We created a popular video on LowEndBoxTV comparing popular note-taking solutions such as Obsidian, OneNote, etc.  You night choose one or the other based on different features.  But there’s one feature you might consider that we didn’t cover: can you run it in a terminal?

If that’s a requirement that’s of interest to you, you have one great choice: Joplin.

Joplin is a full-featured note-taking app which is somewhat similar to OneNote in its interface.  However, it’s completely free (in both beer and libre senses).  And while most people use it via GUI, there is also a full-featured terminal app.  Let’s take a look.

Installation

On Linux or Windows, you can install it via npm.  Simply:

npm install -g joplin

And to start it, just type “joplin”.

Here is what the Joplin GUI looks like:

There are folder, notes, note editor columns.

Now here’s the Joplin terminal interface:

Same interface and same layout.

Let’s create a new notebook.  Type “mb” (short for “mkbook”) and you’ll get a prompt:

Enter the name of your book (quotes are provided) and hit return.  Now it shows up in the first column.  Now type “mn” (short for “mknote”) and enter the name for your note:

Here’s what the interface looks like now, with our “demo” notebook and demo note.

Now here’s something cool: to edit that note, I don’t use some built-in editor but rather my own preferred editor.  In this case, vim.

First, tab over to the note.  You can tab/shift-tab and use arrow keys to move about the columns.  Once you have the note highlighted, hit enter.  At the bottom of the UI, you’ll see this message:

No text editor is defined. Please set it using `config editor <editor-path>`

So type something like this:

:config editor /usr/bin/vim

Or if you prefer nano:

:config editor /usr/bin/nano

Now hit enter again since you have the note highlighted, and you’ll be in your editor, editing the note.  (In this case, vim, but yours may look differently as it’s using my .vimrc settings):

After quitting the editor, the text is updated in the UI.

Other Helpful Things to Know

Your app preferences are stored in ~/.config/joplin/settings.json

The data is stored in a sqlite database in ~/.config/joplin/database.sqlite

To get help and see all the commands:

:help

There are commands to rename, move, etc. notes.  Anything you would want to do in the app, you can do in terminal version.

To quit the app, type

:exit

Verdict: Will I Use It?

Joplin isn’t my preferred note-taking app, but I do respect it and know a lot of people like it.  To be honest, if I’m sitting at my laptop or desktop, I have a GUI sitting in front of me.  I’m not sure the terminal would be faster.  The option to use vim instead of the Joplin GUI is attractive, but you can already do that inside the Joplin GUI.  So personally, I’m not sure I would ever use this.

Still, it’s a neat option…even if all it is is a bit of cool geekery.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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