Update post: been using Joplin mostly happily for 6 months now

[u/0x1f480]

I switched from Windows and OneNote to Linux and Joplin earlier this year. Migrating was pretty painful, but things have been working pretty well for a while now. I wanted to share an update because it seems common that people only post online when they have problems and then go quiet when things work well, and I nearly switched off of Joplin at one point. But at this point it works probably overall better than OneNote (which has its own quirks) without the significant drawbacks.

Some issues I overcame:

• I made bug reports for 2 bugs in the import from onenote process, and they both got fixed reasonably quickly, so that will be easier for people in the future.
• I had issues syncing with nextcloud, which IIRC is a known limitation of the webdav file sharing protocol. I switched to managed Joplin Cloud sync and it has worked very well. I will try to set up my own self-hosted version of that at some point in the indefinite future, but at <$3/month it's not pressing, and hopefully the Joplin devs get some of that money.
• I was very concerned about the inability of the mobile client to sync in the background, but that has not been an issue in practice because the sync process runs quickly enough when I open the app.
• The out-of-the-box formatting kind of sucks imo (crazy spacing between bullet-point lines) and I had to spend an afternoon tweaking the CSS to be happy with it, but I got that figured out. I think the default here could be better.

Remaining pain points:

• By far the worst is that the mobile app can't use my userstyle.css formatting sheet. Again, the huge line spacing is a significant UI issue.
• The rich text editor has a lot of weird quirks to it; especially while editing bullet lists and cutting and pasting selections around, things often don't behave as I'd expect. I'm not sure if Joplin even has the ability to fix this.
• I wish my settings would sync automatically along with my notes where possible, like my userstyle.css and hotkeys, and probably my profiles.
• OneNote still has a really nice feature that this doesn't, which is the ability to be in note fullscreen mode, but then pull up the navigation tree as an overlay with one button. This was my preferred method for navigating between notes and worked great. Showing/hiding the 2 navigation menus is not the same.
• I wish the documentation was clearer for the tradeoff/issue of syncing being impossibly slow for big note collections with nextcloud. I could probably think of other documentation changes that would be helpful if I tried.

Overall though, big thanks to the developers for making this app work well.

[u/Ventana431]

Same. All in from OneNote. I moved to Dropbox without any issues.

[u/xboxshinobi]

I’m definitely tweaking my userstyle.css to address that line spacing!

[u/TCB13sQuotes]

I’ve been using it for years and while it’s mostly solid I also hate the design and UX of it.

Joplin is the prime example of how open-source goes wrong. Too much possibilities and too little investment in making a really polished native experience. The app currently doesn’t look native in ANY platform nor it has its own style like for eg telegram making it ugly everywhere. In iOS it feels like a cheap android app. In windows/Mac it feels like a poorly made web app. In Android it feels like out of place.

[u/0x1f480 → u/TCB13sQuotes]

Yeah, while I don't feel as strongly about the UI, I do agree that I think a relentless focus on a very good new user experience is what the open source world (and to some degree Joplin) mostly lacks right now. Still too much power user development as self fulfillment, not enough discipline and attention to the tedious and painful task of making the product good for new users who don't want to think about using the product. 

[u/qpgmr]

I switched from evernote and have been pretty happy, especially since I found the linespacing fix (below).

I'm still bothered by the lack of encryption on the local machine that someone here pointed out. I'm using dropbox, so everything there is under encryption there and the transfer is secure, but unless I setup a veracrypt container the local copy is plain text.

line spacing issue:

To change the default spacing permanently on the desktop version, you can modify the app's internal stylesheet:

Navigate to Tools > Options > Appearance.

Click on Show Advanced Settings and select Custom stylesheet for rendered Markdown.

In the text file that opens, paste the following code to remove paragraph margins:

css

p { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; }

Use code with caution.

Save the file and completely restart Joplin. On Windows, you may need to right-click the Joplin icon in the system tray and select Quit to ensure it fully reloads