Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

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Joplin is a decent open-source note app but I absolutely hate the way that they structure your notes.

If you have thousands of notes in a folder

  ~/my_notes
  ~/my_notes/work
  ~/my_notes/music
  etc.

Joplin takes them and stores the notes internally as a SQLite table with UUID named markdown files. It makes it very difficult to use bash tools, finding them, other IDEs, etc to work with your files after Joplin has ingested them.

Compare this to apps like VS Code / Obsidian / Logseq (also open source) which don't mess with your markdown file organization. You can just point them to a root folder and they'll work natively with your markdown files.

Furthermore, embedded media are also renamed to GUID.ext files and then are stored in ~/.config/joplin-desktop/resources which is terrible since now are notes are split from their related media.

This is the reason I don't use Joplin either.

Obsidian can handle an existing file structure.

I use Vim and folder sync to Nextcloud.

Where do you expect embedded media to be stored? For example, if I have the following note: ~/my_notes/art/renaissance.txt do you expect images in that note to be stored in ~/my_notes/art or in ~/my_notes/media, or something else?

I don't use Joplin for the aforementioned reasons earlier, but they should at least let you customize the "media folder".

The embedded media is already referenced using relatively standard markdown syntax in a respective MD note, e.g.:

    ![image info](./pictures/image.png)

Since apps such as Logseq and Obsidian work with your existing notes, they avoid this issue of massive file duplication and don't need to move the files at all.

EDIT: I just realized if you're talking about adding media onto a note through the notetaking application itself, take a look at what Typora does as a good example of how to handle it. It auto-creates a relative folder called "note_name.assets" and moves them to it. Obsidian OTOH lets you specify a "media" folder that exists for each subdirectory of your existing note structure.

Thanks for all the info!

In Obsidian, for example, you can choose where your media data is stored (and there are options to store them alongside the Markdown files, e.g. in a hidden folder). I guess OP’s point is that this would be a better way, or at least to store media in the same root folder as notes and not some arbitrary folder far away from the notes.

You can try TagSpaces as well, it works also directly with your file system and do not use a database.

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