QOwnNotes and Markor

software

Warning, bikeshedding ahead.

Only recently I switched my personal note taking / wiki workflow from Joplin to Zim-wiki. I did that because the Joplin app, especially on mobile, could be quite sluggish, especially when I wanted to jot a quick note down. Also, including images was problematic: Joplin always re-encodes and resizes images upon import, and it does not work with local files that you include via the appropriate markdown tag. Still an open issue. Zim does the latter correctly, but it has not mobile app, or any app that is compatible with it’s custom syntax.

So, I once again changed my workflow. Keeps a man off the streets, right? Really good timing too. So I did at one point have a look at NextClouds Notes app. Similarly sluggish in mobile use. It works on a dir with markdown files, so that’s nice, but didn’t seem to show images or allow for easy navigation through local links (Joplin neither!, but Zim of course does). Using an editor like Sublime or VSCode on a dir with markdown files works too, but for following local links (or showing images) you need to find the right extensions and this proved not very stable.

Not even that recently, must have missed it the last time, there’s a companion app the NextCloud Notes, QOwnNotes. Its GUI can be slightly daunting at first, there’s a ton of functionality and configurability, but proves a powerful tool for this purpose. You point it to a dir, it allows you to navigate all .mds therein (or any other .ext you configure, and edit them, navigate local links, including any non-md files, and if they’re images, they’re previewed in the optional markdown render (so not inline like Zim). I quite like it, more than Zim. For the mobile companion app, I use Markor. Open dir, edit markdowns, it does so fast. And the optional markdown renderer shows images! Yes! Together with a Resilio synced dir, I think I have a very nice setup now.

A few essential tweaks to QOwnNotes: