Open Source Note Taking App

Do you take a lot of notes during the day? I do. Do you also try to stay organized by using a To-Do List? Again, I do. Joplin Open Source Note Taking App fits the bill just perfectly. Let’s see why.

Joplin Open Source Note Taking App

To start out with, let’s look at what the Joplin open-source note-taking app is. First of all, Joplin is free and easy on the pocketbook. But that is not all.

A fairly new kid on the block being registered in 2020 and according to SourceForge.net (a trademark of Slashdot Media), “Joplin is a free and open-source note-taking and to-do application that can handle a large number of notes in Markdown format, organize them into notebooks and synchronize them with various cloud services. All notes can also be copied, tagged, searched, and modified directly from the app or through your own text editor.”

If you use Evernote, notes that are exported from Evernote can be imported into Joplin, be it formatted content, resources, complete metadata or plain Markdown files.

Joplin Platform Availability

Joplinapp.org is quick to point out that the application is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS (the terminal app also works on FreeBSD). A Web Clipper, to save web pages and screenshots from your browser, is also available for Firefox and Chrome.

Note Taking App Features

In comparison to other competitors, Joplin comes with many useful features. I mean, as I was looking at the list they gave, there are over 20 features that they list. Among them are:

• The open-source notetaking app supports desktop, mobile and terminal applications.
• Security is covered with end-to-end encryption (E2EE)
• Joplin supports notes, to-dos, tags, and notebooks.
• Multiple criteria are available so you can sort things by title, updated time, and more.
• To put it another way, this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as features go.

What About Joplin Importing and Exporting

So as to give you an overview, recognizing that Joplin was designed as a replacement for Evernote, it is well able to import complete Evernote notebooks, as well as notes, tags, resources (attached files), and note metadata (such as author, geo-location, etc.) via ENEX files.

In terms of data, the only two things that might render a difference are:

• Recognition data – Evernote images, in particular, scanned (or photographed) documents utilize recognition data associated with them. It is the text that Evernote has been able to recognize in the document. This data is not preserved when the notes are imported into Joplin.

• Color, font sizes, and faces – Evernote text is stored as HTML and this is converted to Markdown during the import process. For notes that are mostly plain text or with basic formatting (bold, italic, bullet points, links, etc.) this is a lossless conversion, and the note, once rendered back to HTML should be very similar.

More details are visible on the joplinapp.org website.

Oh, before I forget to mention, the Joplin open-source note-taking app is equally able to handle exporting.

Joplin can export to the JEX format (Joplin Export file), which is a tar file that can contain multiple notes, notebooks, etc. You won’t notice a loss in format as all the notes, but also metadata such as geolocation, updated time, tags, etc., are preserved.

In addition, a “raw” format is also available. Compared to the JEX format, it is the same except that the data is saved to a directory and each item is represented by a single file.

Joplin is also capable of exporting to multiple other formats including HTML and PDF.

Final Words on Open Source Note Taking

In conclusion, I need to at least bring to your attention the many other capabilities of Joplin that I will do in bullet point format.

• Synchronization is multi-faceted and superb.
• As we mentioned earlier, encryption is end to end. E2EE is a system where only the owner of the notes, notebooks, tags, or resources can read them. That means that it prevents potential eavesdroppers from accessing the data.
• Your previous note history is saved automatically.
• Notably Joplin notes can be opened and edited using an external editor of your choice.
• Next, any kind of file can be attached to a note.
• In the desktop and mobile apps, you are free to set an alarm with any to-do.

So what does Megabite think about this open-source note-taking app? We highly recommend it. We are quite certain that you will be happy with your choice if you decide on getting Joplin. If you run into any issues that you need help with, just let us know. Our phone number is 904-430-0350.

#joplin #opensourcenotetaking

Categorised in: Apps, How To Keep Organized

This post was written by Megabite