Joplin tells you which notebook a note lives in - but only sometimes. Open a note from a search result, from a tag, or from All notes, and a blue “In: Notebook” pill appears under the title. Open the same note from its own notebook and the pill is gone. No setting brings it back, and no plugin did it either: Note Tabs has breadcrumbs, but only inside its own panel.
I work from search results and from my Cockpit panel, so notes reach me with no context about where they live, and I kept losing track. Someone had asked for the same thing on the Joplin forum. So I built the plugin.
Whereabouts puts a small chip with the notebook name next to the title - or the full path, “Lab / Joplin”, if you prefer that. It is there on every note, in every view. Left click selects that notebook in the sidebar and keeps the note you are reading open. Double click reveals the note in the note list. Right click opens the move-to-notebook picker. The chip follows the note when you move it and the notebook when you rename it, while Joplin runs. It can also hide Joplin’s own pill, so nothing shows twice.
There are four placements. The default is a row of its own below the title. The second one moves the title-row icons - date, alarm, properties, plugin buttons - down onto the chip’s row, so the title gets the full width:
The other two put the chip inline, to the right of the title, or make it the first item of the editor toolbar. The icon and the path separator are settings too.
The part I find interesting: there is no supported way to do this. Joplin’s plugin API cannot reach the title bar at all - panels sit beside the sidebar, toolbar buttons are icon-only. But a CodeMirror content script runs inside the main window, so the plugin uses the editor as its entry point and inserts the chip from there. It then measures the empty space above and below the chip and keeps the two equal, matching Joplin’s own spacing, so the chip reads as one more line rather than a banner. Every placement is verified by 19 end-to-end tests that launch a real Joplin desktop under Playwright; releases publish to npm through GitHub Actions trusted publishing, with no tokens stored anywhere.
The limits are structural. Desktop only - the mobile title bar is native, plugins cannot reach it. It needs the Markdown editor mounted, which covers the Markdown, split and viewer-only layouts, but not the Rich Text editor. Joplin 3.7 or newer; tested on 3.7.14. Each editor window shows its own note’s notebook, and in a separate note window right click still moves the note while the other two clicks are inert there.
Free and open source under MIT: github.com/pmslava/joplin-plugin-whereabouts. It is in Joplin’s plugin list - Tools → Options → Plugins, search Whereabouts - and the .jpl is on the releases page too.