MojoPad

Migrating from VoodooPad

MojoPad was built to be the place VoodooPad documents retire to — losslessly.

One menu item

Choose File ▸ Import VoodooPad Document… and pick your .vpdoc. Every page comes across: rich text pages with their formatting and their embedded images and diagrams, plain text pages, web archives (with the same Clean / Snapshot choice as any other import), images, PDFs, and URL bookmark pages. Page links reconnect automatically because linking is by name — the moment the pages exist, the words light up again.

What maps to what

VoodooPadMojoPad
Pages, aliases, WikiWordsIdentical concepts, same behavior
Checkboxes on a pageReal to-do rows, still checked or not as you left them
CollectionsFolders in the sidebar (drives PDF/ePub order)
Tags, To-dos, Anchors, BacklinksSame-named palettes
VPNewPageTemplateHonored as the new-page template, including $date$-style variables
Scriptlets <% %>Same syntax, JavaScript inside — see Scripting: Scriptlets
Plugin pagesPages named Plugin: X — see Scripting: Plugins
Event scriptsPages named Event: X — see Scripting: Event Pages
Encrypted pagesRe-encrypt after import (MojoPad uses modern AES-256-GCM)
Static publishingThe Static palette — see Static Publishing
The Bucket, Sketch, web server, web exportAll present and accounted for

Saved web pages keep their own pictures

A page you save is only as durable as what it points at. If it borrows its pictures from the site it came from, then the day that site reorganizes or closes, the page you saved so carefully is a column of broken frames — and you find out years later, when it is far too late to go back for them.

So MojoPad fetches them once, while it is saving, and keeps them in your document. A saved page opens the same with the network switched off, and opening your own notes never tells anyone else you did.

Pages saved before this still point outward. Open one and run Keep This Saved Page’s Pictures in the Document from the command palette (⇧⌘P) — it fetches what is still there and tells you if anything has already gone. Worth doing on anything you would be sorry to lose.

Two things it will not do: fetch from an address on your own network or machine rather than out on the web, and store anything that comes back that is not a picture. A saved page is something written by someone else, and it is not given the run of your Mac.

Pictures come across beside your pages, not inside them

This matters more than it sounds, and only on a big archive. A VoodooPad page keeps its pictures beside it. MojoPad does the same — each picture becomes a file in your new document, and the page simply points at it.

It used to write them into the page instead, as text, and on an archive built up over decades the difference is not subtle: the pictures can come to most of what the whole document weighs. Because MojoPad reads all of a page before it can show it to you, that is a wait every time you open the wiki — for pictures you are not looking at. Stored beside the pages, they cost nothing until you look at one.

A picture that appears on many pages is stored once. An archive built up over decades repeats itself — the same letterhead, the same scanned figure, pasted a hundred times — and paying for those bytes once is the difference between a heavy document and an absurd one.

If a picture cannot be read at all, the page says so where the picture was, rather than leaving a silent gap. You will know something was there.

Your to-do lists arrive as to-do lists

A VoodooPad checkbox is not a character — it is a little file tucked inside the page. That meant a page of them used to arrive as a column of broken attachments, which is a poor welcome for a to-do list you have kept for years. They come across as real to-do rows now, each one still checked or unchecked as you left it, and a run of them gathered into a single list the way it looked on the page.

You can see the effect in Help ▸ Save Diagnostic Report, which counts pictures written into the pages for every open document. On a document imported before this it will be a large number; on a fresh import it should be nothing.

Notes

  • Your .vpdoc is opened read-only and never modified.
  • VoodooPad's encrypted pages can't be imported encrypted (the cipher differs); decrypt them in VoodooPad first, then encrypt again here.
  • Import is repeatable — try it on a copy, poke around, import again for real.
  • A document imported before this keeps its pictures where they were. Importing the .vpdoc again into a new document is the way to get the lighter shape.