Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

github.com

328 pointsThe_Colonel124 comments

I wish somebody would write a good comparative review of all the note-taking, information organization and outlining apps... I'm in constant search of the one that would actually suit my preferences. Perhaps this is the one (but chances are it's not). Let's take a look...

I have made something like that [1] for my note-taking app. It doesn't currently include Trillium though, and it may be skewed towards the features I'm personally interested in, but if somebody would like to help make it better I'm all ears.

[1] https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable#comparison

It's a good start but since it's meant to compare your own note taking app to others it's indeed a bit biased. Maybe make it easier for others to contribute to the table, and add a few missing features (for instance web clipper is not in the list). Also the negative categories like "no bloat", "no wysiwyg" being marked a positive for your app is a bit weird. Many users will not see a web clipper or wysiwyg as bloat.

You raised some good points. Some things are kind of biased by definition, as I also mention in a paragraph below the table what I consider bloat can be considered as useful features by somebody else, and the UI part is somewhat subjective as well.

I think contributing to it should be easy enough, one just has to edit this [1] HTML file. It was a plain Markdown/ASCII table earlier, but since it's quite wide it wasn't looking too good.

[1] https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable/blob/master/resou...

I currently use Bear but your app looks really nice!

Turtl is missing.

Good!

Yeah I tried but I can’t share the results because I’ve misplaced the notes and they didn’t sync between my devices plus the format was proprietary and got corrupted...

I came across this recently which was amazing.

It's iOS specific but the features might let you filter by features you need;

http://brettterpstra.com/ios-text-editors/

I think a good place to start would be here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_notetaking_softw...

Thanks but this list doesn't seem relevant to me as it doesn't even contain any of the most interesting notetaking apps I've seen so far like TreeSheets, Bear (I wish it wasn't Apple-only), The Brain, Notable or Frame. Evernote-like stuff is not what I'm looking for.

I guess that this list is incomplete and you could help by expanding it.

What are you looking for?

I've described it below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18858538

(if you are a programmer) Why don't you write it? It seems to me a good personal project, not too much complex and pretty funny (at least to me)

A good, fully-featured note-taking application is incredibly complex.

One of the nice things about writing your own note-taking application is that it doesn't have to either good or fully-featured. It just has to do the job better than any existing solution.

It just has to do the job better for you than....

I'm always thinking about doing so yet the perfect one I imagine is actually too complex for me to make - I hardly am too much of a frontend developer so far.

What features would you like in your ideal one?

Thank you for the question but it feels I can't write a comprehensive answer quickly enough and it's time to go to bed now (in Europe) but my head is already working on systematizing the idea. I'll probobably write later.

Here is an approximate description of my image of the perfect information management tool:

Free and open source preferably but if it has to be paid (I don't mind paying if somebody builds a perfect tool for me, I'll donate if it's free) - it is to be single-time payment, not any kind of subscription.

100%-internet-independent. An option to synchronize data over the internet is a nice thing to have but it must be E2E-encrypted (I feel like a manually-set private key symmetric encryption is ok) and support P2P-synchronization via local network.

It should better work on all the platforms but desktop Linux is the most important and minimally-sufficient.

It is to store the data in a format easy to read and modify programmatically. E.g. SQLite (seems the best choice, also does great storing attached files as BLOBs within the DB), XML, JSON or whatever with sane scheme.

A node can be folder/document, a document section with a heading (including subsections), a paragraph (with support for marking particular spans as non-breakable and inserting manual line breaks), a picture (svg, png or jpg), a numbered or bulleted list (of whatever a depth) or its element, a video, an audio, a table, a formula, a piece of code, an attached file (stored within or alongside the database), a link to a node or to an external URL. Something else too perhaps.

It should be possible to attach tags and custom properties to the nodes. Every node should have a UUID. The tagging system should support implications (e.g. if I tag something with "python" tag "programming" tag is applied implicitly). It should be possible to rename tags and merge tags into one.

Full text search (and replace) by content, tag, property etc.

Drag&Drop nodes migration and reordering.

Export a node with all its subnodes into a file, execute a command line with its name substituted and import it back. I am going to use this feature mostly to author documents (markdown, latex, epub etc) and blog posts via Python scripts.

What I want to use it for:

Writing down random ideas and notes, mindmapping, organizing reasonably small files and scanned stuff, writing lecture notes, papers, blog posts and books and all these with all their hierarchy elements (to the sane depth, treating every word as an node or looking inside attached files would be too much) should be 1-st class nodes displayed in the tree and available for the operations.

Let me join the conversation, since it's a good opportunity to think about it. For me it would be:

* Open-source, self-hosted

* Storing the data in some very plain format, as long as it doens't conflict with other features. In fact, I'd wish for it to be plain markdown in individual files on the disk, but (aside from performance problems) I don't imagine it being fully possible. So I'm not sure where the right balance should be, but the point is it is something to strive for, since personal notes is something that should be easily editable/recoverable within minutes in any situation.

* Clients for Android, web, preferrably simple enough API to be able to write plugins for vim/atom/whatever.

* The main document format (let's call it .note further): ok, maybe not really markdown, but something intentionally simple still. The only not-markdown feature I can remember right now that is really necessary is text coloring. Must support block-quotes and tables well. Otherwise, it shouldn't be possible to make any html document you want in the editor.

* Editor UI: pretty much one of the Evernote. Embed images by drag'n'drop (automatically copying them to the server), preserve simple formatting when copying HTML markup from somewhere (like Google Docs do).

* Even though only .note files must be editable, pretty much anything should be easily attachable as a first-class note: picture, audio-file, PDF, etc. Even if the only thing app can do with the file is to upload/download, this still should be considered as much a note as a .note file.

* Auth, obviously. I doubt it's a viable feature to build, but if I'm writing it myself, I'd eventually configure it to log-in the proper user using SSL user-certificate.

* Primary purpose of notetaking app is, actually, reading the notes, not writing them, so this should be simple. The default UI for any saved note should be read-only, w/o unnecessary buttons taking up the space on the screen (especially critical when using the phone).

* Tags attachable to every note (of any format). Search using tags. Tags can be non-ASCII. Tags must be easily searchable and editable in bulk.

* Full-text search.

* Some tags can be marked as "labels", and the label should be the only possible way to organize data: treat them approx. as Gmail does, don't clutter the app with both tree-style navigation and tags. To satisfy the user who really likes trees, treat some symbol in the label (- / |) as the separator, so that "university/biology" and "university/math" would form a tree in the UI.

* Pretty much everything else I can imagine right now is anti-feature. Simple is gold. Well, maybe some sort of versioning is actually useful, but if it's implemented it should not only "just work", but also be obvious for the user to see how it works.

* Treat conflicting changes well (for example, if you lose internet connection on a mobile). Maybe something similar to how git does it: let the use choose?

* Oh, yeah, about lost connections: caching on the clients. All cached data should always be encrypted on the disk (hm, I guess it would conflict with auth by SSL?).

> Simple is gold.

Which IMHO is the reason why no software for personal managment of stuff will ever be good enough. We all want the perfect tailor-made suit to work with, but we don't wanna go to the tailor and pay for it. And even worst, we grow, we change, so custom-made solution today might not do it tomorrow.

I think for that reason applications with a programatic approach are the real solution for organization like notes or tasks. Something scriptable is a good start for this.

You can indeed use plain markdown and get all the features you are thinking of. You can color with html, since you could add that to markdown and support it reasonably well. Performance takes some thinking but is not a major issue. This also simplifies versioning, since you could e.g. just use git. I've been working on a notes app that does these things -- not ready yet, but these are all doable. Comments like these remind me its worthwhile (beyond my personal use).

One feature I’m sorely missing in pretty much all note taking apps is proper citation/reference handling. As in, working with actual bibliography indexes.

I imagine it being implementable by simply using anchor-based links as in vanilla markdown, no? So every reference can be written manually, and in order to make it convenient you only need some button in the editor, that performs quite a simple macro: add a superscript index with a link, and insert a little piece of text in the bottom of the document (or on a separate page) + an anchor.

But, it reminds me, there also must be a way to easily link one note to the other you wrote. Which isn't always available.

https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref

Have you tried Bear (on iOS, but otherwise pretty close). I especially love how they combined tags with tree hierarchy (like you suggest).

Bear looks amazing (maybe the best although not perfect) but has 2 serious turn-offs: Apple lock-in (a single-platform app in 2019, seriously?) and subscription (whatever humble it is, I hate subscriptions as compared to reasonable price once-and-forever payments).

Remind me never to complain about spreadsheet software to you.

You can actually write your own spreadsheet nowadays and I'm not even sure this is going to be harder than to write a good outliner. I advice using HDF5 for the file format.

There are already too many of these "collect universal notes" kind of apps. New ones pop up all the time with a slightly different twist, but basically same shit, new wrpping

I’ve tried every one and still plain text files work and will continue to work. The simplest is best.

This is really impressive. I've always wanted a decent Journaling app that also mapped well to hierarchies and how I think about things. It looks incredibly fleshed out, and that a lot of thought and effort was put into this project.

I'm curious about whether there's synchronization between the local desktop application and the hosted web version. Also about how responsive the web version is, and how well it works on a phone.

Thank you for your kind words :)

Hosted web version actually serves a dual purpose - it is a full online app (for both desktop and mobile) and also acts as a central sync server for desktop clients.

There's a fully featured web version which is tailored for desktop and isn't responsive. There's a separate frontend for touch based devices which doesn't have a complete feature set, but scales nicely for both smartphone and tablet layouts. But this is a brand new feature released just days ago so it has probably rough edges.

FYI - The link to images in the Screenshot tour seems to be broken.

https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Screenshot-tour

What error does it give? This links works fine for me ...

Nvm, when i disconnected out of the VPN to my workplace, the images loaded fine. Tried connecting to VPN again to test if the images would load this time, it didn't. Weird... It could be something specific with my VPN.

You should check out your workplace's firewall rules. About a week ago, my works' firewall suddenly started blocking the domain where Github's CSS/JS files were hosted and all formatting and images were gone. Not sure if Github switched hosting servers or our firewall whitelist was updated incorrectly.

It looks like both my questions are covered in your very comprehensive documentation. Color me impressed

Sort of related. Does anyone know of any note apps that will let you select and area of web page, and drag it into the note. I just want easily make a scrap book of relevant info from web pages I visit. The solution I know of, Screen shot, saving, loading, and so on has too many steps. I just want something that will let me select and drag into the note. And that will look exactly like I see on the webpage. Bonus, if it lets me drag not only rectangular boxes, but actually adjust the box so its not cutting off lines, or other content. Sort of like pinterest, but not for just images, but text also. Hyperlinked to the actual source page would be nice too.

Sciter Notes: https://notes.sciter.com

That if you mean something like this: http://notes.sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/notes-dra...

Works with any browser, no plugins required.

StandardNotes is an OSS note taking app. The Plus Editor can accept pastes from a web page with styling and whatnot.

https://standardnotes.org/extensions

You can use the TagSpaces Web Clipper browser extension, which saves parts or whole webpages in simple html files. It is available for Chrome and Firefox from https://www.tagspaces.org/downloads/

Evernote has a browser plugin that does exactly this.

Not sure about your OS, but on Ubuntu and many Linux distributions you can press Ctrl+Shift+PrtScrn to select a region of your screen to screenshot and copy it to your clipboard. I commonly use a workflow of Ctrl+Shift+PrntScrn, select a region, then Ctrl+V to paste the screenshot where I need it - really low friction, and surprisingly many websites support pasting images.

(I suppose other OS's have similar shortcuts as well, so if you use something else, this might be worth Googling for.)

Otherwise, I think Pocket might be exactly scrapbook-collector-type thing you're looking for?

Onenote has a webclipper extension which works similarly.

Zim desktop wiki has a webclipper with options to clip url or selection or all urls in a window.

you can do this on surface pro with the pen. It automatially screenshots into one note.

Thank you for the hoisting! For me this is a crucial feature missing on most outliners. I got spoiled by one that had it in the mid 80s (one of the first, can't remember the name). That one went away and ever since hoisting has been my screening test. The fact that hoisting is hard to find 30 years later is evidence of technical regression and the oncoming collapse of civilization. So Trilium gives me hope.

Emacs/Org-mode have had this feature for years. You can narrow-to-subtree, or even subtree-to-indirect-buffer, presenting a subtree as its own buffer, like having files within files.

First of all, congrats. It looks like a nice application with good thought out features. I've esp. liked central syncing, source code capabilities and markdown.

I personally use Zim [0] at work, which is pretty dependable, extensible and mature. Zim also builds a personal knowledge base with exports, so you can learn from its approaches I think.

However, I personally don't prefer to use electron applications, so Trillium is not a real candidate for me, sorry. Wish it wasn't on Electron, so I'd try it.

[0]: http://zim-wiki.org/

I'm a zim user too but looking to replace it. Why is Electron a deal breaker for you? (Also, in case you didn't notice, you can host Trilium on a server if you want to)

I'm an old folk in terms of computer history [0], and while my computers are not resource constrained, I'm resource conscious. Also, I'm a high performance computing sysadmin and researcher, so I know what computers can do with what amount of resources.

I'm extremely annoyed by the fact of running a complete browser engine and sacrifice half gigabytes of memory and a lot of storage (I cannot remember the exact size of Atom) just for a text editor or any other software with the same caliber.

Also, Electron consumes more resources than it needs. When running on any Electron app on my Mac, I generally get a notification about its power usage too.

e.g.: Atom is not as powerful as Eclipse, but needs more resources per feature. BBEdit is much lighter and compact, and is nearly as useful for me as Atom, and I can run Eclipse if I need a full fledged IDE.

Server-only deployment is nice, but I'd rather sync the data, because I'm not always online while taking notes, and if I'm going to keep my data centralized, I'd rather keep it at my home, and I don't have enough upload bandwidth to serve anything like Trillium.

BTW, Why are you trying to replace Zim? I'm interested in your reasons.

I'm open to and interested in discussion and, I'd happily stand corrected if I'm mistaken.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839788

I'm not sure why you would think that Trilium, even in Electron form, would be resource intensive. It's not. Upload bandwidth? For syncing data? Unless you keep full video files in it, I can't imagine how that would come into play unless you are using only cell data at below 3G speeds. It seems as if your objections are more based on principle than actual in this case...

> I'm not sure why you would think that Trilium, even in Electron form, would be resource intensive.

Because NixNote 2 uses 145MBs, Zim Wiki uses 60MBs, nvPy uses 45 MBs, and Atom uses 660MBs on start.

> It's not.

Can you provide the memory consumption data?

> Upload bandwidth? For syncing data? Unless you keep full video files in it, I can't imagine how that would come into play unless you are using only cell data at below 3G speeds.

Sorry, but my home ISP is providing extremely asymmetric network speeds. I have 1Mbps upstream bandwidth for every 16Mbps downstream. This is barely keeping up if your home network is shared inside the home, consumed by 2 desktops, a laptop, three mobile phones at minimum. This network also needs to keep up with the daily usage needs. It's not realistic to peg the upload bandwidth just because I can.

> It seems as if your objections are more based on principle than actual in this case...

My principles are born out of actual cases. I'm not that conservative to try new technologies or applications, but I'm against wasting resources on my personal devices because hardware is cheap. I believe that efficient applications (in resource utilization) are always better in the long run. At least you can run more applications with the same hardware. I won't dive into details about how heavy applications like Atom or frameworks like Electron increases background CPU and power usage with interrupts, wakes, small spikes and such.

I'm looking for alternatives because Zim is so rarely updated and I'd like more features. It's become very stable though so maybe I shouldn't complain.

The plugins provided ample features for me for the time. What are you missing in Zim for example?

Yeah i was a happy zim user but kept hitting the wall that zim is clearly designed for the desktop. While i don't take as many notes on mobile as I do on desktop, i still have the need for mobile notes...and zim fell short. I know there are alternative methods where some folks use zim on their desktop and then for mobile leverage dropbox - both for synching the zim files and using dropbox's text editor (such as it is). but this mode left me wanting more. I really loved zim, but lately i've been using the notes app on self-hosted nextcloud - which is synched to my desktops via nextcloud's sync client. I'm only a few weeks into this experiment, but so far, so good. I think the day that zim moves into territory where it is more easily workable on mobile, is when it will be a top dog for note-taking platforms.

For simple, single page notes you can try simplenote [0]. It has nice Mac, Linux, iOS, Android clients, tagging and markdown support, and instant sync on official clients. It's also free. I use it for non-sensitive fast notes like a reminder notebook.

Also, applications/cliens like nvALT, nvPY provide a very very fast workflow for instinctive note taking and recalling.

[0]: https://simplenote.com

Does this support maths notation? E.g. Latex code interpreted with Katex or MathJax, or WYSIWYG with MathQuill.

I see there may be relevant CKEditor plugins. Could these be used?

Currently no support.

I use CKEditor 5 which is very very nice, but still a bit immature in its plugin ecosystem.

LaTex support is definitely something I've been thinking about, but I'm still not sure about how to approach it.

This might be also one of the showcases for the scripting support. User can load e.g. KaTex as a script, bind it to the "code note" which it will render into a view e.g. above the code editor. But that's not very user friendly for sure.

You should look at https://katex.org/

Two popular note taking apps which do this are Dropbox Paper and Notion.so, but they only support inline math. A niche app that does both is Gitbook but they’re a newer company and I’m not sure about personal plans.

Edit: I should add neither of these support code execution. I would really love if someone could point to a Wikipedia / knowledge base composed of Jupyter notebooks but have the functionality inverted — primarily focused on note taking and secondarily on code execution.

I've made a small userscript for inline math in Notion.so: https://github.com/evertheylen/notion-inline-math

I'm using it extensively myself :)

Want to add on that TeX support is pretty much the only thing holding me back from this. I feel like KaTeX is not only easy to integrate but also full featured.

I'd be incredibly impressed if you could render full LaTeX though - e.g. via a renderer switch and a PDF viewer like PDF.js.

I looked a bit more, and found this demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwNjwP9DMAc

It seems pretty great, but there's no code available as far as I can tell.

hackmd.io has a pretty nice latex supported. I find it much better for math notation than dropbox paper. It also has docker image available incase the service happens to shutdown.

https://hackmd.io/

This is very interesting. It's self-hosted and therefore not reliant on someone's brittle/invasive business model. I'd consider switching over to this in a heartbeat if it could handle attaching arbitrary files to notes (e.g. office docs, pdfs, etc.) that would also get sync'd.

I haven't looked at the code, but can anyone say something informed about the sync server auth and transport security? Is it running over TLS?

Trilium Notes has a concept of "file notes" which are just notes placed into the tree which can contain binary files. They fill the role of attachments. As any other kind of note, they are synced to the sync server and all clients.

Sync auth is done through HMAC of a timestamp with shared secret. Sync uses HTTP so if sync server is properly configured with TLS, then it is used of course.

Native integration is better, but file:// + syncthing could probably suffice?

I can't really recommend this. Trilium Notes stores its data in an SQLite database and syncing it as a single file would mean any kind of edit conflict would have to throw out all changes from one side of edit conflict.

Native solution has an advantage of being able to resolve edit conflicts on a very granular level (individual notes, attributes etc.)

Is there a way to do diffs between versions of notes?

I'm not sure if you mean on a user level or possibly on a sync level?

Trilium Notes automatically versions notes by kind of taking a snapshot every few minutes. It allows you to browse those "revisions", but there isn't a diff built in yet. It is one of those features which I thought I might implement some day but there's always something more important.

For the edit conflict resolution - no diff is being used. Newer change just overwrite the old one. But since you have historical revisions from both sides of edit conflicts, there's a good chance you didn't lose the data completely. And in practical terms this happens quite rarely if you sync often (i.e. - are online) since the sync is granular enough.

This looks awesome! Clearly you have put in a lot of hard work and thought into this.

Ive been itching for a scriptable personal knowledge base where I can store arbitrary datastructures and executable code in addition to the typical richtext note taking. Will be diving into the code asap. Cheers!

> Ive been itching for a scriptable personal knowledge base where I can store arbitrary datastructures and executable code in addition to the typical richtext note taking.

Wow, this is actually exactly what Trilium Notes is. Perfect match!

Sounds like org-mode.

Thanks for sharing. The cloning feature is really key. Looking to replace Notion with a more compliant solution (reg. storage of data) for quite a while and your combination of app/server nails it!

The only thing I would really love is a more open way to store notes, like text files in a directory. Love how DevonThink does their file indexing. Can imagine it being a headache though with the cloning etc. so good you have export to at least have openly accessible backups.

The_Colonel, could handwritten notes fit into Trilium? It's technically possible, with PointerEvents to get pressure, but I'm wondering about whether it would fit with your goals for the project.

I'm guessing it would need to be another type of note, separate from the CKEditor ones, or maybe some kind of drawing area plugin making space within a rich text note.

Yes, some kind of drawing is planned, but nothing concrete yet. Ideally I'd use some library because it's probably not feasible for me to implement it all by myself.

An informative 4-month-old discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9c34b8/trilium_notes...

Looks really nice... I do wish it could use Dropbox/Google-Drive/MS-OneDrive etc as a storage engine though... or local FS in the appropriate directories. I'm also not sure about security on the server, may give it a try on a dokku server to see how it goes.

I've been using Typora to make todo lists, and keep notes. It also has markdown, and I can do checkboxes with it quite easily, and add large titles, and horizontal lines. I just save all related todo's and notes into a folder. When I open a single note, it lists in the left pane all the other notes in that folder. So for example, I have a todo folder. And a file for each day of the week. If I open Monday, it lists all the other days in the left pane. I love using it. Very similar concept to this program. I'll have to try out trillium.

+1 to Typora, it shows you the folder contents which is great.

I compare everything with emacs editing text files with git for synching. (Encryption is through a VM with encrypted Ubuntu which I use for note taking and everything else.)

But this does work with mobile which is key...

Looks like a mix of Leo and org-mode running on Electron.

What I need most is guaranteed and easily accessible backups. I think, for me, that's automatic commits to a git repo in some format and structure that isn't bound to the app.

This looks pretty impressively thorough. I noticed you support Evernote -> ENEX -> Trilium; what about exports, ie going in the other direction?

For the export there's a TAR archive which contains a directory structure of HTML/Markdown files (you can choose the format) representing the notes in the tree structure. Extra metadata are stored in a single JSON file (in the same tar). Same tar archive can also be imported without losing anything in the process.

Besides that there's an OPML file export which contains a tree structure with plain text. Its import seems to be supported widely among outliners.

So, say I export my note as a markdown document, what I'm seeing is that all the images that I had pasted into my note are still referenced as a link. I was thinking the image itself would be copied into an images directory and referenced relative to the note, locally. Is it possible to do that?

Actually image itself is also a note (of image type)and is placed into the note tree so in export it appears at the same place as in the app.

But you're right that the exported note doesn't rewrite the link to correctly point to the local exported image.

Nicely done! Thanks for sharing. I've been using Tiddlywiki over TiddlyDesktop (used on Win and Mac Os) and it suffices most of my needs (except drag-n-drop images and web scraping). TW's extendable macro and plugin environment is awesome. It works great off of cloud drives. Curious to know what others feel about TW. KNote's note 'card' interface resembles TW. Thanks.

The releases could be improved using electron-builder. You'd then have one executable file, instead of thousands of node_modules files.

You're right. I kept it like this as a debugging solution of last resort. But having single ASAR is probably more useful for regular use.

This app looks amazing. I see that it says there is support for arbitrary amount of nested notes, but it seems the method to do this is to right click and add child notes. Is there any way to add workflowy like nesting? Workflowy has a very simple but very useful way of nesting notes that I personally find intuitive for organizing my thoughts.

Just played around with it. Really nice application and seems very comprehensive. I'll need to spend some more time with it though.

I was especially keen on the syncing to work, but unfortunately kept getting a 'DB not initialized' error on the server. I'll raise an issue for it.

Wonderful application overall. Congratulations.

Hello, "DB not initialized" is not necessarily an error and may just mean you didn't set up the sync between the nodes yet. If you can create the issue on github, we can look into it in more detail.

This is awesome! Downloaded the binary and runs with no issues on Ubuntu 18.04 x64.

Two questions:

1. Any plans to support OCR processing similar to Evernote?

2. Any plans on offering a paid service for syncing the encrypted notes to? I'll gladly pay $5 / mo for a more secure, open source Evernote if it means I don't have to manage my own server.

Really liking how lightweight, extensible, and flexible this is. It feels like a mature product already!

Been using https://usejournal.com for last few months for taking quick notes and grabbing and tagging links. Works well enough but no mobile support still means I am not that keen to over invest in it.

Will check out Trillium

Woah, I can't believe I missed this 12-ish days ago, but just went looking for a note-taking app today and I have to say this is the best one out there by a hundred miles! It's incredible how exactly and perfectly it works in line with what I needed it to do!

I'm looking for.a.tool replacing DevonThink, which lets.you also put Documents (e.g. PDF) as a node in the hierarchical tree which is IMHO key for knowledge systems. Your system looks great on first look, is this a planed feature?

You can put any kind of file as a node in the tree. However it won't be displayed in-app - instead opening it would start your PDF reader.

The only reason I still use Evernote (and I fervently want off) is its excellent page scraper. If there were a non-web (i.e. local storage) alternative for macos&ios I'd switch in a heartbeat. But so far, no luck.

I have been looking for a note taking app that fits my needs for a long time. I have tried Tiddly-wiki, Typora, Evernote, Boostnote, OneNote, Simple Notes. So far this looks better than all of those combined. Thanks!

This seems like a super-version of Notion.so. I'll definitely have a look.

This is an amazing project! It is extremely well documented and very well thought out!

Do you have plans to build import functions to take data from OneNote and Evernote?

Evernote import is supported (by importing ENEX files). Nothing for OneNote yet though.

This looks awesome! I've been looking through the docs. I can't wait to get back to my computer to give it a whirl.

I've been using Ulysses but considering trying something else ever since they changed to a subscription-based model.

The features set seems very interesting, I'll definitely take a closer look at the code, good job!

Is there a shortcut to create a new folder? It seems really difficult, or I am just missing it?

There's a CTRL-O for creating new note/folder on the same level and CTRL-P for creating nested one.

I thought this was going to be some note-taking add-on for the cross-protocol chat app Trilium.

That one is called Trilian. But yeah, it sounds similar.

Awesome app. Thanks for sharing.

Quickly checking on the way. Is there a way to import notes from Evernote?

Yes, as the other commenters answered. Just a word of warning - there's not many ENEX files floating on the net available for testing so I kind of expect some bugs to appear here.

Looks like yes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Evernote-import

https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Evernote-import

Quite rought around the corners. I guess in 3-5 years it can grow into something good. I assume leo editor was a inspiration for this?

do you have any plans to create a SaaS version? Maybe with some premium features, that would be great

No commercial plans at the moment.

It's not viable unless you have a lot of paying users and there's a lot of competition.

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