Perhaps you have come to a point in your life where you wanted to put into words and capture your thoughts, your feelings, your ideas, or just a quote that you read somewhere that you liked. Or there was an occasion when you came across important information while at work and want to save it. This is exactly when note-taking applications come into play, as they offer an easy and convenient way to save your information or data.

In the past, you only needed a parchment and a quill to write it down. However, when the digital revolution hit the shores of the world, technology came about and that changed everything. Today, those parchments and quills have been turned into note-taking applications that have clearly made things so much easier and faster than before. However, it is quite a chore to find a great note-taking application as there are tons of note-taking tools and applications out there.

The topic of our discussion in this article would therefore revolve around installing such a great app called Joplin which has become immensely popular in the Linux community.

What is Joplin?

Joplin is an open source and free note-taking application that is bundled with many features. It’s available for both desktops and mobile phones and even has a command line version of itself. Extremely powerful, Joplin can easily manage the organization and management of large notes categorized into multiple notebooks. It also allows browsing notes, adding tags to notes, and even importing and exporting files in various data formats like Evernote export, PDF, HTML, etc. In conjunction with this, Joplin also enables users to sync their accounts with the cloud Services like Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. that back up and secure your data. It even has a web clipper for Firefox and Chrome that can be used to save web pages as notes.

Install Joplin

There are two main methods we can use to install Joplin on Ubuntu. Let’s look at both of them.

1) Install Joplin with Snaps

Joplin can easily be installed with a snap version. Snaps are compressed packages that contain the entire application with all its dependencies. This is very useful as there is now no hassle to install the dependencies separately. To install Joplin from Snapcraft, simply run the following command in the terminal:

2) Install Joplin with AppImage

For users unfamiliar with the terminal, Joplin can also be installed through its AppImage, which, like the application’s executable, is similar to that in Windows. To download the AppImage, go to Joplin’s official website and find it under Desktop Applications (Get it on Linux icon).

Next, go to the directory it was downloaded to and right click on it. Here, open the Permissions tab and check the box next to Run.

After that, just double click on the AppImage file and Joplin will run.

3) Install Joplin using the installer script

Another method of installing Joplin is to use the installation script which installs the latest version of Joplin directly from the GitHub repository. To do this, we must first run the update command so that the entire system cache is up to date, which can be done by running the following command:

Next, enter the following command into the terminal to install Joplin:

Using Joplin

After installing Joplin, you can find it in your list of installed applications.

When you open the application, you are greeted with an interface that is packed with features. As can be seen in the image below, the interface has 3 areas – the sidebar which lists all of your notebooks, the middle bar which contains all of your notes in that notebook, and the right area which is the note editor.

Joplin allows users to have multiple notebooks, which in turn can contain subnotebooks and multiple notes. The interesting thing about Joplin is that notes are written using the Markdown language, as shown in the following figure:

As a result the following will turn out:

There are also a number of styling tools that you can use to further customize your notes. Suppose we want to add the current date to the note, and then list the items that need to be completed on that day. To add the date, click the button with the calendar icon.

Then click the checkmark button to add the check boxes. You can add as many lists of items as you want.

The end result that we get is the following:

You can also toggle from the editor to the main screen using the layout button next to the search bar.

You can also change the layout button settings by going to the Layout button order in the View section.

You can also add tags to your notes and easily use them to filter out your notes. You can even add multiple tags to a single note.

Add tags:

Filter notes using tags:

Joplin even offers the synchronization of your notes with cloud services. To do this, first click the Synchronize button at the bottom left.

Then just follow the on-screen steps and your Joplin application will begin syncing.

You can also export all of your notes as well as import them from other files, including the Evernote Enex file. To do this, click the File section and then select the file format that you want to import or export.

Why use Joplin?

Joplin is one of the best note-taking applications, packed with features and a simple and easy-to-use interface. For users who need to take notes on a regular basis, Joplin would be an excellent choice.