Trilium Notes: Markdown autoformat personal knowledge base (opens in new tab)

Think it tends to be mostly a personal preference thing.

I use both, but do rather like hierarchies - they just seem like a natural way of grokking things. I also tend to just naturally outline a lot, whether writing, taking notes or coding.

Another reason I find them useful is that the act of organizing them is also a form of learning for me - not just the information, but the context and relations.

A third reason I like hierarchies is probably a result of a mental flaw. I've always had an issue with "missing words" - where a particular noun just doesn't come to me when I need it. Definitely worse with proper names for some reason. When I'm missing a word, context works much better for finding something.

It depends on what you are looking for. Your thinking works at least in a different way. You remember things by finding things that connect to the thing your looking for...

One could say their "Link map" enables such a thing but its not quite the same thing.

Personally I do really like the Zettelkasten Method which leans more towards a representation of thought in a written form. Ever wondered how the Zettelkasten "guy" Nikolas Luhman could be so productive(> 50 books) it was because of his Zettelkasten(Method).

http://www.dansheffler.com/blog/2015-05-05-the-zettelkasten-...

So every time I find a new tool, at least for me I evaluate it through that lens: how much does it really help me to represent my thought process. And hiearchical notes are not enough for that, at least for me...

The disadvantage of an "all search" solution is that it presumes that you know what you are looking for. Some of the greatest value I get from my notes happens when I'm serendipitously browsing an old hierarchy, remembering connections I made before.

When all you have is search, you may run into the difficulty of actively organizing and structuring notes and clippings into a hierarchy, clusters, or mind map. Also the search support varies from "exact match" to "fuzzy match" to "synonym search".

For example, Evernote supports Notebooks but they only create one level of hierarchy. Often the use of "tags" is then recommended to label notes with context, hierarchy, and categories.

We went for search with Emvi [1]. There are people who like hierarchy, but I think if you don't know what you're looking for you won't find it in a structure anyway. Except everyone on the team or you personally put a lot of thought into it. A hierarchy does not scale well. We tried to make the search as powerful as possible. With filters that can be combined to filter the result set, but I mostly use the textsearch as it is good enough.

Im still thinking about how we could add "explorability". Sometimes you just want to click around a bit and explore what's there without any real goal in mind. Let me know if you have an idea on how the system could support that.

We are rebuilding the UI right now to put an even stronger focus on search. You can read about it here [2] if you like.

[1] https://emvi.com/

[2] https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-user-interface-QMZg...

I agree 100%. Don't see why one approach must preclude the other.

I prefer using tags rather than folders, so I actually keep every e-mail since last year's January 1st in my Outlook inbox (currently at 29,348 and counting...) and just search. If you let Outlook index everything, it's blazing fast, and you can sort by name / subject / date / category pretty easily to further drill down results and find what you want.

Haven't found a system that works better, with the only disadvantage being that searching on mobile really sucks

I agree 100%. It's shocking how many knowledge base apps there are with terrible search. What's the point of putting stuff in if you can't find it when you need it? I've been working on https://histre.com/ (Effortless Knowledge Base) and search is the #1 thing I'm focusing on now.

This was my experience with my photo collection. I pretty much abandoned Lightroom because Google lets me type "pug" in the search box and find all of my pug pictures.

It also holds my pictures and their metadata hostage but that's another story.

> I find that an ability to search the knowledgebase exceeds the value of organizing according to a hierarchy.

Why not both? Searching is good for makro-managment, navigation and dynamic. Hierachy works well for micro-managment, relations and static access.

My "all search" solution is a text file. Works great.

My biggest gripe trying it now is the poor keyboard shortcuts in windows.

Hitting ctrl+s is a reflex and while it might not need saving, it's annoying that it redirects focus to the search.

Likewise, F2 doesn't rename, instead tries to do something difference.

If it proves useful anyway I'll try to contribute a keyboard shortcut map to be more consistent with windows or VS, it might be annoying until then however.

I’m probably in the minority, but for a notetaking app to be “pretty much perfect” I absolutely need to be able to easily view and edit notes with vim/nvim, or at least have basic Vim emulation.

> Truly cross platform

> No mobile

Look up Andrew Matushchak's entry on evergreen notes [1].

[1] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4SDCZQeRo4xFEQ8H4qrSqd68ucp...

Write your notes on the margins and once you finish the book, transfer the marginalia and relevant quotes to your note taking system of choice.

> My process so far has been I keep a daily journal where I write down the most interesting things I learnt or did everyday

Trilium should work great for this, you can press ctrl + alt + p to automatically create a new day note under a calendar tree.

In my case, I also added a custom shortcut/button that brings me to the current day in the calendar tree

Sounds like you have the bulk of a successful routine in place already. The only thing that is missing is a regular moment when you sit down and sift through all your recent notes and connect them to your knowledge base, whatever that is. I suspect that this feels a bit pointless at first but I understand that it soon becomes satisfying and useful. (Beginner here, hence the cautious tone.)

So I'm going through a bunch of these apps/systems and so far, Zettlr looks like it might be suited to what you're already doing. It's fairly minimalistic out of the box, the markdown files are automatically named by the date you write them (your daily notes), there's autocompletion for your links, there's tags, and that's it. There are maybe a few other things, but that's it.

I'm trying out Trilium right now because I was interested in its visual mapping (I'm more of a visual thinker So I've been using Freeplane, a mindmap software, but it's too restrictive with the hierarchies) and while it has nice features, there seems to be too much going on, which I suspect won't stick with me personally.

This makes me wonder if there is feasibility for P2P collaborative editing feature in trillium.

Nice idea, maybe make a feature request.

What is your current setup?

I quite happily and successfully used MPTW to manage work knowledge, tasks, and context for 2 years. Between leaving the related job and the odious save workarounds for pre-TW5 wikis, I stopped using it. I've made multiple multi-hour attempts to find a workable TW5 configuration, with both the TW5 legacy plugin and searching for replacement plugins.

I have been using 'Joplin' for most of my notes. I have the desktop client and mobile client synced up using 'syncthing' app on my desktop. Its a perfect little setup.

Website resources?

I think this is more in reference to yesterday’s discussion about Obsidian...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598

There have been a few knowledge base/markdown discussions lately.

I've tried Trilium in the past, and tried Obsidian this week. I fell in love with Obsidian instantly (even though there are a couple of key things missing [1]). This is entirely subjective, but the UI of Trilium actually gives me anxiety - I want my note-taking, knowledgebase to be a zero-friction thing of calm. Obsidian definitely is, I spent two minutes customising keyboard shortcuts to closer match Sublime Text where I spend most of my day and I was up and running, and in the flow when writing documentation. Trilium is the exact opposite of that. It's information overload. It reminds me of MS Word with all the toolbars open. Some people like that, but if you like a calm, focussed place to write or read documentation or notes, I'd go with Obsidian.

[1] For me Obsidian is currently missing anchor linking to headers within a document (which I know is on the roadmap), and scroll past end of document, as I hate my carat being anchored to the bottom of the screen when writing. Despite those things being missing, I'd paid the personal license within about an hour of trying it and if it turns out to be useful across a team I'll pay the commercial license for it too.

Well, my questions are pretty basic but since you offered :) 1. In text note I make a code block and I do not know how to 'exit it'. How can I 'finish' it and make another paragraph? 2. Is there a shortcut to insert a checkbox (like Evernote does with Ctrl+Shift+C 3. Is there a way to change the font? I like Mono fonts for notes. 4. Can I reduce the margin between paragraphs in text notes?

Thats all for now, thanks.

Also the fact that I can completely self host it on a server while running a local client on any machine that syncs effortlessly.

I'm very happy with this program, the GUI isn't the most elegant but it does the job.

I don't think I'd describe the GUI as 'bloated' though... it's actually pretty minimal. I think the screenshot on the github page makes it look busier than it really is (e.g. the sidebar can be hidden, and you'd usually be using it with a larger window size).

I find the program to be very powerful out of the box, so I haven't had to customize much (the customization is just icing on the cake IMO).

I use this program every day at work as my personal knowledgebase for my technical support notes (and also for taking notes on phone calls). I have thousands of notes and this program handles it much better than anything else I've tried. The powerful tree structure, fast search, and tagging system make it really easy for me to quickly find what I'm looking for.

As referenced above [1] multi-user is a non-feature so I wouldn't expect development on that any time soon.

Not sure how good Obsidian [2] is, multi-user support seems to be in dev as well but it might work on a shared drive folder. Also doens't seem to be free/libre.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347168 [2] https://obsidian.md/

Seems to have an export to a tarfile of markdown docs with a folder structure matching the tree.