An idea arrives while you are in the middle of something else. In Joplin, New to-do creates an empty note and opens it: the note you were reading is gone, and Back lands at its top. A user asked in the Cockpit forum thread for “an option not to open the task note after creation”. My own habit is the same - capture, then carry on - so the request became a plugin of its own.

Jot opens a small form over the note you are in: Type, Title, Text, Notebook, Tags, Due. Type a title, press Enter, and the note or to-do exists where you said it should - and you are still where you were. Four ways in:

  • Ctrl+Shift+J, or Tools → Jot…
  • Highlighted text, from the editor’s right-click menu. The first line becomes the title and the rest the text, and you choose what happens in the note: the text is replaced with a link to the new note, kept as it is, or followed by a link.
  • Typing ++ at the start of a line or after a space in the Markdown editor. It never fires inside a word like C++, never on a paste, and never twice for the same occurrence.
  • The feather button in the note toolbar.

Jot tells two kinds of note apart. A quick note - nothing highlighted, the shortcut or the button - is a reminder to deal with later. A note from text belongs with the note it came from. Each kind has its own notebook, tags and back-link defaults, so reminders can land in an inbox while a note cut out of a page stays next to its source, with the source’s tags and a line linking back to it.

If you run Getting Things Done, that is the capture step: everything goes into one inbox with the shortcut, a title and Enter, and no decision is made at that moment. The decisions wait for the review, where Cockpit lists the inbox by date next to everything else.

Edit with Jot… in the note list’s right-click menu opens the same form prefilled with an existing note’s title, type, notebook, tags and due date. Save writes only what you changed, and the note is never opened.

The due date uses Cockpit’s date picker, folded behind a bell. And from version 2.8 Cockpit calls Jot back: a right-click on its New note or New to-do opens the form with the type and the panel’s notebook filled in, and Quick edit… in its row menu is this edit form, reached from the panel. Neither plugin needs the other.

The part I find interesting: Joplin does not let a plugin create a note quietly. Writing a tag refreshes the note list, and under All notes Joplin then selects the note at the top of it - the one Jot has just created. There is no command to select a note in place. So Jot remembers the note you were in, the scroll position and the caret, and puts you back; the price is that the list switches from All notes to that note’s notebook. Everything else the form does is verified by 37 end-to-end tests driving a real Joplin desktop under Playwright.

The desktop is tested; Android is not yet - the plugin installs there, but the form, the button and the trigger have not been checked on a phone. In the Rich Text editor the typed trigger does not exist, since no plugin code runs there; the shortcut and the right-click entry work. Joplin 3.1 or newer.

Free and open source under MIT: github.com/pmslava/joplin-plugin-jot. It is in Joplin’s plugin list - Tools → Options → Plugins, search Jot - and the .jpl is on the releases page too. The idea of a note from highlighted text comes from Convert Text To New Note by ambrt; the capture use case from xiaofeng’s request.