Description

Quick capture of a note or to-do without leaving the one you are in. A small form for the title, a line or two of text, the notebook, tags and the due date, opened by a shortcut, from highlighted text, or by typing ++ in the editor. The note is created where you say, and you stay where you were.

Additional Information

Jot

Quick capture of a note or to-do without leaving the one you are in.

While you read or work in one note, Jot opens a small form for the title, a line or two of text, the notebook, tags and the due date, creates the note from it, and does not open it. You stay where you were. Joplin's own New note and New to-do create an empty note and open it, and Back lands at the top of the note you were reading; Jot exists so that never happens.

The desktop is tested; Android is not yet, see the known limits below.

Install

In Joplin, Settings › Plugins › search for Jot and install it. Or download io.github.pmslava.jot.jpl from the releases page and use Settings › Plugins › Install from file.

Ways in

• Tools › Jot…, with Ctrl+Shift+J as its shortcut on every platform (change it under Options › Keyboard Shortcuts).

• Jot from the selection… in the editor's right-click menu. The first line of the highlighted text becomes the title and the rest the text. The shortcut does the same when text is highlighted.

  

• Typing ++ at the start of a line or after a space in the Markdown editor. The trigger is a setting; empty turns it off. It never fires inside a word (C++), on a paste, or twice for the same occurrence: cancel the form once and that ++ is left alone.

  

• The Jot button in the note toolbar, the feather icon.

• Edit with Jot… in the note list's right-click menu: the same form prefilled with the note's title, type, notebook, tags and due date. Save writes only what you changed, and the note is never opened.

  

The form

Type, Title, Text, Notebook, Tags, then the choices, and Due last. The title is focused when the form opens, so typing a title and pressing Enter is all a capture needs; Enter creates from anywhere in the form except the Text, where it is a new line, so a date picked with the mouse is followed by Enter as well; with the title still empty, Enter keeps the form open and puts the cursor back in the title. Every choice is one line of buttons you click or move through with the arrow keys:

• Type: Note or To-do, in the order of Cockpit's buttons.
• In this note, when the form was opened from highlighted text: Replace with link (the default), Keep text, or Add link after. Opened by ++: Replace ++ with link (the default) or Remove ++. Each starts on its setting.
• Back link: Add puts a line linking to the note you are in at the top of the new note, then an empty line, then the text (or at the bottom, by setting). Hover Add to see the line. It starts on the setting, Don't add unless you change it.
• Open: No (stay where you are, the default), In editor, or New window. It starts on the setting.

Jot tells two kinds of note apart. A quick note is one you start with nothing highlighted, from the shortcut, the menu or the toolbar button: a reminder to deal with later. A note from text in a note is one you start from highlighted text or by typing ++: it belongs with the note it came from. By default:

• Notebook starts on the notebook setting for that kind of note: by default the notebook of the note you are in, for both. Set the one for quick notes to an inbox, say, and reminders land there while notes from text stay next to their source.
• Tags stay empty for a quick note. For a note from text they start with the tags of the note you are in, followed by a comma and a space, so you can clear what does not fit or type the next tag straight away.
• Back link starts on Don't add, for every note, until you choose otherwise in Settings.

Each of these is a setting, so a quick note can be just the shortcut, a title and Enter, and a note from text can come out ready, with no clicks. Notebook and Tags filter a list as you type, and Enter picks the highlighted row.

Title and Tags grow with what they hold, up to three lines; past that they scroll, and the scrollbar shows there is more. Tab into either puts the cursor at the end, ready to add to it; a click puts it where you click. Enter in them never starts a new line, and a pasted line break becomes a space.

Due shows the date and time beside a bell. The bell unfolds Cockpit's date picker, the calendar, the time columns and the quick buttons, and every pick writes into the row at once. A to-do whose date is picked before its time starts at the day start time.

Create writes the note and opens it only if Open says so. Cancel, or Escape, writes nothing. A form with no title and no text creates nothing. An empty title with text takes the first line of the text as the title.

Settings

Settings › Plugins › Jot:

• What Jot creates: a to-do or a note.
• Notebook for quick notes: The current notebook (the one of the note you are in, the default), or any notebook, such as an inbox. Notebooks made later appear in the list once Jot has been used.
• Notebook for notes from text in a note: The current notebook (the default), or any notebook.
• Fill in the tags of the note you are in: Never, For notes from text in a note (default), or Always.
• Add a back link to the note you are in: Never (default), For notes from text in a note, or Always; the form's Back link starts here.
• Back link text: Parent {note_type}: {note_link} by default. The placeholders are Copy Note ID's, for the note you are in: {note_link}, {note_title}, {note_id}, {note_type} (to-do or note), {notebook_name}, {notebook_path} (such as Work/Projects) and {notebook_id}. So Extracted from: {note_link} works too.
• Back link position: the first line, above the text (default), or the last line, below it.
• Open the new note: No, In the editor, or In a new window; the form's Open starts here.
• In this note, for highlighted text: Replace it with a link to the new note (default), Keep the text, or Add a link after it.
• In this note, for the typed trigger: Replace the trigger with a link to the new note (default), or Remove the trigger.
• Typed trigger, Day start time, and Show the Jot button in the note toolbar (after a restart, since Joplin cannot add or remove a toolbar button while running).

Known limits

• Nothing has been checked on Android yet. The plugin installs there, but the form, the toolbar button and the trigger are untested on a phone.
• In the Rich Text editor the typed trigger does not work (no plugin code runs there), and "Add a link after it" is not offered; the shortcut and the right-click entry work, and "Replace it with a link" writes the link as HTML.
• The trigger ignores Markdown context: ++ after a space fires inside a code block too. Cancel once and that occurrence is left alone.
• When the note list shows All notes, Joplin answers a new tag by selecting the note at the top of the list, which is the note Jot has just created. Jot notices and opens the note you were reading again, at the same scroll position and caret in the Markdown editor. Joplin can only do that by showing the note's notebook, so the note list switches from All notes to that notebook.
• Cockpit calling Jot from its New note and New to-do buttons and its row menu comes in a later Cockpit version.

For other plugins

joplin.commands.execute('jot.open', args): with { mode: 'new', type, title, body, notebookId } it opens the form with those presets and resolves { id, opened }, or null on Cancel; with { mode: 'edit', noteId } it opens edit mode and resolves { id, changed }, the list of fields written, or null. With no arguments it behaves as the shortcut.

Build from source

npm install
npm run dist

npm test runs the harness; npm run test:e2e runs the Playwright suite over an isolated Joplin AppImage under xvfb. The plugin file is publish/io.github.pmslava.jot.jpl.

Credits

The idea of a note from highlighted text comes from Convert Text To New Note by ambrt. The capture use case comes from xiaofeng's request in the Cockpit forum thread. The date picker is Cockpit's. MIT.