Description

Rediscover your notes: open a random note, resurface notes from this day in past years, and see writing statistics for your whole library (counts CJK correctly).

Additional Information

Links:	Repository Homepage View source
Maintainers:	smiletalker
Version:	1.1.1
Minimum app version:	3.0
Downloads: This version:	17
Last updated:	2026-10-19T20:36:39Z

Recall — a Joplin plugin

Rediscover your own notes, and see how much you've actually written.

• Open a random note — one click (or toolbar button) jumps you to a random note. Great for serendipitous review.
• On This Day — surfaces notes you created on this calendar day in previous years, the way photo apps show "memories". Joplin has no built-in equivalent.
• Daily Recall digest — generates a single note combining On This Day plus a handful of random notes, with clickable links. Optionally built automatically on startup on desktop.
• Writing statistics — the word count of your whole library: totals, a 12-month heatmap, and breakdowns by year and by notebook.

Writing statistics

Screenshot generated from a synthetic library (node tools/demoData.js), not from anyone's real notes.

Every other Joplin word-count plugin counts the current note, and all of them tokenise with /\b\w+\b/, where \w is ASCII-only. A 500-character Chinese note reports 0 words. Recall counts the whole library, and counts CJK correctly:

Text	/\b\w+\b/	Recall
今天下午去看了房子，中介说学区还不错。	0	17
读完这本书花了三天，里面讲的 survivorship bias 很有意思。	2	19
これはテストです	0	8
Today I went to see the apartment.	7	7

How it counts. Han characters, hiragana and katakana count per character — the convention in Chinese and Japanese publishing. Every other script, including Hangul and Cyrillic, counts per word. Before counting, markdown syntax, URLs, attachment links, HTML tags and inline code are stripped, and fenced code blocks are excluded entirely and reported separately. Full-width punctuation is reported on its own line rather than folded into the total. Recall's own generated notes are never counted.

Performance. Counts are cached per note and only recomputed when a note's updated_time changes. On a 3,400-note library the first run reads every body in ~70 paged API calls; later runs re-read nothing and only refresh the metadata. The cache lives in a plugin setting (~220 KB at that size) and can be rebuilt from the panel.

Where it lives. On desktop, open Tools → Recall → Writing statistics for an occasional-use dialog. On Android, open plugin panels → Recall and choose Writing statistics. Both let you copy the figures as Markdown or rebuild the cache.

Usage

Install Recall from Joplin’s plugin directory, or download the .jpl from GitHub Releases and use Settings → Plugins → Advanced → Install from file. Fully restart Joplin after installing or upgrading so all settings appear.

Desktop (Joplin 3.0+): a die icon in the note toolbar opens a random note; Tools → Recall contains every action.

Android (Joplin 3.4+): finish syncing, then open plugin panels → Recall. The panel provides Random note, On This Day, Daily Recall and Writing statistics. Automatic startup generation is disabled on mobile; generate reviews manually after syncing. Physical-device feedback covers Joplin 3.7.8 on Android 16 and 17; the declared minimum version has not been tested on a device. iOS has not been validated, and Joplin restricts iOS installation to recommended plugins.

Settings

Settings → Recall:

Setting	Default	What it does
Random notes in Daily Recall	3	How many random notes the digest includes
Exclude completed to-dos	on	Skip finished to-dos when picking notes
Source notebook IDs	(empty)	Comma-separated notebook IDs to review; empty = all notebooks
Include sub-notebooks	off	Include all descendants of the selected source notebooks
Target notebook ID	(empty)	Where generated notes are stored; empty = default
Generate Daily Recall on startup	off	Auto-build the digest when Joplin starts (desktop only)

The "On This Day" and "Daily Recall" notes are upserted per day — re-running updates the same note instead of creating duplicates.

Building from source

npm install
npm test            # counting assertions, including the CJK cases above
npm run dist        # produces publish/com.github.smieltalker.recall.jpl

Install the resulting .jpl via Joplin → Settings → Plugins → gear icon → Install from file.

Checking the counter against your own library

tools/ holds two harnesses that run the real code against a real library with the plugin API stubbed out (tools/apiStub.ts), so you can check both the numbers and the layout without launching Joplin:

npm run harness

# numbers: totals, per-year and per-notebook breakdowns, cache behaviour
<dump> | node .harness-build/tools/statsHarness.js

# layout: renders the dialog to a standalone HTML file
# (a 5th argument of "light" or "dark" picks one theme; omit it for both)
<dump> | node .harness-build/tools/previewHarness.js out.html \
          src/webview/stats.css src/webview/stats.js

<dump> can be node tools/demoData.js, which emits a deterministic synthetic library — that is how the screenshot above is produced, so no real notes are involved:

node tools/demoData.js | node .harness-build/tools/previewHarness.js \
  docs/preview.html src/webview/stats.css src/webview/stats.js dark

To check it against your own library instead, pipe NDJSON on stdin out of a read-only query against database.sqlite — one {"t":"n","v":{...note fields...}} line per note and one {"t":"f","v":{...folder fields...}} per notebook. Piping rather than dumping to a file keeps your notes off disk.

License

MIT

Mobile behaviour

The mobile statistics page reports scan progress. Copy Markdown copies the figures; Recount clears the count cache and scans again. The first scan reads all local note bodies, so a large library can take longer on a phone. Counts reflect notes currently available on that device, not notes still waiting to sync.

Generation and sync. Automatic startup generation is disabled on mobile, even if the desktop startup setting is on. Generate manually after syncing. A sync that starts while Recall is running prevents a subsequent mobile summary write, and repeated taps on one device cannot create overlapping summaries. This is not a cross-device lock: independently generating on two offline devices can still produce duplicate daily summaries after sync. Recall updates existing daily summaries by exact title. With no target notebook ID, a new mobile summary uses the current notebook, or the first available notebook if none is selected.

Testing: npm test checks counting rules; npm run test:plugin checks mobile and desktop registration, generation, sync races, repeated taps, statistics, cache reuse, errors, and retry behaviour using an in-memory API double. These tests do not simulate Android's native WebView or prove device performance. The offline preview and statistics harnesses remain available with npm run harness.

Date-based features now use Joplin's visible Created date (user_created_time), falling back to internal created_time when unavailable. Imported or manually backdated notes are therefore reviewed and grouped under their original dates. This can change historical year/month/day breakdowns from version 1.0.1, without changing the whole-library word total or modifying the source notes.

Notebook sources

In Settings → Recall, set Source notebook IDs (optional) to one or more notebook IDs separated by commas. On desktop, right-click a notebook and choose Copy notebook ID. IDs identify the same synced notebook across devices; configure Recall's source settings on each device where you use it.

• Leave source IDs empty to review the whole library (the existing default).
• Turn on Include sub-notebooks to include all descendant levels; default is off.
• These settings apply to Random note, On This Day, and both sections of Daily Recall.
• Writing statistics always cover the whole library.
• Target notebook ID still controls where newly generated summaries are saved. Existing summaries are updated in place, including when saved outside the source scope.
• Settings and notebook moves take effect on the next action without restarting.
• Malformed or unknown source IDs show an error; a source with no eligible notes shows a message. Neither falls back to all notebooks or overwrites a daily note with an empty-scope result. Sync first if a selected notebook is not yet available.
• Whitespace, duplicate IDs, uppercase hex IDs, and a trailing comma are accepted.

Validation

Version 1.1.1 passes 30 counting assertions and 57 plugin integration scenarios. The final beta was installed and exercised in Joplin’s mobile web app, including an upgrade from 1.1.0, notebook scopes and whole-library statistics. A community tester reported success on Android 16 and 17 with Joplin 3.7.8, and on Ubuntu 26.04 with Joplin 3.7.21. That report does not enumerate every native interaction or filter edge case. Real multi-device sync and iOS behaviour have not been verified.