Quick note up top. I wrote this blog post mostly by dictating to my computer, as an experiment. It worked … somewhat. After dictating, I rewrote most anyway. But some weird turns of phrases might remain unnoticed.
Intro
I used Evernote for close to 10 years before switching to Joplin for my notes and workflow. Having used Joplin for a year now, I thought it was time to take stock.
Timeline
I started using Evernote sometime in 2013. Initially I used it for writing notes, with no real systematic thought behind it. During the next few years, I was exposed to the getting things done methodology and decided to implement a version of it myself. This I did in January of 2017. That is the point that I became a so-called power user of Evernote. To put it into perspective I had about 270 notes in Evernote prior to 2017 and by the end of 2019 I had about 2200 notes. Today, in July of 2023, I have somewhere around 4800 notes.
In late 2020 things changed. The new version 10 of Evernote was released, and it was a significant downgrade from previous versions. My faith in the company had been eroding for a while, and now it was gone. I realised that I had to change my notetaking program. I spent a long time searching for the perfect replacement and preparing for the eventual to change. And finally in July 2022 I made the switch to Joplin. I have now used Joplin happily for one year — which surprises me, because it feels like much longer.
What I like about Joplin
Markdown
One of the fears I had when I was contemplating the change was that I would have to learn markdown. This turned out to be a false fear because markdown is incredible, and I love it. One of the great things about markdown is its versatility. I use it both for statistical coding in R and for a writing this blog post. It also allowed me to easily employ markdown-compatible tools. For instance, when creating flowcharts for VR games, I used Mermaid to get flowcharts of player actions.
Furthermore, writing in markdown improved the formatting of my notes. This was an unexpected bonus. In Evernote I have various inconsistent ways of creating headlines, like bolding, italicising, underlining or upper-casing text, or combinations of these. Markdown simplified this by introducing a three-level hierarchy of headings indicated with the use of #.
Stabililty
Evernote was infamous for its bugs. Usually, they were harmless. Notes would lose focus, lines would appear sporadically across the space of the notes. Sometimes they were serious, like when I lost pictures stored in notes. The new version 10 was supposed to increase stability, but instead it completely broke my workflow. Joplin is blissfully stable. I still experience minor bugs, these are usually fixed quite quickly by the development team. And they are also never as severe and encompassing as Evernote’s bugs were. All in all I am quite amazed at the great job that the team are doing, considering that they are not paid for the work they do. Instead, they rely on donations and volunteer work.
Plugins
The plug-ins created by the wonderful community of Joplin has improved my workflow immensely. Often beyond what I was able to in Evernote. One of the great examples is the quick links plugin. Instead of switching between several notes and copy-pasting links between them, you simply type @@ and search for the name of the note you want to link to. The inline tags plugin similarly made it trivial to add several tags to a note quickly. Other plug-ins that I have benefited greatly from are: Note overview, Note tabs and Favourites.
FOSS
Finally, it gives me great pleasure that Joplin is free and open source software. Having been a denizen of the Internet for decades now I am increasingly seeing the value of this framework. It ties the success of software not to its ability to generate revenue, but rather to its utility and interest among users.
I don’t mind paying for a good product. Evernote was, I believe, the first subscription service I bought. And I was fine paying for it because, after all, it was an ongoing service. Over time, however, the subscription fees kept increasing while there was no corresponding increase in quality. Rather, it decreased.1
The proprietary nature of some software can cause issues if you ever want to transition to other software. As the new version of Evernote was dropped, it introduced a limit to the number of notes that could be exported if you, say, wanted to import them into another note program. I discovered a similar “feature” in Mendeley when I was transitioning to JabRef. In both cases, the trick to regain the ability to export all elements was to downgrade to a previous version of the app from before the restrictions were introduced. This feels wrong. Your notes shouldn’t be held hostage. The open source foundations of FOSS software are a safeguard against this. Even if Joplin were to suddenly terminate, I could easily export my notes and import them into another program.
What I still miss from Evernote
I was able to replicate most of my workflow to Joplin. Some features I still miss, tough.
Note list with details
My biggest gripe is that the notes list in Joplin only has the title of the note. It doesn’t have details like time created, time updated, tags, and notebook. I didn’t realise how much I had come to rely on these fields to navigate the notes. My workflow relied on searching for note titles and content. And without those attributes easily available in the search results, sifting through them becomes a chore. Especially because notes are sorted not by time created nor time updated, but by relevancy (I assume). If my search yields many results I have a hard time identifying which note I’m looking for.
To illustrate: Note that only the title of the notes are displayed.
Compare this to the only picture I was able to find of Evernote’s detailed note overview, borrowed from I wrote a novel entirely in Evernote. You can glean a section of the note list entitled “Updated”. Evernote allowed for several of these tabs.
The Note overview plug-in somewhat alleviates this issue by allowing me to recreate somewhat the functionality of Evernote’s saved searches. But is too cumbersome for simple searches, on which I relied a lot on in Evernote. This remains unsolved the issue for me.
Mail to note
Evernote had a snappy feature for getting the contents of an email into the app. This is not available in the base version of Joplin. I know that various people in the community have worked on solutions that imitates this behaviour. I have not tried them yet because, reading the comments and discussions, they don’t seem to work flawlessly. Though I realise I can’t really criticise it before I tried it.
Quick widget on tablet, phone
Joplin works best on a computer. This is fine for me since I mostly use it for work, which I do on a computer. However, I frequently use it on tablets or phones to do either of two things: review notes, or making a quick note. And the latter was easier on Evernote. I would simply press a widget to open a small note into which I could write some text, close the note, and it would appear later in my Evernote app. Joplin has no similar feature, and it’s thus cumbersome to add a note quickly. Especially since synchronisation requires the app to be open. Meaning it can take a while, especially if I haven’t done it recently. This is because the apps do not allow you to synchronise in the background (another minor annoyance).
The beloved quick note widget:
Other thoughts
I have talked about some of the things that I love about Joplin and miss from Evernote. However, there is a point I want to make that I think it is important.
One of the main reasons that I waited so long to make the transition to Joplin was that I desperately needed hierarchical tags. I used them to organise my work. For instance, the tag work had several sub-tags, one of which was courses, which again had sub-tags for each of the courses I was teaching. After agonising for a long time over the lack of hierarchical tags in Joplin I came to the realisation that I did not actually need them in the first place. Evernote actually only really implemented the hierarchical tags in the tags overview menu, which was helpful for getting an overview of my work structure. But I couldn’t use it in my searches, which was the main intention. I had known this for a while, but somehow never really internalised it. Thus, in the end I realised that I didn’t really need this functionality from Joplin. I mention it because I think it is important to be somewhat sceptical of your perceived needs in software.
Similarly, sometimes the problem is not a lack of implementation but rather a rigidity in my own use case that can be easily simplified by just changing my own behaviour, rather than creating/adjusting features of the software. When I browse the Joplin forums for suggestions for implementation and changes to the app, I see that a lot of the requests are variants of this:
For instance, I see many people desperately clamouring for the ability to view several notes simultaneously. I was one of them. But I realised that I didn’t need this feature as much as I though, despite using it heavily in Evernote. Again, my point here is that sometimes flexibility is the solution. Neither Joplin nor Evernote can be perfect for everyone (or maybe even for anyone). But it is close.
Footnotes
I put the money I saved on an Evernote subscription this year towards a donation to Joplin.↩︎