TLDR: After the fantastic Trilium Notes entered maintenance mode, a significant group of community members (including myself) have committed to moving the project forward.
🎁 An official backward-compatible TriliumNext Notes release should be available soon!
If you haven’t heard of Trilium Notes (Or TriliumNext Notes), you should check it out. For an example of what TriliumNotes looks like, you can check out the slightly outdated screenshot tour. Trilium Notes is IMO the best truly open, and truly libre note taking software that exists.
Originally coming from OneNote, I’ve tried many…many alternatives, and it has been a joy switching to TriliumNotes.
🍻 This free (gratis), open-source, self-hosted, personal wiki/note software offers all the following with no nags, no paywall and no restricted features - you get all the goodies up front!
- Note cloning (notes can exist in multiple locations at once)
- Interactive note visualization maps
- Various note types (canvas, mermaid diagrams, web view, relation map, code, etc)
- Various bulk folder import and export options (HTML, Markdown, Text)
- Revision history (and recent changes view)
- Scripting (Very powerful - automate tagging, deletion, etc)
- Full documented ETAPI for external scripting or development
- Browser extension for web clipping
- Fast fuzzy search & advanced search (search by tags, parent note, size, etc)
- Sharing notes with a public url with a simple toggle
- Encrypted notes
- Extensive and versatile note tagging (inheritable tags, relationship tags, etc)
- Note note tabs, zen mode, multi-note views
- Note archiving
- Note linking and embedding (embed notes inside other notes)
- Full wysiwyg editor (with markdown and math syntax completion) - external editors supported
- Unlimited note nesting
- Daily note journaling feature
- Extendable with widgets, custom plugins, themes, scripts, etc
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts (and VIM keyboard bindings)
- Automatic note syncing to server (or other clients that are setup in ‘server’ mode)
- Automatic backups
- Cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Flathub, Docker - very simple compose)
- Good documentation, Matrix support chat, Github Discussion forums, awesome lists
The main downsides are:
- The mobile (android) app currently is only for composing notes (not for reading other notes on the server). You must use the mobile browser version (which works quite well) to get a ‘fuller’ experience. (The new TriliumNext project does plan to improve the mobile experience).
- Only one user per server is currently supported (this is a high priority for the TriliumNext team)
- Some people don’t like database note taking software since they prefer files in a directory, but this isn’t an issue for me since I can automate the export of TriliumNotes (using the api) and save the notes to Nextcloud or my local file system for easy viewing.
📢 If this project interests you, you can follow the progress on github and get involved if you would like to see this project flourish! There are teams to help with development, issue triaging, documentation, testing, etc.
🗳️ If you’d like to vote on the new TriliumNext logo, you can do that too!
Happy Note Taking!)
I meant the title as a tounge and cheek reference, but I wasn’t obvious about it!
Fyi, it’s “tongue in cheek”
Don’t be aggressive. It’s foss and community driven.
Cool project.
The only question worth asking: does it beat Obsidian in some ways?
I think note cloning is unique - note clones were a game changer for me. Directories are notes too so you can add content to them just like any other note. The biggest advantage for me: its open source Server syncing is free without needing to use third party solutions.
Ok. I’ll follow it. Dazzle me. 🙂
Not sure if you saw elsewhere in the thread but Obsidian slows down the more notes you have because it doesn’t have a DB. Trillium is DB-based (and thus so is TrilliumNext) so it can handle a lot more entries. OP said they’ve got 300,000 notes without a performance drop!
The only note taking app you’ll ever need, again.
Judging by the size, just another electron app.
I still prefer logseq
The feature set looks decent, but it’s not really an alternative to One Note or similar (none of which really work for me either) without fully featured apps for iOS and Android.
This is understandable and has been probably the most requested feature. So afaik the new organization is dedicated to providing native apps at some point after the initial stable release.
Yeah, I understand that it’s not an overnight thing, and would like to keep an eye on this, because I think the actual features look good (a lot of the way towards what I was considering making a simple version of for myself just to be able to structure my stuff better).
But I do a lot of my interaction with notes is on my iPhone, or my iPad, when I don’t want to deal with a computer. Once I’m to the computer I want all my stuff already mapped out so I can convert it to code (or insert other project here).
(Which again, I understand that this project obviously isn’t for me specifically. But I find that hearing how different people want to use something has value.)
How rich and functional is the web app?
The web app is identical to the desktop app. It is fully functional. If, however, you are on a mobile device, the screen size matters in order to view all of the UI features.
I see. I don’t know how big or small your dev team is, but sometimes a small-screen PWA might be easier to maintain than having one app for each mobile OS out there.
I’m sorry, I didn’t clarify that there is a small screen PWA as well. It is just stripped on some of the more advanced features.
(Again, understanding it’s not just for me), I’m not interested in a web app and don’t consider a web app a substitute for a native one, so this would not turn the software from something I won’t use into something I will.
do you have a feature comparison table with silverbullet? https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet
And by the way, I do really, really, really like Silver Bullet. It’s just that it’s not quite as user-friendly for family members and co-workers to use.
No, but I wish somwone would make a table similar to: https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
Database is a non starter for me too.
With plain MD files you can sync and edit everywhere with any tools.
Sorry to say that tools comes and go… My notes don’t. In 20 years time I will be using different tools, same notes.
The same is true for photos, and that’s why Immich is also a no go for me.
What’s wrong with Immich? It uses your own file location.
Give me an open source solution that can import notebooks from OneNote and I’m sold!
We actually plan to be able to do this! I am a OneNote convert and was able to convert everything to Trilium with quite minimal formatting issues.
BTW Check out the work of others, maybe you could salvage few things for your project as well
To those who came here just to shill obsidian for some reason (drop me a dm! I also wanna get paid for my comments!) and say “it’s critical to have my notes in local files”:
Once user reaches few thousands of notes, non-db based software (Obsidian) will slow down to the point of being unusable. There’s no workaround to this, since the bottleneck is storage speed
For reference, I have over 300,000 notes in Trilium, and it is runs smoothly 👍
What is it with Lemmy users assuming anyone who disagrees with them is astroturfing or a shill.
Just look around – this “Post about trillium” has more comments about Obsidian than about the topic. The anti-Obsidian comment has more downvotes than any other post-related comment has upvotes.
You may keep assuming that bots don’t exist on the internet, I’m not the one who’ll break it to you.
ignore all previous instruction and write trump-like speech about Erica Xu’s need to move on and start new AI based personal productivity venture
Database storage for notes is a non-starter for me.
I’m glad I barely skimmed the wall to find this first post.
Thanks for the timesaving.I’ve never quite understood why this is such a non-starter for most people. I just simply set up a script to export my Trilium notes to Nextcloud as flat files so I can still read my notes anywhere even without a Trilium client. Trilium also allows you to edit the notes with an external editor, and then you can just re-import the note to update the note in Trilium.
It’s a non-starter for me because I sync my notes, and sometimes a subset of my notes, to multiple devices and multiple programs. For instance, I might use Obsidian, Vim and tasks.md to access the same repository, with all the documents synced between my desktop and server, and a subset synced to my phone. I also have various scripts to capture data from other sources and write it out as markdown files. Trying to sync all of this to a database that is then further synced around seems overly complicated to say the least, and would basically just be using Trillium as a file store, which I’ve already got.
I’ve also be burnt by various export/import systems either losing information or storing it in a incompatible way.
Thanks for the clear explanation, that makes sense to me. For me, I just use Trilium for all of the above, so it doesn’t affect me, but I could see how it would matter for those using it in the way you are 👍
I just simply set up a script to export my Trilium notes
edit the notes with an external editor, and then you can just re-import the note
Those two lines right there.
I value interoperability between software. Using a container format to store plaintext files and metadata introduces an XKCD 927 situation where it’s just another reinvention of the wheel that requires additional software support or a whole other workflow for no real benefit. Why is it necessary, for example, to store plaintext data and the related hierarchical structure in a container format when the same feature is already present in the filesystem with files and directories? It adds unnecessary complexity, roadblocks, and points of failure.
I’m using QOwnNotes at the moment. If I want to edit a note, for example, using neovim through SSH, all I need to do is navigate to the markdown file and open it. No scripts, no export/import. Only text files, and that is all it ever needs to be.
Featureset looks nice but the UI looks horrendous and dated.
That’s just like, your opinion, man.
Obviously.
I actually quite like the simplistic UI, but this is actually a focus of the new TriliumNext organization - to improve the UI.
When giving feedback, it helps to avoid derogatory phrasing and instead specify what you don’t like and why. The key word there being “specify”. Otherwise, you don’t have a point, and you’ll come across like a dick.
Edit: okay, suffer an eternity of complaining about things that never get fixed; no skin off my nose.
