FAQ

Inspiration for the name “Trilium”

Naming software is hard. I lived in Ontario when I first started the project and Trillium (the flower) is sort of a provincial logo, many institutions in Ontario are named "Trillium [something]". So I kept hearing/reading it almost everyday, I liked the sound of it and its nature motif, so I just reused it.

– Zadam (original Trilium maintainer)

[!NOTE] Despite the fact that the Trillium flower has two “l"s, the Trilium application only has one.

macOS support

Originally, Trilium Notes considered the macOS build unsupported. TriliumNext commits to make the experience on macOS as good as possible.

if you find any platform-specific issues, feel free to report them.

Translation / localisation support

The original Trilium Notes application did not support multiple languages. Since we believe that internationalisation is a core part of an application, we have added support for it.

Contributions to translations are welcome.

Multi-user support

Common request is to allow multiple users collaborate, share notes etc. So far I'm resisting this because of these reasons:

• it's a huge feature, or rather a Pandora's box of collaboration features like user management, permissions, conflict resolution, real-time editing of a note by multiple people etc. This would be a huge amount of work. Trilium Notes is project made mostly by one person in free time and that's unlikely to change in the future.
• given its size it would probably pivot the attention away from my main focus which is a personal note-taking
• the assumption that only single person has access to the app simplifies many things, or just outright makes them possible. In multi-user app, our scriptingsupport would be a XSS security hole, while with the single user assumption it's an endless customizable tool.

How to open multiple documents in one Trilium instance

This is normally not supported - one Trilium process can open only a single instance of a database. However, you can run two Trilium processes (from one installation), each connected to a separate document. To achieve this, you need to set a location for the data directory in the TRILIUM_DATA_DIR environment variable and separate port on TRILIUM_PORT environment variable. How to do that depends on the platform, in Unix-based systems you can achieve that by running command such as this:

TRILIUM_DATA_DIR=/home/me/path/to/data/dir TRILIUM_PORT=12345 trilium 

You can save this command into a .sh script file or make an alias. Do this similarly for a second instance with different data directory and port.

Can I use Dropbox / Google Drive / OneDrive to sync data across multiple computers.

No.

These general purpose sync apps are not suitable to sync database files which are open and being worked on by another application. The result is that they will corrupt the database file, resulting in data loss and this message in the Trilium logs:

SqliteError: database disk image is malformed

The only supported way to sync Trilium's data across the network is to use a sync/web server.

Why database instead of flat files?

Trilium stores notes in a database which is an SQLite database. People often ask why doesn't Trilium rather use flat files for note storage - it's fair question since flat files are easily interoperable, work with SCM/git etc.

Short answer is that file systems are simply not powerful enough for what we want to achieve with Trilium. Using filesystem would mean fewer features with probably more problems.

More detailed answer:

• clones are what you might call "hard directory link" in filesystem lingo, but this concept is not implemented in any filesystem
• filesystems make a distinction between directory and file while there's intentionally no such difference in Trilium
• files are stored in no particular order and user can't change this
• Trilium allows storing note attributes which could be represented in extended user attributes but their support differs greatly among different filesystems / operating systems
• Trilium makes links / relations between different notes which can be quickly retrieved / navigated (e.g. for note map). There's no such support in file systems which means these would have to be stored in some kind of side-car files (mini-databases).
• Filesystems are generally not transactional. While this is not completely required for a note-taking application, having transactions make it way easier to keep notes and their metadata in predictable and consistent state.

Search-related Questions

Why does search sometimes find results with typos?

Trilium uses a progressive search strategy that includes fuzzy matching when exact matches return fewer than 5 results. This finds notes despite minor typos in your search query. You can use fuzzy search operators (~= for fuzzy exact match and ~* for fuzzy contains). See the <a class="reference-link" href="Basic%20Concepts%20and%20Features/Navigation/Search.md">Search</a> documentation for details.

How can I search for notes when I'm not sure of the exact spelling?

Use the fuzzy search operators:

• #title ~= "projct" - finds notes with titles like "project" despite the typo
• note.content ~* "algoritm" - finds content containing "algorithm" or similar words

Why do some search results appear before others with lower scores?

Trilium places exact matches before fuzzy matches. When you search for "project", notes containing exactly "project" appear before notes with variations like "projects" or "projection", regardless of other scoring factors.

How can I make my searches faster?

1. Use the "Fast search" option to search only titles and attributes (not content)
2. Limit search scope using the "Ancestor" field
3. Set a result limit to prevent loading too many results
4. For large databases, consider archiving old notes to reduce search scope