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 For an example of what TriliumNotes looks like, you can check out the slightly outdated screenshot tour.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!)
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
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
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.
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
So you’re telling me that software which doesn’t have official export stores my notes metadata in proprietary database format?
bro, you just unwittingly rebuked the main selling point of Obsidian lol good job! I should take a note of it next time lol
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
Tell me, are you aware of the distinction between content and metadata?
Also, what do you mean, no official export? The data is already sitting on your filesystem in markdown…?
stores my notes metadata in proprietary database format?
Obsidian note metadata is stored in YAML in the markdown note file itself. That’s about as non-proprietary as it gets.
Not sure why you hate Obsidian. I don’t love it and would switch to a FOSS alternative if there was something comparable, but at least I’m not making crap up about it.
I have encountered this issue before when I tried using Obsidian my RPG pdf collection (10,000s of files), would not recommend. I do still like Obsidian and will keep using it, but would something like Trillium work as a sort of PDF library software for a massive amount of files like that? The main need is to be able sort/categorize game systems using tags, link to pdfs, and maybe have some sort of Dataview-esque query capabilities. Zotero is the least worst option, but it still has some annoyances for me and I’ve still been looking for something that could help me organize better. I know this is billed as a note-taking app, so it’s a weird use-case, but Obsidian was pretty close to being a decent solution, if not for the slow speed issues.
