Joplin is an open-source note taking and to-do application organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor.

It is officially available for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and macOS. It can sync with OneDrive, NextCloud, Dropbox, or WebDAV. It supports standard Markdown, enhanced with optional extensions, such as to-do lists, math expressions, advanced tables, etc. You can also add tags to be able to sort your notes easily and search for them when needed.

Similar to Evernote, it offers a web clipper browser extension to directly take a screenshot or save webpages directly to a notebook. Both Firefox and Chrome are supported.

Joplin has gained a lot of attention over the course of the last few years. Among others, It’s FOSS ranked it as the #1 note-taking app. The app, with its focus on user privacy, is also the first recommendation on PrivacyTools for Digital Notebooks.

Joplin successful participated in the Hacktoberfest in 2018 and 2019 and its successful very first application at GSoC in 2020 is showing that Joplin is continuously raising attention in the open-source community.

The user range is increasing steadily and is expected to increase further as a new desktop and mobile features are being added. This is now simplified by its new plugin system. New collaboration features are being developed, in particular, the late last year released server app.

This application shall give it another push to satisfy some of the most desired wishes of the community and win more long-time code contributors. As it spans across diverse modern but well-established technologies, students will encounter a diverse range of programming languages, paradigms and use cases. Moreover, they will get in touch with characters all over the globe, with different demands and priorities, as in their future professional careers. There are interesting challenges to offer for any developer.