I have used Joplin for years. It is an open-source notes app — Markdown files, end-to-end encryption, syncing across my laptop and phone without handing the content to anyone. It replaced Evernote for me a long time ago, and I never looked for a reason to leave.
A few things always chafed, though. Notebooks and notes live in two separate sidebars, each eating a column of space. Seeing my to-dos as an agenda meant installing a plugin that duplicated the notes list instead of replacing it. There was no way to save a view I liked and return to it later. Search had no tag suggestions. None of these were dealbreakers. They were the small daily frictions you stop noticing until, one day, you notice them again.
Live with it, or leave
For years the choice was exactly those two options. Live with the friction, or go looking for another app. And looking for another app is never free. A new tool means new lock-in, a fresh set of compromises you have not discovered yet, and the migration tax of moving years of notes and retraining your hands. Weighed against four small annoyances, that is a bad trade. So I lived with it for years.
We live in a new AI era
This time I did not go shopping. Joplin is open source, which means I am allowed to change it. There was even a starting point — the Agenda plugin by BeatLink and TheScriptingGuy, released under the MIT license. I forked it and, working with an AI coding agent under my direction, reshaped it into something I actually wanted.
The result is a plugin I called Cockpit. It replaces both sidebars with one panel: every to-do, note, and inline checkbox in a single view, grouped by due date. It has saved view profiles, so the layout I like is one click away. Search has autocomplete. You can drag an item to reschedule it. There are themes, and it works fully on Android, not only on the desktop. From the first fork to a published entry in the official Joplin plugin registry was about three days of directed work.
What honesty requires me to add
The AI wrote the code. I want to be exact about that, because the interesting part is the division of labour, not a claim that I have become an engineer. I directed, and I tested — every iteration, on desktop and on my phone. Things broke. A scrolling bug survived two confident, wrong fixes before measuring the actual browser layout revealed what was really happening. The mobile dialogs needed an architectural rework, because Android draws native windows above the web layer the plugin lives in, and the first design did not account for that. Each of those was found and fixed the same day. But they were real, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The repository now has proper continuous integration — a stubbed test harness plus Playwright driving a real Joplin instance — precisely because code written this way needs guardrails, not blind trust. I have a lot of respect for the people who do this professionally, and none of the above says their craft is obsolete. It says something narrower, and I think more useful.
The right, and now the ability
Open source always gave you the right to change your tools. For someone like me — a product person, not a programmer — that right was mostly theoretical. I could read the license and the source and still not be able to bend the thing to fit. AI closed that gap. It did not grant the right; open source already had. It granted the ability to act on it.
That is why the old calculus flipped. When software almost fits, the rational move is no longer to start over with something else and inherit a new set of compromises. It is to adapt the one you already trust. And when you do it in the open — MIT license, credit to the people whose work you built on, an entry in the registry — your private fix quietly becomes an option for everyone else with the same itch.
Cockpit is on GitHub and installable straight from the Joplin plugin search: github.com/pmslava/joplin-plugin-cockpit. I built it because I wanted my notes app to work the way I work — and for the first time, that was cheaper than switching.