Joplin markdown editor

These comments are about Joplin 2.8.8 (Linux AppImage).

• home: https://joplinapp.org/

Nonobvious

The available controls made it seem that notes can only be sorted by when-last-edited (ascending or descending), but actually there are multiple options including by-name and manual-sort. These are found only in the menu.

Joplin supports infinite folder-nesting of Notebooks. You can link across Notebooks. The "easy" way to link is to click-drag a note from the list, but this gets difficult when going from one notebook to another; the almost-as-easy (or maybe-easier) method is to right-click on the Note you want to link to, select "copy Markdown link", and then paste it where you want it.

Notes do not have to be named uniquely, even within the same Notebook.

Mixed

You can paste an image directly into Joplin -- but there's no way to resize or rotate , which means photos tend to be way too large and must be resized externally before you add them.

You can use straight-up HTML, but within an HTML tag-pair you can't use Markdown.

It will synchronize with Nextcloud, although the dialog box it shows when you first press the "Synchronize" button on an unconfigured install only mentions Dropbox and, I think, GDrive -- implying that those are your only options. The full list of available sync formats is in Tools → Options → Synchronization.

Hindrances

The table formatting is a bit maddening and vague:

• Doing a linebreak within a cell is doable, but undocumented (and maybe not officially supported?): you have to use a <br>.
• I can't figure out how to do a table without a header, although you can have a header with no text (which leaves the header as a thin strip of dark grey instead of large empty boxes).

(From Tessa: apparently the Mobile version doesn't recognize its own exports.)

The initial sync from a new Joplin install to an existing Joplin repo was tricky, partly hindered by Nextcloud apparently always giving the WebDAV URL to the base folder rather than the current folder. (Joplin should show you a folder-tree and let you select, to prevent this kind of misunderstanding.) Once you get the correct URL, you have to press the "delete all local content and re-sync" button. Even after the sync shows as complete, the downsynched content may not appear until you click around a little.

Bugs

The HTML export is bollocks. There are two modes, both of which produce internal links that use the Joplin-only URL format (e.g. joplin://b7c199d7cdc54305ac58e467db6e1d1a), which does not work in any other context.

• HTML file (produces a single file with JavaScript)
  • It would make sense for this option to use "joplin://" URLs, as these could in theory be translated by the included JavaScript -- but that does not seem to work.
• HTML Directory (produces a tree of files, one for each page)
  • I can't see why this doesn't just link to the appropriate file directly ("file://" protocol), but... it doesn't.

In both cases, clicking on the links has no effect.