this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I switched to Joplin a few years ago from Evernote and haven't looked back. Take control of your own notes - Joplin is open source and has clients for every platform, and imports notebooks from Evernote.
Or Obsidian? Take actual control over them including rendering if you want to customize that.
Maybe it's a different use case 🤔
Obsidian is closed source, so once the company dies, no one can modify the app. Joplin on the other hand is open source.
What I really like about Obsidian is that it stores your notes as plain text/markdown files on your computer. So you always have access to them, even without Obsidian itself. Markdown is also a fairly common format, so it shouldn't be too hard to move them somewhere else later.
But your concerns are still valid and I generally also prefer free open source software.
The app may be closed-source, but the data is all markdown, which should be easy to move to other apps.
At some point I realized that the solution to this little problem is Emacs org-mode. It's just sitting there waiting for people to use it.
I'm a l former emacs user of ~10 years and I could never get used to org mode, so it's definitely not for "normal" people.
Additionally, in modern times being emacs bound means no decent mobile client, no web interface, and mandatory roll-your-own sync and backup.
There's a few friends I know who swear by org mode up and down, but it's a considerable effort for most people to use it.
Haven't tried Obsidian, but have heard good things about it. I have about 12,000 notes and continue to be impressed with Joplin's ability to handle that with no issues.
Obsidians really good with lots of notes and linking them together as well as adding metadata to them.
It really depends on your use case. The plug-in ecosystem is also quite rich.
Different use cases, indeed. All I need is plaintext, images, and in-line pdf rendering. No audio, no video, no LaTeX, not even italics or bold.
Now, to be completely fair, while Joplin is great for simple notes, it’s data entry modes are weird AF. I assume, in a programmers mind, the operation is normal for an IDE as it can’t/won’t render links/objects in line with editing. You either get a markup-only window that’s editable, a rendered window that is read only, or lose half your screen to a split-view version. These options are selected via two, separate, unlabeled, non-status-indicating toggle buttons which cycle through 2 and 3 versions if the view.
Aside from that, it seems nice.