cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43147928
I built a note-taking app because the one I wanted didn’t exist. Clean UI, local .md files, no cloud, no account.
Built with Rust + Tauri 2.0 + SvelteKit. Full-text search powered by Tantivy. Graph view, AI writing tools (bring your own key), Obsidian import, version history.
Available for Linux (AppImage, APT, AUR), Windows, and macOS. Source: https://codeberg.org/ArkHost/HelixNotes
Have a look at Trilium. Anything Obsidian can do, it does better. And syncing is native.
Can trillium store all files in markdown/plaintext?
How is the theming by trillium? I use a light tan interface because it is much easier on my eyes, personally than high contrast white or eye-straining dark themes.
So, I recently abandoned Trilium, because it’s very half-assed.
It stores data in a database on your local file system, and you can export as markdown.
What do you mean “half-assed”? I manage very large collections of notes with it, in ways that no other PKMS can, just because none of them approach “note as data” (or “typed notes”) in a way that Trilium does.
My #1 criteria is for all my notes to remain consistent over time. If I create a note type for “Projects”, I want all notes representing a Project to have the same properties (start date, location, cost, …) at all time. Trilium has very neat concepts like Templates and Attributes Inheritance that make changes on the template be reflected on instances. That’s something even AnyType, Notion, Capacities, Logseq, Tena and others are struggling with. When your collection grows, so does your bookkeeping with those systems, and what should be a tool to help you get stuff done ends up giving you more work to do and holding you back. I beg to see a tool that helps my productivity so much.
I found it buggy and unfinished, plus a “That branch is unmaintained, use this fork” situation, so…nope.
Oh, so your experience with Trilium is at least a year old. In the meantime the original dev popped out of their hiatus to formally hand over the project (and the rights over the original repository) to the newly formed community, which has been very active (porting to typescript, internationalisation, porting of the UI to reactive components, full rewrite of the UI, new collections feature, new note types, new doc, new homepage, some LLM APIs, etc).
It’s still an opensource project run by volunteers on a best-effort basis, but it punches way above its weight-class.
Content is stored in a SQLite db (with options to export to markdown & al.), Trilium is open source, so there’s no lock-in and you get the best of both worlds.
You can totally reimplement the whole UI if that’s your thing, everything (or close-enough) is a note in Trilium, including themes and other JS/CSS notes that will override or extend parts of the application, like add-ons would elsewhere.
Can you tell me more? Is it FOSS? Is it electron? Is it a UI for a folder of markdown files? Is there a native android app? What is “native” syncing? Do I have to pay for some kind of cloud?
You can see by yourself at https://triliumnotes.org/
It’s FOSS, it’s web so you can use it hosted, or local first as an electron app, or both and then they will sync together.
It is NOT a UI for a folder of markdown files, because that’s silly when you expect from your system to hold relationships, metadata, rich note types, notes to coexist in multiple places, etc. Since it’s FOSS, and since you can sync your notes real-time and distributed across machines, there’s nothing wrong with this.
You can use the web version on Android as a PWA, but it won’t sync offline. There are workarounds to run a local server on your device for that use cases (not ideal in terms of user-friendlyness, but gets the job done).
You don’t need to pay anything to anyone if you host it yourself or if you keep it local. There is no official hosted plan, some people offer to do that for a tiny fee at https://www.pikapods.com/ (never used them, some people say they are decent).
You lost me at electron…
How so? Trilium is a web app, that you may use wrapped in an electron shell. Or not. Up to you.