Which new note type should we implement next?

[adoriandoran]

What new note types would you like to see implemented in TrilliumNext?

[adoriandoran]

#132

I propose adding a mindmap note type. While TrilliumNext currently supports mindmaps through Mermaid Diagrams, it's not very user-friendly or comfortable for brainstorming sessions. A visual editor would be ideal.

[meichthys]

The canvas note type may get you close to what you want, but i agree that a mind-mapping note type could be useful 👍

[adoriandoran]

The canvas note type may get you close to what you want, but i agree that a mind-mapping note type could be useful 👍

Indeed, Canvas can also create mind maps. However, I prefer when the software automatically manages the layout, so I can focus solely on the ideas rather than spending time arranging the drawing elements.

[bitkata]

A Kanba Board would be nice. The extension by CyrilLeblanc doesn't seem to work.

[q7w7e7r]

Yes, kanban would be great to add. But I'm still not happy with the functionality of todo and I don't know how to improve it or what to replace it with.

[adoriandoran]

#90

A spreadsheet could also be useful for notes that require automatic calculations and sorting.

[rom1dep]

I suspect something like https://github.com/dream-num/univer would deliver part or all of that

[CobriMediaJulien]

+1 this would be huge

[LarsaSara]

Passwords management.

[meichthys]

Just thinking out loud here, but you should be able to use promoted attributes to partly/mostly achieve this:

For example:

Attributes used:

This along with being able to password protect a credential note and/or parent note (that contains credentials) could probably get you close to a 'credential type note'.

To use this, you would probably also want to make a 'base' credential note and convert it into a template note:

This would allow you to create new 'credential notes' easily like:

[eliandoran]

Seems feasible, we should probably add a password field type, to hide the password. 🤔
However I wonder if it would be useful under any circumstances.

[meichthys]

Yeah, maybe not necessary since we can password protect notes already. However, it would be nice if we could password protect notes using a different credential than the users's login credential.

It's an intresting idea nonetheless. Just not sure how practical it would be since the featureset of a 'credential' note would never compare to a full-on password manager.

[Alumniminium]

https://obsidian.rocks/getting-started-with-zettelkasten-in-obsidian/

This keeps coming up when I tell people to switch to trilium and they already use Obsidian.

[eliandoran]

@Alumniminium , is this something that can be implemented as a note type? 🤔
To me it seems more like an personal organization thingie that can be achieved using the note hierarchy.

[Alumniminium]

to be honest i never understood what this is 🥲

[EventualDankDog]

I also think it's more about a way to organize your notes. Can be done perfectly with internal links and relations

[CobriMediaJulien]

It´s jsut a way to organize your notes and zadam pretty followed this tecnique designign trilium architecture

[kangaroolab]

How about a notebook type? It will be handy if such is provided to do both text and run code (with extension to use different engines) on the same note.

[tevenfeng]

1. Some sort of video type? For example maybe I would like to include/insert a youtube embed video into my note.
2. Collection and Set function like Anytype, maybe just based on the label system.

[zerebos]

Collection and Set function like Anytype, maybe just based on the label system.

Being able to do arbitary collections, sets, and objects would also help Trilium rival Anytype, capacities, and other similar PKMs.

[abstractionmage]

I'd love to see a World Map note similar to Obsidian's Map View community plugin so I can finally place all my travel notes on a world map and get a geographical overview of all the nice places I've already been to.

Maybe we could use Leaflet for that, it seems to be a pretty popular javascript library for exactly this kind of functionality.

[herrkami]

A text-based 2D/3D CAD note.

The benefits would be shiny and plenty imho:

• precise, reusable, and scalable sketching
• STL-support would allow saving, viewing and, perhaps, even editing 3D parts as notes
• combined with Code Notes, it would create a powerful environment for developing entire projects anywhere and from everywhere
• it would close an important gap for people who use Trilium to sketch and develop real-world projects (e.g. furniture, art, mechanical thingies, electronic gadgets, etc.)

And I guess, this would be far easier and faster to implement then it might appear at first glance.

For example, there's the web version of JSCAD. It's easy to customize, runs in the frontend, and would integrate well with the existing interface for frontend JS code notes. It even uses CodeMirror already. Feature- and compatibility-wise it's likely more than capable to turn Trilium into a fairly powerful CAD suite. The CAD-language is easy to learn and practical.

A better CAD-language would be build123d for example. Unfortunately, this would be far harder and costly to implement, as it requires Python, and hence, an entire (safe and secure!) backend environment for Python. Source notes would then have to be built within this environment and sent back as renderings to a frontend renderer, e. g. based on three-cad-viewer or so. I'd strongly vote against this option for many (obvious) reasons.

JSCAD would be great though. I'm currently trying to implement it into Trilium via Render Notes and Templates. If that works out, it could even be implemented and shipped as a widget or so. However, for better usability, maintenance, and efficiency, a dedicated note type would be superior imo.

Cheers, Kami

[diyoyo]

I'd say a RelationMap that is built only from a selected set of existing notes, instead of having to create new ones to create the network.

Also, my dream would be to be able to add metadata to edges:
If (A:Person)-[workedAt]->(B:Company), I'd like to provide information on the "workedAt" relationship, like which year, what job, etc.

[diyoyo]

Also, some other thoughts:

• maybe a SQLite db could be interesting to have, as a note.
• a pic slideshow

[yu-jingrui]

Not a new note type but a new way to display child notes:
currently the child notes are displayed as fixed-size boxes under the parent note.
What I would like is to display the child notes one by one horizontally under the main content of the parent note, with the possibility to show only the first few lines or the whole of the child note.

The use case is to create a main post, under which I constantly add new contents to the same topic, without having to tamper with the main post, but at the same time have an overview of what I have done under this topic. This will enable keeping track of (for example) a journal of constent developement in one topic.

[yu-jingrui]

@perfectra1n I find the "book" type has nothing fundamentally different from "text". The only real difference is that "book" has no own content text. I think there is no need to retain "book" type, and I agree with @rom1dep that it should be a display/rendering property.

[rom1dep]

@rom1dep are you suggesting that the the "view" the Book note type provides (e.g. in the screenshot above) should be available to other note types as well? Such as beneath a Text Note?

I think so, yeah. My impression (but again, I could be wrong!) is that such a rendering option could be relevant to anything that has child notes.

[perfectra1n]

Cool, got it. It should be pretty easy to find in the code, if anyone wants to take a crack at it before Elian or I can - I'm assuming that it's exactly what's been proposed here. I'm sure there's some flag to check that "Book" has been selected and then it renders the "view" in the screenshot above.

[perfectra1n]

@rom1dep would you mind tossing this into an issue and assigning it to me? I wanna make sure I don’t miss anything, I’m curious to look into it

[rom1dep]

@perfectra1n I'd love to, especially since there might be some good bits to include from https://github.com/orgs/TriliumNext/discussions/356#discussioncomment-11146681 , sadly I'll be travelling for few weeks and might have to pick that up in a while.

[kleutzinger]

Audio notes or some type of voice recording. It may or may not have to be a note type, it could also just be some object you embed inside a note or as some type of attatchment.

Another nice-to-have would be an automatic timestamped transcription (with click-to-jump on the text). Google Keep (or https://recorder.google.com/) are a nice reference for well-implemented voice notes.

[meichthys]

I can see the usefulness of this. It was recently requested on the original Trulium repo.

[perfectra1n]

Is anyone aware of any useful/quality self-hosted transcription service or tool? Might be cool to integrate with the voice recording as well.

[glaucon1984]

I have a suggestion that might be easy to implement: a "markdown" type note.
This would be a note that has a split-screen view, one side is plain text, the other shows the rendered note.
I say it might be easy to implement because there is already an approximation to this:
https://github.com/zerebos/Trilium-MarkdownPreview
This type of note could make it easier for users coming from Joplin or Obsidian.

[Winson-Huang]

In fact, the editor in Trilium supports some markdown grammer, but the format in "import from / export to markdown" is not good.....

[EventualDankDog]

A musical note sheet

[meichthys]

Interesting idea. Do you have any samples or tools that implement something similar?

[rom1dep]

Apparently there was an active attempt at porting lilypond to the web, assuming this is what OP is talking about: https://www.weblily.net/

[EventualDankDog]

Unfortunately I don't have anything similar, it was just an idea. Sometimes I come up with ideas for melodies when I'm playing around on the piano and my synth but I'm to lazy to turn on the PC and record it. That's why I thought it might be handy

[diyoyo]

A ChatGPT integrated discussion. It's such a pain to copy paste the conversations and keep a nice formatting. So why not provide a way to enter an API token and have a discussion already in Trilium ?

[perfectra1n]

You can give this a shot if you're interested @diyoyo :)

[brianvanderburg2]

Engineer Calculator note type.

While this can probably already be achieved with Render Note/etc a dedicated note type could make adding utility calculators easier. One can define a series of fields for input, their unit types, and a calculate function. Some calculators may be simple with only one output from one or more inputs, but it should also be possible to define more complex calculators that may take different inputs and have multiple outputs,

Unit types define for instance length or time and a set of conversions in a array ("ft": 1.0, "yd": 3.0, "in": 1.0 / 12.0, "cm": 1.0 / 30.5) A note can define field types and they would displayed to the user. The user can select different conversion from the same type as input. In the code, field1.getValue("ft"), or something like that, would automatically convert the input values for the calculator function based on the user's selection and the unit type of the field, The code can set output via field2.setValue("s", 5.0) and the field would automatically reflect the user unit selection.

Attachments can be added for visual representations to show what the fields represent if needed. There should exist some built-in unit types, "unit", "time", "length", "mass", "weight", "speed", etc. It should also be possible to extend the unit types with unit-type notes, so calculator notes don't have to define the same set of unit types over and over. Unit conversions can also be extended:

builtin_length = [["ft", 1.0], ["yd", 3.0], ["in", 1.0 / 12.0], ["cm": 1.0 / 30.5]]

conversion extension note:

yd = conversions["length"].get("yd")
extra_length = [["parsec", yd * 3.374563e16]]
conversions["length"].extend(extra_length)

[brianvanderburg2]

I've been working on a widget that implements something like this, at very rough early stages

https://gist.github.com/brianvanderburg2/a23384b73be410685aa4575d7554b78f

[asamarco]

Forms, a note format for structured data. Same idea of promoted attributes, key value pairs but in the main text of the note. Possibly with additional field types including dropdown menus/radio buttons/checkboxes. Effectively making a note template the definition of a database table.

[rom1dep]

Treeline is fascinating. I only spent very little time messing around with it but I am still convinced that Trilium is more capable in terms of data modeling. Anyhow, we all agree that the mean to manage notes as data in Trilium is via promoted/inherited attributes, and there should be means to render those as tables with R/W capabilities. @asamarco Any opinion on the table-view extension I linked previously?

[asamarco]

@asamarco Any opinion on the table-view extension I linked previously?

I installed it, it could be nice to visualize homogeneus sets of data like the example of books but it is far to what I would use to help me organize hyerarchies of objects. What is missing is the capability to represent a tree of different objects, whose depth, content, and even parent type can be different. I acknowledge that the Cleanroom-ELN template I linked above is a bit too niche and technical but it shows exactly how versatile trees and custom object templates can become. Trillium has already a hierarchy of notes, so by using templates and improved attributes might as well provide this way of data management which is lacking in all the other note-taking software right now.

[rom1dep]

it could be nice to visualize homogeneus sets of data like the example of books but it is far to what I would use to help me organize hyerarchies of objects.

I suppose Trilium encourages "homogeneous sets of data" in how it makes it much easier to handle large amount of typed notes through Inheritance (much more so than through Templates, which have stark downsides, like the absence of automatic attributes updates whenever the master template changes).
An approach I use a lot is to build a "Library" note with subtrees (e.g. "People", "Places", …) containing a bunch of notes of a same type that I then clone or link in context. In that scenario, the table-view approach really shines, because a bi-directional editor/widget could be hooked-up at the head of one of those collections and enable quick and convenient grid edition of all notes of the same type (i.e. the list of all "People", "Places", … with all their common attributes as columns).

What is missing is the capability to represent a tree of different objects, whose depth, content, and even parent type can be different.

I suspect trilium's query engine is quite capable in this area: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/search.html , and it should be a feature-goal IMO to tap into it like table-view does. But again, in practice, I wouldn't really know what to expect from a list of heterogeneous notes. Perhaps you could share a screenshot from Treeline showing how you like it?

[asamarco]

There could be easier examples but this is what I already have ready in treeline. This is how I keep track of my production flows. I have about 40 object types representing different fabrication processes, physical objects, containers, measurements... At top level there is a research sample, underneath the processes it withstand in the right order and possibly subprocesses if required. Processes can change, repeat, fork. It can become quite complicated and non linear (https://imgur.com/a/19KJvxt) so it definitely require a tree to keep track of the reality.

In any case I was just suggesting to have a note type that is able to represent nicely key:value pairs. I believe would be appreciated even if I could not replace treeline anyway.

[rom1dep]

I don't find this enumeration of key-values to be very convenient nor practical, but I can see how it's a lesser evil in your workflow. IMO, this attributes enumeration on the right should be a tree of expandable/collapsible nodes just like the nodes hierarchy it mirrors on the left. I suspect it would be trivial to implement over a refacto/generalization of the book note type (discussed above).