Joplin

Obsidian keeps your notes as plain files and is free but not open source; Evernote holds them in a service you can’t inspect. Joplin takes the third position: open source end to end, with notes stored locally and synced encrypted to storage you choose.

If the thing that matters is that nobody else can read your notes and nobody can change the terms on you, this is the one.

Install link

  wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/dev/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash
  

That script is the official Linux route — it installs the AppImage and wires up the desktop entry. The Flatpak is community-maintained and not supported by the project, which is worth knowing before you file a bug against it. There’s a terminal client too:

  npm install -g joplin
joplin                 # a full TUI, if you'd rather not leave the terminal
  

Desktop, mobile, and a browser clipper for saving pages complete the set.

Sync, and the encryption link

Joplin doesn’t run the storage — you point it at one:

Then turn on end-to-end encryption in the settings before the first sync. Notes are encrypted on your device, so the storage provider holds ciphertext. Save the master password somewhere you will still have it after a laptop dies — there is no recovery, by design.

Organising, and writing in your own editor link

The model is notebooks (nestable), notes, and tags, with search across everything. That hierarchy is the main structural difference from Obsidian’s flat-folder-plus-links approach: if you think in folders, Joplin will feel right immediately.

The feature that makes it comfortable for people who already have an editor:

  Tools → Options → General → Text editor command:  gvim -f
                                                  code --wait
                                                  kitty -e nvim
  

Press Ctrl+E on a note and it opens in that editor. Save and close, and Joplin picks up the change. You get Vim bindings, your snippets, and your spell-checker on a note that’s still synced and encrypted — which is exactly the arrangement people usually have to give up when they leave plain files.

Notes are Markdown, and the underlying store is SQLite plus attachments, so nothing is locked away: export to Markdown, JEX, HTML, or PDF whenever you like.

Joplin or Obsidian? link

Rough rule: Obsidian if you want your notes to be a folder of Markdown you can grep and link heavily; Joplin if encrypted sync you control and an open-source stack matter more than the plugin ecosystem.

Next link

Whatever tool you use, the syntax is the same → Markdown