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 For an example of what TriliumNotes looks like, you can check out the slightly outdated screenshot tour.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
do you have a feature comparison table with silverbullet? https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet
No, but I wish somwone would make a table similar to: https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
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.
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.
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.
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.
