Joplin Extras and Plugins

Joplin continues to be my favorite note-taking and markdown application. It has several killer features that make it great.

• The Notebook sidebar keeps the notebooks organized and the tags accessible.
• The Note list sidebar displays all the notes contained within a notebook.
• Nextcloud synchronization keeps all my notes backed up and available to the Joplin Android app.

Enter Joplin Extras

When you dig into the configuration options, there are several built in tools that take you markdown to the next level.

From the menu, go into Tools | Options (Shortcut: Ctrl + ,) to tweak your settings. Then click Markdown on the sidebar menu to get to the extras.

These are basically included plugins that extend the basic markdown functionality. Some of the extras my not work outside of Joplin. So, whether you use them will depend on if you will be using your notes outside of Joplin.

Check out the Joplin Extras documentation for an explanation of each of this items and the extra levels of coolness they bring to your markdown text.

Some of the special abilities they include are:

• Linking between notes
• Math formulas and chemical equation notations
• Mermaid diagrams
• Checkboxes (use this LOTS)
• Typographic conversions
• emojis

Joplin Plugins

But wait, there's more. On the same Options menu, there is a Plugins choice which allows installing user contributed plugins.

Check out this list of Joplin Plugins.

Some of those sound really intriguing. Just haven't had the time to try them out.

The ones I'm playing with now are:

Table formatter plugin

Add a Format Table option to the Edit menu. This prettifies your ugly markdown table.

Graph

This automatically builds a "knowledge graph" of how your notes are interrelated. Here is a screen shot of a portion of my graph that deals with food recipe notes.

• Bible quote

This allows you to add a scripture quotation to your markdown and it looks up the scripture and displays it.

This one does require some extra configuration to download an OSIS xml Bible text file and configure the tool to point to it.