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:

2. 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.