Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which helps you write and organise your notes, and synchronise them between your devices. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the application directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format. Joplin is available as a desktop, mobile and terminal application.
The notes in this notebook give an overview of what Joplin can do and how to use it. In general, the three applications share roughly the same functionalities; any differences will be clearly indicated.
Joplin has three main columns:
-
Sidebar contains the list of your notebooks and tags, as well as the synchronisation status.
-
Note List contains the current list of notes - either the notes in the currently selected notebook, the notes in the currently selected tag, or search results.
-
Note Editor is the place where you write your notes. There is a Rich Text editor and a Markdown editor - click on the Toggle editor button in the top right hand corner to switch between both! You may also use an external editor to edit notes. For example you can use Typora as an external editor and it will display the note as well as any embedded images.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. Joplin supports a Github-flavoured Markdown syntax with a few variations and additions.
In general, while Markdown is a markup language, it is meant to be human readable, even without being rendered. This is a simple example (you can see how it looks in the viewer panel):
Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. Text attributes italic, bold and monospace are supported. You can create bullet lists:
- apples
- oranges
- pears
Or numbered lists:
- wash
- rinse
- repeat
This is a link and, finally, below is a horizontal rule:
A lot more is possible including adding code samples, math formulae or checkbox lists - see the Markdown documentation for more information.
Joplin notes are organised into a tree of notebooks and sub-notebooks.
- On desktop, you can create a notebook by clicking on New Notebook, then you can drag and drop them into other notebooks to organise them as you wish.
- On mobile, press the "+" icon and select "New notebook".
- On terminal, press
:mn
The second way to organise your notes is using tags:
- On desktop, right-click on any note in the Note List, and select "Edit tags". You can then add the tags, separating them by commas.
- On mobile, open the note and press the "⋮" button and select "Tags".
- On terminal, type
:help tagfor the available commands.