this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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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 For an example of what TriliumNotes looks like, you can check out the slightly outdated screenshot tour.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.

πŸ“’ 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.

πŸ—³οΈ If you'd like to vote on the new TriliumNext logo, you can do that too!

Happy Note Taking!)

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (5 children)

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

more on the topic

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I mean in your linked thread it says:

I have some 15K notes in Obsidian and it runs fine.

I personally have 4000+ notes in Obsidian and it runs fine 🀷

Here's also Obsidian with 100,000 notes and it performs fine. This test is also 2 years out of date.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (8 children)

This isn't really the case though. Obsidian uses a database for metadata, and therefore can extremely rapidly display, search, and find the correct file to open. It generally only opens a handful of files at a time.

I've used obsidian notes repos with hundreds of thousands of notes with no discernable performance impact. Something LogSeq certainly couldn't do.

The complaint in the post you've linked is a) anecdotal and b) about the import process itself getting slow, which makes sense as obsidian is extracting the metadata.

I'll always champion OSS software over proprietary, but claiming this is a huge failing of the obsidian design is just completely false. A metadata database fronting a flat filesystem architecture is very robust.

Edit: adding link to benchmark. https://www.goedel.io/p/interlude-obsidian-vs-100000

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What is it with Lemmy users assuming anyone who disagrees with them is astroturfing or a shill.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

For reference, I have over 300,000 notes in Trilium, and it is runs smoothly πŸ‘

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Is handwriting & drawing support planned?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This has been supported for a while using the Canvas Note Type.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Cool project.

The only question worth asking: does it beat Obsidian in some ways?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Ok. I'll follow it. Dazzle me. πŸ™‚

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Featureset looks nice but the UI looks horrendous and dated.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That’s just like, your opinion, man.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

I actually quite like the simplistic UI, but this is actually a focus of the new TriliumNext organization - to improve the UI.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

The ability to easily do synchronization through a Nextcloud instance (or commercial cloud storage providers like OneDrive) is what's keeping me on Joplin.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The two rooms linked above are mirrored, so you can use either XMPP or Matrix, from any client you prefer, on pretty much any platform under the sun!

There's no XMPP link in the README above the quoted statement.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Oof good point! XMPP Bridge: xmpp:[email protected]?join

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How rich and functional is the web app?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

Awesome! Best of luck to the new team!

[–] [email protected] 57 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Database storage for notes is a non-starter for me.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

Some people have different requirements. Some have been burned by a program becoming obsolete or migrating between programs and finding out getting their data was (at least initially) beyond their capabilities. Some don’t see the tradeoff of having true rich text as worth it.

I’m not in that camp, but I can see the appeal.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

I'm glad I barely skimmed the wall to find this first post.
Thanks for the timesaving.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, there are better options that sync flat file notes via plain old WebDAV.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Most of those options are the traditional text-based, "page" based type notes. There really aren't that many options in terms of competition to something like OneNote though, where the "page" isnt a fixed size, and supports more than just plain text such as handwritten text, or images, or stuff that doesnt necessarily fit in a neat little square.

Dont get me wrong, there are some fantastic note-taking apps out there that are dead simple to use, but if you're looking specifically for something like OneNote, then again, super limited options.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I still prefer logseq

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