Trilium Notes - a personal knowledge base

Evernote used to be my go-to note-taking tool. Be it shopping lists, or poetry or diary entries everything went into Evernote. Later I moved to OneNote and transferred all my data manually. I still use OneNote because of its inking and annotations feature.

For all my other data which included a lot of spreadsheets, Airtable was what I loved, because of the sheer number of ways you could customize it. Handling data was hard though. I never really understood where I would use those linked sheets and all. I even tried out their premium plan with all the virtual currency I had earned from referrals. But somehow, Airtable was just not enough compared to Notion. Eventually, I moved to Notion when they made it literally free for everyone and removed the limit on the number of blocks that can be used. Notion is awesome and still growing and getting better everyday.

After I started switching to privacy oriented software, I found Trilium Notes on GitHub. This does have a lot of haters on reddit and elsewhere because of course it’s another Electron JS app. Let the memes flow! 😂

Nonetheless, I found it meeting my requirements:

• Must be offline with sync support if at all I need to keep an encrypted backup
• Should have a good deal of customization (I got a lot more than I asked for here)
• Should be able to store code snippets
• Notes should be hierarchical
• Should support basic formatting and needs to be better than markdown
• Should have an export option with standard data formats ( if at all this tool is no longer maintained, I should be able to migrate)

But Trilium has way more features than this. We can create and link notes to each other. Much like Obsidian - which I tried for a single day(it was too much). It has support for math equations, tables, images and we can also embed a PDF in it. Note versioning is inbuilt and you just need to type away!

Here’s a screenshot of my Trilium Notes setup:

There are a lot of inbuilt features and infinitely more possibilities since we can write our own scripts that can do anything from adding UI buttons to creating beautiful graphs. The only problem is that their documentation is sparse and not very noob-friendly. So writing custom scripts does not look easy to me. I just stick to the features that are already present.

So, now I use OneNote for everyday stuff like lecture notes, random sketches, annotations and Trilium for the more organized things in life - which includes a lot of lists and things I’m learning along the way.