for the data sync but we can use other third-party cloud storages such as DropBox, OneDrive, NextCloud, or S3. I'm using DropBox.

3. Markdown Support

Markdown is the native format for Joplin but there are some plugins to make it look better. I don't use them as the default is enough for me.

4. Publishing the notes to Web

This is the main feature I wanted. I used to write blogs hosted on GitHub Pages by using a static site generator, Hugo. Notion is way more better as there are a lot of free and paid templates, and also cool features. But publishing the notes with custom domain is not available in free account. My requirement is simple, just want to share some notes to public for my channel, KnowYourLinux and it has to be organized. Joplin Pages Publisher is good enough for that.

5. Drawing Support

I always use draw.io for architecture diagrams and excalidraw for some drafts and sketches. There are plugins for both. We can search and install draw.io plugin directly from the Plugins setting of Joplin app, but for excalidraw plugin, only lower version is available in there and it doesn't work with newer Joplin version. We need to download .jpl from the GitHub project and install manually from file.
joplin-plugin-drawio
joplin-excalidraw

6. Knowledge Graph

This one is just a fancy feature for me at the moment. I just want to give it a try.
joplin-link-graph

I will add more if I found new useful features.

Cheers!