Trilium Notes - new note taking app

Posted by Carrot
Aug 4, 2020 at 04:14 AM

I’ve searched for good open source note taking solutions for years and so I was shocked when my friend introduced me to Trilium. I’d never heard of it.

I’ve been using it on and off for several months and am deeply impressed. I have large collections of research materials in MyInfo 6 (now migrated to MyInfo 7), an application widely seen as one of the very best of this genre.

I’ve always hoped to find an open source solution that could replace my reliance on proprietary note software.

For a few years I tried Keepnote for a few years, and had plenty of correspondence with the developer. Sadly, it was discontinued. Then I moved to CherryTree, but its development was slow and did not offer the interface I needed. I then found Joplin and though I liked its web-clilpping tool I found its UI be its biggest downfall—- it appears to be inspired by OneNote and/or Evernote and those interfaces do not fit my needs. For my way of working, the UI is awkward to use, takes up far too much screen space, and overall is poorly designed. Though I sent my recommendations to the Joplin forum, indeed they were busy with many other aspects of development.

But when I found Trilum, I was very impressed, especially by the clean classic user interface. It follows the design used by so many of the best note-taking applications: UltraRecall, Right Notes, MyBase, MyInfo.

Trilium needs an import tool so users can import collections from Joplin, Evernote, easier mass import of ODT or DOCX documents. Please continue to develop its WYSIWYG interface. I find interfaces that use Markup to be very slow- its like taking a step backwards to 1997 when I used WordPerfect’s reveal codes to see how everything was formatted. I don’t want to do that anymore.

I hope you can find a team to develop Trlium to be what Joplin does not quite yet achieve.