Joplin: Migrating from OneNote to Joplin

How-To: Joplin

11th December 2023.

By Patrick Perkins on unsplash.com

OneNote have been one of my most frequent used tools. It is a perfect place to gather facts, notes, links and documents about technical stuff.

I’m not a fan of Onenote’s latest appearance anyway

Only one problem with it: It is Microsoft; I don’t want to store my notes on their servers anymore.

Joplin - The Open Source alternative

One of many alternatives out there, but this is the one I happened to end up with. I choose Joplin for 2 main reasons:

• Integration with Nextcloud

• Support for End-to-End Encryption

I was considering writing an article about Joplin features, but there is already a good one over here: https://itsfoss.com/joplin/

I found Joplin a few months back and I was very exited to integrate it with Nextcloud. But because I was in the middle of replacing my infrastructure with open-source alternatives, I didn’t have any functioning Nextcloud anymore. Therefore I waited, until recently.

To integrate Joplin with Nextcloud, check this article:
Nextcloud: Connect Joplin (coming out 14th December)

Note: Joplin can integrate with multiple cloud storage solutions. They even have their own cloud storage

Install Joplin

For us Linux users, The recommended way is to use the wget method of installing Joplin:

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

Note: It can also be installed with snap, but it is a very old version. All install methods are listed here: https://joplinapp.org/help/#desktop-applications

Then you can find Joplin on your system:

Note: If you try to run the command “joplin” in the terminal, you may get an error:

user@workstation:~$ joplin
Command 'joplin' not found, but can be installed with:
snap install joplin
Please ask your administrator.

Export OneNote Notebook and Import it into Joplin

Export OneNote Notebook

It is not possible to import a OneNote notebook as-is. It needs to be converted. I found a tool but *sigh* it only runs on Windows.

Download Zip:
https://github.com/alxnbl/onenote-md-exporter/releases/tag/v1.3.0

Install and run instructions:
https://github.com/alxnbl/onenote-md-exporter

I guess I have to make a faux pas and use my work laptop for this one occasion.

Start the script and choose [2] Joplin Raw Folder. I believe Markdown is for Evernote.

Note: This will take a while:

Import Directory into Joplin

About an hour later: Launch Joplin, click File > Import > "RAW - Joplin Export Directory" and select the export folder location

Source:
https://github.com/alxnbl/onenote-md-exporter/blob/main/doc/migration-to-joplin.md

Result

One notifiable difference in Joplin compared to OneNote is that there are no longer any subpages, but subfolders. It’s not necessarily a problem, just different. I think I will get used to it.

You can also toggle between two editors which is cool:

Appendix

Bonus material

Turn on E2EE = End-to-End Encryption in Joplin

If you don’t use or encrypt your files in Nextcloud, but you want to encrypt your notes:

Step 1: Set a Master Password by clicking on Tools > Manage master password…

Step 2: Enable E2EE Encryption from Tools > Options > Encryption