Do I Like the Notetaking Program Trilium? (Yes)

My view when editing a trilium note in the desktop client.

1. A searchable tree of all my notes.
2. A Collection of widgets to execute various pre-provided or scriptable actions.
3. The content of the note I'm editing.
4. A list of attributes (tags) applied to the current note. 

Cool Things I Can Do With Trilium

  • Make a widget that opens or creates my daily journal note (except I made the day roll over at 5am) and creates a subnote with a randomly selected writing prompt.
  • Self host trilium on my server and log in with a password on any device with a web browser. Offline editing is possible in the desktop app.
  • Full text search my notes and apply bulk actions. Or save the search itself as a subtree of notes.
  • Mark subtrees of notes as public and share them on the web (like this one!).

Good Things About Trilium

  • free and open source
  • syncing to my self hosted server works very well
  • Web interface is great. On anything with a browser I can go to the domain, log in, and edit away. The web interface supports 99% of the features desktop version.
  • Pretty good wiki and documentation (example)
  • Everything is stored in SQLite, so it's fast.
  • Infinitely scriptable, though it has a learning curve.
  • Can store images
  • Seems pretty akin to self-hosted obsidian
  • Mostly intuitive format
  • Notes accessible on phone. (barely. decent enough for reading but editing is a pain).
  • Publicly sharing notes is a very powerful concept.
  • Visually appealing WYSIWYG editor
  • Backups are as easy as DUMPing the sqlite db.

Mid Things

Bad Things

  • phone is awkward for editing notes. The UI just isn't really built for this and typing in particular gets wonky.
  • small community?
  • When you update the source code of a widget (including when you pull in a change on a sync on bootup), you have to reload the desktop app for the changes to be respected. Ctrl + R suffices for this, though.
  • single user (this is fine for me)
  • I don't think i can attatch audio notes? or any non-image files for that matter
  • Spell check is wonky and undesirable (I disabled it)
  • I wish i could better diff changes to a given note. (like git, kinda)
    • there are note revisions which should be sufficient for storing history, but not so good for, say, rolling back individual lines.
  • it doesn't really have #tags from what i can tell? you can do @ stuff but it's different?
    • there are labels for a note. inside a note you can link to other notes, but you can't really use tags inside a note. As in, typing #math inside a note has no special meaning. Though I could apply the label #math to the note's attributes.

Still figuring out