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I spent a lot of time recently looking for a good note taking app. Notable (electron), QOwnNotes (Qt), and Joplin (electron) are very similar, with a markdown f

I spent a lot of time recently looking for a good note taking app. Notable (electron), QOwnNotes (Qt), and Joplin (electron) are very similar, with a markdown format with the ability to switch to the rendered view or have them split side-by-side. Joplin has an experimental combined rendered markdown editor view but it's still a bit rough around the edges. Ultimately I settled on Zettlr. It can be used as a normal notebook, and most importantly it's killer feature to me is that it allows you to paste images from your clipboard into a note, and then view that image inline in the markdown editor instead of having to switch to the rendered view to see the image. All of the other applications show a markdown ![image-filename]() link inside the note editor, requiring you to switch to the rendered view to see the actual image. The only other applications I found which can do this are: Joplin with the experimental editor, OneNote (no linux support, proprietary format), Bear Note (Apple devices only), and a few desktop note taking applications with a non-markdown format and no mobile application. With any of the markdown ones you can sync to Syncthing, NextCloud, Dropbox, etc. and then access them on your phone with the Joplin mobile application. But Zettlr just feels better than Joplin on the desktop, has some nice themes, and the editor is more refined than Joplin's experimental one. Given this, I don't really see any reason to use Notable over Joplin and Zettlr. QOwnNotes is also good if you really don't want electron and can live without inline images. I used all four of these for quite a while before forming this opinion.

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Author here. One practical reason to switch to Notable from Joplin is that notes in Notable are just plain files on disk, and that's extremely powerful. In Joplin instead you can only open notes one by one in the default app, the difference is that Joplin essentially copies the note out of its database, opens that in the external editor, and then synchronizes its changes back with the database. In Notable the files on disk _are_ the database. In practice this means that you should be getting better startup times with Joplin's approach, but anything that has to do with manipulating a lot of notes with an external tool is trivial in Notable, but you can't really do it with Joplin. Plus each note in Notable contains its own metadata in the YAML frontmatter section of the note. Last time I checked Joplin just doesn't expose this at all. I don't know enough about QOwnNotes to compare it in the same level of detail. If you want to give Notable another spin you should probably try one of the alphas of v1.9: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases the app changed quite significantly. For one now all shortcuts are customizable like they are in VSCode, and theming too is pretty much like in VSCode, in fact I ported all themes from VSCode to Notable, they are installable via the "Theme: Install..." command in the command palette.

fabiospampinato 6y ago

Author here. One practical reason to switch to Notable from Joplin is that notes in Notable are just plain files on disk, and that's extremely powerful. In Joplin instead you can only open notes one by one in the default app, the difference is that Joplin essentially copies the note out of its database, opens that in the external editor, and then synchronizes its changes back with the database. In Notable the files on disk _are_ the database. In practice this means that you should be getting better startup times with Joplin's approach, but anything that has to do with manipulating a lot of notes with an external tool is trivial in Notable, but you can't really do it with Joplin. Plus each note in Notable contains its own metadata in the YAML frontmatter section of the note. Last time I checked Joplin just doesn't expose this at all. I don't know enough about QOwnNotes to compare it in the same level of detail. If you want to give Notable another spin you should probably try one of the alphas of v1.9: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases the app changed quite significantly. For one now all shortcuts are customizable like they are in VSCode, and theming too is pretty much like in VSCode, in fact I ported all themes from VSCode to Notable, they are installable via the "Theme: Install..." command in the command palette.