Text-notes

Trilium uses awesome CKEditor 5 as its editing component.

Formatting#

Trilium text note interface doesn't show any toolbars or formatting options by default, these needs to be brought up by:

1. selecting text will bring up an inline toolbar:

1. clicking on the block toolbar:

Read only vs. editing mode#

Text notes are normally opened in edit mode, however there are two cases when they are open in read-only mode:

• they are long and thus would take time to load so by default we open them as read only which is much quicker
• or the note has readOnly label

In both cases, it is possible to switch to editable mode again.

General Formatting#

Trilium uses the CKEditor, so any formatting that the CKEditor supports should be available in Trilium. For example:

Bold – Type **text** or __text__

Italic – Type *text* or _text_

Code – Type `text`

Strikethrough – Type ~~text~~

Lists#

• Bulleted list – Start a line with * or - followed by a space

1. Numbered list – Start a line with 1. or 1) followed by a space

[ ] To-do list – Start a line with [ ] or [x] followed by a space to insert an unchecked or checked list item, respectively

Blocks#

Block quote – Start a line with > followed by a space

Multi-line Code block – Start a line with ```

Other#

Headings – Start a line with ## or ### followed by a space to create a heading 1, heading 2, or heading 3 (up to heading 6 if options defines more headings)

Note: Trilium only accepts headings with ## and more because # is reserved for the title

Horizontal line – Start a line with ---#

Markdown & Autoformat#

CKEditor supports markdown-like editing experience. It recognizes syntax and automatically converts it to rich text. See it in action:

Complete documentation for this feature is available in CKEditor documentation.

If the autoformat is not desirable for what you just wrote, you can press CTRL-Z which will un-autoformat the text to its original form.

Note that the use of # for Heading1 style is not supported because the editor assumes that is used for the title, start with ## for Heading2. Explanation here.

Math support#

Trilium provides Math support with the help of KaTex:

Cut selection to sub-note#

One of the common situations in Trilium is when you're editing a document, and it gets somewhat large, so you start splitting it up into sub-notes - the process is essentially like this:

• select the desired piece of text and cut it into clipboard
• create new sub-note & give it name
• paste the content from clipboard into sub-note

Trilium provides a way to automate this:

You can notice how heading "Formatting" is automatically detected and new sub-note is named "Formatting".

It is also possible to assign a keyboard shortcut for this action.

Include note#

Text notes can "include" another note as a read only widget. This can be useful for e.g. including a dynamically generated chart (from scripts & "render HTML" note) or other more advanced use cases.

This functionality is available in the block toolbar icon.