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Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

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Re: Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

#111
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.

Re: Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

#114

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.

Re: Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

#115

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.

Re: Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

#116

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.

Re: Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

#117
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.

Re: Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

#118
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features would you like in your ideal one?

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 balanc…

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).

Re: Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

#119
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.

Re: Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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