Trilium Is THE PERFECT Note Taking App and Editor!

hey everybody welcome back to Jim's Garage today I've got a short one because I want to share with you an awesome app that I use almost daily to take notes of the things I want to do including making scripts and bullet points and even some of the code for these videos that you're watching now there are tons of alternative applications out there some of them are privately hosted things like Google keep some of them are self-hosted but with a proprietary angle so things like obsidian and then there's the thing that we're going to talk today Trillium now I love Trillium I've been using it for about six months now and it's great because it has pretty much all of the features that I need it's a direct competitor to things like obsidian and it has a few dare I say it advantages so things like you don't need to keep the documents locally they'll be stored on the server in a database so no matter where you access this from you're going to have all those files available to you and furthermore there's a wysiwyg web GUI so you can do all of the editing and administration through your browser you don't need to download another application onto your desktop machine albeit you can if you want because it's also got one of those and you can also access this friendly on your mobile because it has an nice reactive web page that works pretty well on your mobile device so let's have a quick Whistle Stop tour of some of the features then we'll get into deployment and I'll show you this up and running with a few examples so heading on over to the Trillium GitHub page you can see that it's a pretty big project it's got 22 and a half thousand stars but it's probably one of those that you've not heard of within this space so let's try and remedy that and give Trillium the support it deserves so if you have a quick look through at some of the features because this is probably the make or break for you so the UI as you can see here is quite minimalist and you can modify that if you want but I think it works really well we'll come on to a demo in a little bit but effectively you have your quick search of all your documentation on the left and on the right you have a rich feature field editor and this doesn't just have to be text it can be code and it can also be diagrams thanks to things like Excalibur built into it so if we move down into the actual features we'll see that we've got a single arbitrary tree so single note can be placed in folders and files so there's no mucking about on the host itself it's just simply through that folder structure on the left hand pane it can do things like markdown and math you can do source code editing you can even look at dependencies Version Control between different notes and map them out exactly like you can do on obsidian so you can see references between documents and you can even see things like the same word or the same phrase used in different documents which was really handy when you're trying to search for things it has built-in synchronization built-in sharing and encryption if you want to enable that there's a great rest UI and you can also do enhanced scripting on top of it should you need it plus there's a lot of development documentation if you want to build upon what's already there and with this being open source if you do build something why don't you share that back with the community Unity so Trillium can be built and installed in a binary form just as you would on a VM or a physical machine but we're going to opt for Docker so let's hop into the docker compose file have a quick run through and then let's get this spun up so I can give you a proper demonstration so thankfully the docker compose is pretty straightforward we simply need to specify an environment variable where this data is going to be residing So within the container it expects your data to be in slash home slash node slash Trillium data and I've used a bind Mount here to bind that to my home Ubuntu Docker Trillium folder so any data documents created with Trillium they're going to be in the host at that location on top of that I've just added the traffic labels so that I can run this through my browser with https and a valid certificate and there's nothing different here from all of my previous videos if you do need to go and set up traffic have a look at my video how to do that but we should be in a position now where once you've created this folder we can go ahead and deploy this so now that I've created this folder where it expects the bind Mount to be I'm going to go ahead and deploy this and to deploy this we're simply going to do sudo Docker compose up Dash D we're going to enter our password and hopefully this will pull the image and get everything up and running as we'd expect this is also not a very big image so it should complete pretty quickly once this is completed let's go and check the logs as we always do just to make sure that everything's set up as expected and there aren't any nasty error messages I'll be heading over to portana to do that but you could do a sudo Docker logs and specify the correct container if you wanted to now that's completed let's head over into portena and check that everything's okay now over in portena we can see that Trillium is healthy which is great it's done that health check let's have a look at the logs everything in here looks fine the only complaint it's saying is we didn't specify a user ID but that's fine it's going to use the default user so in this case it's my Ubuntu which already has the right permissions and it says that the HTTP server is started and is listing on Port 8080. fantastic if we just head over to winscp we can see that those files have been created and here we can see that these are all the files that are necessary for Trillium to be up and running so fingers crossed we should be able to see this now within our web browser so if I now jump into my browser and hit this URL I should be able to reach the main page and log in for the first time now I'm going to cheat a little bit here because I've already got this up and running so I'm going to take this opportunity to show you the login process and then I'll show you some of the active notes that I have currently and we'll get into creating some new notes looking at some of the features just so you've got a feel for how to actually go ahead and create things because it's not quite as simple as it probably should be but once you adapt to it it's pretty straightforward now the first time that you visit this page you just need to set a password but that's pretty straightforward once you've done that you can log in log out log back in using that password and everything will be as expected so now that I've logged in you can see some of the notes that I've created for these videos and it couldn't be simpler if you just want to get straight in to creating a note you do that on the left hand side so I've created a folder under the root and I've just called that home lab and that's where I put some bullet points for some of these videos to make sure that I cover all of the areas that I want to cover during that video so under root you could just click the Plus and you'll get what's called new note now that's not necessarily that intuitive because you might be thinking oh I want to create a folder but when you click the plus depending we're in the hierarchy I.E this one is under home lab you give it a name so I'll just call this one test and then that's created a note now before we get into what you can do with a note you might want to have I don't know a sub note so you could create a plus here and create a new note now the eagle-eyed amongst you will have seen that that changed to a folder icon so if I didn't create a sub note it would have left it as a note just within the root but because I'm now creating notes under an existing note it turns that top one into a folder so like I said there's a little bit of getting used to how Trillium works but hopefully it's straightforward and if it created another note under that new note again that would become a subdirectory now and then I could create notes here if I wanted to go back to the test folder click a note that's going to create a note now within the test folder you get the idea and what can you do with a note well really powerful you can click the edit button here and this will give you some of the formatting that you're probably more used to in say Outlook or word or any other feature Rich editor so you can do things like a bullet point you can do a numbered bullet point if you wanted and you can just change that quite simply on the Fly you could embed pictures here you could embed code here you get the idea so once you've typed this it becomes basically like an online Word document and you can format change it share it how you want but also you're probably interested in seeing how you can change this so you can do diagrams and the key here is to click the settings in this case it's called basic properties and I can change the type here so this could be text a relation map a render note a canvas canvas is the one where we're going to do diagrams so if I click canvas click OK and you'll notice that the icon has changed here over on the left it's now got a fountain pen nib as opposed to just a blank document and this is really powerful because it uses excally draw underneath and anyone who's used excally draw knows that it's a really powerful yet simple to use editor so if I wanted to draw a square I click a square and I've drawn a square I want to do a circle I've done that and you can start to build up complex shapes flow charts Etc and I've personally used excally draw in the past to do some of my network diagrams because it's a great tool for doing that so once you've done that there's no need to click save or anything like that it just automatically saves within real time which is awesome if you wanted to protect this note you can hit the protect button and then it's going to ask you to enter a password to protect it and that's good if you say you wanted to share notes but wanted to give people read-only access or you can limit it so that only certain people with the password can edit it great so if we look at a note I created earlier around my authentic web proxy video you can see here that links are hyperlinked so you can click on those quite easily and you can also do things like note Maps so look where any other related notes are to do with this unfortunately in this case I haven't done much because I don't have many notes in it yet now if you wanted to do some code editing in here you can also do that so again go back to those basic properties and we're going to change this from text I don't know let's say we want C plus plus and now we can start editing our C plus plus within this browser which is really cool especially if you're just wanting to tweak things and you want it to look properly formatted it might be good for copying and pasting into a post later on one other cool feature is the web view so again you change the type to a web View and that's going to allow you to do some coding or copy paste text from the internet from a real website into Trillium and it does its best to try and render that for you so you can see it in real time and that's quite cool because it gives you a real-time you of what you're changing on that website I still would recommend something like code server which we set up in an earlier video because that's a far more extensive set of tools specifically for doing coding but this is Handy if you're just wanting to make notes on the Fly and if we head over to the Trillium website we can actually see some more advanced use cases than I'm even using it for so as you can see on the screen here we have a straight up just note taking with clear formatting and hyperlinks great we can then see a good example of how code is formatted in this case JavaScript and all the indentation looks right and this might be a replacement for something like notepad plus plus there's a good example of how to use the promoted attributes function which starts to build up the links between items so that you could in this instance click on Queen Elizabeth and it would show all the links that are associated with her in the notes that you have in your Trillium setup that then enables things like the relationship map so the then you get a visual representation of all the links between your documents and this could be great for a really Advanced setup where you want to have interdependencies and check cross references between your notes that also leads nicely into the link map which in my instance I don't have any links currently set up but here you can see what that would look like there's even some handy graphing functionality built into that so you could graph simple metrics if you wanted to there's a simple task manager for completing daily tasks if you wanted to do that instead of using your calendar notes revision is really powerful as well because it's good to be able to have different revisions of notes especially if you're updating things or possibly even sharing with other people and you want to keep tabs on what's changed over time and lastly there's a simplified reactive web interface for this so that you can just fire up your browser on your mobile device and you should have exactly the same user interface and web experience as you have on the desktop albeit in a slightly more annoying form factor so I hope you enjoyed this quick Whistle Stop tour of trillion it's a great application and one that I use on the day-to-day I only use a handful of its features but there's no reason why you couldn't use this to replace some of your existing applications let me know if you're going to use Trillium and what you're going to be using it for in the comments below as always please like comment and subscribe and I'll see you on the next one take care everybody foreign

Channel: Jim's Garage

Views: 22,296

Keywords: trilium, how to use trilium, note taking, boost productivity, productivity, docker, linux, proxmox, obsidian, trilium notes, how to make notes, google keep, self hosted, homelab, secure notes

Id: H9l3JnPMtrg

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2023