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triliumnext/trilium

📈 Trending★ 36,093TypeScriptAudience · vibe coderComplexity · 3/5ActiveLicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

A free, open-source note-taking app for building large personal knowledge bases with hierarchical organization, rich formatting, full-text search, and cross-device sync.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Trilium Notes))
    What it does
      Hierarchical note trees
      Rich text formatting
      Full-text search
      Note versioning
    Note types
      Mind maps
      Sketches
      Relation maps
      Geo maps
    Deployment
      Desktop via Electron
      Self-hosted server
      Browser access
    Features
      Cross-device sync
      Per-note encryption
      Web clipper
      Public publishing
    Use cases
      Personal wikis
      Research databases
      Journals
      Project knowledge bases

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Build a personal wiki where thousands of notes link together and nest hierarchically.

USE CASE 2

Create a research database with full-text search, versioning, and encrypted private sections.

USE CASE 3

Keep a journal with sketches, maps, and formatted text that syncs across your devices.

USE CASE 4

Organize a project knowledge base with mind maps and relation visualizations showing how ideas connect.

Tech stack

TypeScriptElectronNode.jsSQLiteExcalidraw

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
Free and open-source; you can use, modify, and distribute it freely for any purpose.

In plain English

Trilium Notes is a free, open-source note-taking application designed for building large personal knowledge bases. Unlike simple note apps, Trilium organizes notes in a hierarchical tree structure where notes can be nested as deeply as you like, and the same note can appear in multiple places in the tree simultaneously. This makes it well suited for people who accumulate thousands of notes over time and need a flexible system for linking ideas together. Notes in Trilium can contain rich formatted text with tables, images, mathematical formulas, and code with syntax highlighting. There are also specialized note types including mind maps, hand-drawn sketches (via Excalidraw integration), relation maps for visualizing connections between notes, and geo maps with location pins. Full-text search and note versioning (keeping a history of every change) are built in. Trilium can be run as a local desktop application using Electron (a technology that packages web apps as desktop programs), or self-hosted on a server and accessed via browser. Notes can be synchronized across devices through a self-hosted sync server, encrypted on a per-note basis for privacy, and selectively published to the public internet. There is also a web clipper browser extension for saving web pages directly into your notes. Someone building a personal wiki, a research database, a journal, or a project knowledge base where notes grow over time and link to each other would use Trilium. The project is written in TypeScript, runs on Electron for desktop use, and can scale comfortably to over 100,000 notes according to the README.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
How do I set up Trilium Notes as a self-hosted server so I can access my notes from any device?
Prompt 2
Show me how to use Trilium's relation maps to visualize connections between my notes.
Prompt 3
How do I encrypt specific notes in Trilium while keeping others public?
Prompt 4
What's the best way to structure a large Trilium knowledge base with 10,000+ notes to keep it organized?
Prompt 5
How do I use the Trilium web clipper to save articles and web pages into my note tree?
Open on GitHub → Explain another repo

Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.