A word form @foxmask, our community manager!

Hacktoberfest is back this year again for our great pleasure ^^

here are the rules to participate:

To qualify for the official limited edition Hacktoberfest shirt, you must register and make four pull requests (PRs) between October 1-31 (in any time zone). PRs can be made to any public repo on GitHub, not only the ones with issues labeled Hacktoberfest. This year, the first 50,000 participants who successfully complete the challenge will earn a T-shirt.

To participate go to https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/, log in (with you GitHub account) and you are ready to get in.

Next, go dive into the Joplin issues list labelled "Hacktoberfest".

Start hacking, submit the PR from the 1st of October, not before.

We hope you will enjoy that event this year again like the previous one  🎃 🎉

PS: the 4 Pull Request don’t have to be done only on Joplin project, those can be done on any FOSS projects. Even PR for issue not tagged as 'hacktoberfest'

The Joplin icon is going to change soon. The one we have now is something I put together quickly, not knowing if the project would interest someone, so I didn't want to spend too much time on it. Now that the project is more mature, it makes sense to start improving the visuals - first the icon, then the logo font, the website and finally the app UI (although these have already been improved little by little over the past year).

Before picking an icon, I'd be interested to hear about your feedback and whether you have a preference among those below. They all share the same idea - which is something that looks like a note, and that contains a "J" too.

Feedback is welcome! And if you have a preference please answer this post and put your top 2 or 3 icons in your post and we'll do a tally in a few days.

Icon A

Icon B

Icon C

Icon D

Icon E

Icon F

Icon G

Icon H

Fountain is markup language for screenwriting. Similar to Markdown, it is a lightweight markup format, which allows editing screenplays in plain text.

The desktop and mobile Joplin applications now support Fountain, allowing you to write and read your screenplays on your computer or on the go. To add a Fountain screenplay to a note simply wrap it into a fenced block, with the "fountain" identifier. For example:

\*\*FADE IN:\*\*

A RIVER.

We're underwater, watching a fat catfish swim along.  

For example, here is Big Fish on mobile:

and on desktop:

In Joplin desktop, it has been possible to customise the appearance of your notes using CSS for quite some time.

An issue however is that it is difficult to know what CSS to write and how to select specific elements with CSS. The development tools that were just added allow figuring this out. They are available under the menu Help > Toggle development tools.

Then, from the "Elements" tab, it is possible to select an element and view the corresponding HTML as well as styles. It is also possible to modify the style in real time and view the changes before adding them to userstyle.css.

One issue that came up frequently in the forum is that Joplin's data can be very large, especially when the note collection includes many attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). This happens in particular when using the web clipper a lot, as each web page usually has many images included.

The recent versions of Joplin (Desktop, mobile and CLI) attempt to mitigate this issue by providing an option to change how attachments are downloaded during synchronisation.

The default option is to download all the attachments, all the time, so that the data is available even when the device is offline. However, more importantly, there's now the option to download the attachments manually, by clicking on it, or automatically, in which case the attachments are downloaded only when a note is opened.

These changes should help saving disk space and network bandwidth, especially on mobile.

The latest versions of Joplin adds support for note history. The applications (desktop, mobile and CLI) now preserve previous versions of the notes, so you can inspect or restore them later on as needed.

A common complain with many sync-based note taking apps is that they work in an opaque way - sometimes notes are changed or they disappear and it's not clear why - it could be a user error, or some bug, but regardless it makes it hard to trust the app with thousands of notes. So this feature give transparency over what's happening - if some note seems to be gone or changed when it shouldn't, the redundant data allows investigating the issue and restoring content.

Another medium term goal is to allow the implementation of a recycle bin. Behind the scene, this is essentially already done since whenever a note is deleted, a final revision of that note is preserved. What's missing is a user interface (i.e. the recycle bin) to view these deleted notes.

How does it work?​

All the apps save a version of the modified notes every 10 minutes. These revisions are then synced across all the devices so if you're looking for a particular version of a note that was made on mobile, you can later find that version on the desktop app too.

How to view the history of a note?​

While all the apps save revisions, currently only the desktop one allow viewing these revisions.

To do so, click on the Information icon in the toolbar, then select "Previous version of this note".

The next screen will show the latest version of the note. You can then choose to view a different version, if any, or to restore one of them.

To restore a note, simply click on the "Restore" button. The old version of the note will be copied in a folder called "Restored Notes". The current version of the note will not be replaced or modified.

How to configure the note history feature?​

Additional options are available in the "Note History" section of the configuration screen. It is possible to enable/disable the note history feature. It is also possible to specify for how long the history of a note should be kept (by default, for 90 days).

IMPORTANT: Please note that since all the revisions are synced across all devices, it means these settings are kind of global. So for example, if on one device you set it to keep revisions for 30 days, and on another to 100 days, the revisions older than 30 days will be deleted, and then this deletion will be synced. So in practice it means revisions are kept for whatever is the minimum number of days as set on any of the devices. In that particular case, the 100 days setting will be essentially ignored, and only the 30 days one will apply.

Exactly one year ago, on 24 April 2018, the Joplin forum was created as a result of this post on GitHub. Before this, the only way to discuss the project was indeed on the GitHub bug tracker, which is not ideal for general discussion about features, development and so on.

After looking at various options, eventually we settled on Discourse, which provides a nice clean UI, works well on mobile, and is easy to manage. Even better, the Discourse team was kind enough to host the project for us for free, as part of their Free hosting program for open source projects. Not having to manage or pay for the server is great, and it means more time can be spent developing the application.

On the opening day, there was only three users - me, foxmask and zblesk, joined a few days later by tessus, merlinuwe, jhf2442, sciurius and many others. Today there are 811 users, 6700 posts, about 15 new posts created each day, and about 2000 pageviews each day.

The forum has been very useful to discuss features and development, to provide support and news, and to organise events such as Hacktoberfest. It also serves as a knowledge base (via the search function) to provide solutions regarding various Joplin issues.

Of course the forum has also been great to develop the community around the Joplin project, and hopefully will keep serving us well for the years to come!

The latest release includes two relatively important new features:

The first one, is the addition of several Markdown plugins that enable new features: for example it's now possible to add a table of contents to your notes, to enable footnotes, or to render various text decorations, such as superscript, subscript, highlighting, etc. This was all made possible thanks to the efforts of Caleb John.

The second major new feature is the addition of the Goto Anything dialog. Press Ctrl+P or Cmd+P and type the title of a note to jump directly to it. You can also type # followed by a tag or @ followed by a notebook title. The feature was largely inspired by the cool Sublime Text Goto Anything feature.

The original search engine in Joplin was pretty limited - it would search for your exact query and that is it. For example if you search for "recipe cake" it would return results that contain exactly this word in this order and nothing else - it would not return "apple cake recipe" or "recipe for birthday cake", thus forcing you to try various queries.

The last versions of Joplin include a new search engine that provides much better results, and also allow better specifying search queries.

The search engine indexes in real time the content of the notes, thus it can give back results very fast. It is also built on top of SQLite FTS and thus support all its queries. Unlike the previous search engine, the new one also sorts the results by relevance.

The first iteration of this new search engine was a bit limited when it comes to non-English text. For example, for searching text that contains accents or non-alphabetical characters. So in the last update, better support for this was also added - accentuated and non-accentuated characters are treated in the same way, and languages like Russian, Chinese, Japanese or Korean can be searched easily.

This search engine is still new so it is likely to change over time. For example, ordering the results by relevance is a bit experimental, and some edge cases might not work for non-English language queries. If you notice any issue, feel free to report it on the forum or GitHub. The new search engine is in use in both the mobile and desktop application.

Joplin is now featured on PrivacyTools.io, a site dedicated to providing knowledge and tools to protect people's privacy against global mass surveillance. The app was kindly submitted by Mats Estensen on GitHub and accepted soon after.

Since day one the Joplin project has indeed been concerned with privacy - offering End To End Encryption and supporting open standards, including WebDAV for synchronisation. Setting up Joplin synchronisation can be more complicated than other existing note applications, but the advantage is that once it is done you 100% own the data and even the infrastructure if you use Nextcloud on your own server.

The applications do not track users, and of course there is not and will never be ads. It also makes very few web requests (outside of synchronisation). In fact only two requests are made, and both can be disabled in the options:

• One for geolocation tagging, to associate a latitude and longitude with a note.

• One for the auto-update checks. It makes a request to GitHub to check if a new version has been released.

This endorsement by PrivacyTools is great news for the project. It means more users, and that our efforts to create a privacy-respecting tool are going in the right direction.