Comment by ezst
1 day ago
> I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children?
You are right that the "atom" of content is the block in an outliner and the Note in Trilium. If you can tolerate⁰ the coarser-granularity, you can make Trilium behave pretty closely to an outliner: notes can be embedded within notes, either manually, or via the "Book" note-type¹ (that essentially renders a tree as embedded notes), hoisting² should be a familiar concept then.
⁰: when researching the topic, I immediately fell in love with outliners, thinking I would never go back to a note-based approach like Joplin which I was using then, but here I am, promoting a note-based solution. Metadata/tags at block level is not something I could get the hang of (I know how to manage collections of notes at scale, but not collections of blocks). ¹: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/book-note.html ²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/note-hoisting.html
Book is exactly what I was thinking of!
I think my only other question is around my preferred "Daily Journal" workflow and unreferenced tags
On one hand I feel some surprise that you're noting a distinction between metadata/tags for collections of notes vs collections of blocks. On the other hand, it's a bit of a peeve of mine that there's a distinction between "pages" and "blocks" in logseq when it comes to linking & referencing.
> I think my only other question is around my preferred "Daily Journal" workflow and unreferenced tags
how do you generally go about that? Trilium has the concept of day notes¹, incrementally building a time-structured hierarchy (years/months/days, but you can configure that however you want), under which you can park your notes. Or you can just let them stay unordered under an "#inbox"² for later categorisation. It's up to you.
My workflow include both time-based (log of events on that day, meetings and appointments happening on that day, etc), and time-independent notes (notes on projects, places, etc), and I have essentially 3 top-level hierarchies:
- Journal ← time-based
- Hierarchical notes ← time-independent
- Reference notes ← collections of things being often referred to
(and I have a workspace³ for Personal-stuff and another for Work-related-stuff, but the Reference notes are "cloned⁴" - and hence accessible ‑ in both).
Interestingly, "Book" recently gained a "Calendar" mode, so you can very easily manage notes as events as well, move them from day to day, etc.
> On one hand I feel some surprise that you're noting a distinction between metadata/tags for collections of notes vs collections of blocks. On the other hand, it's a bit of a peeve of mine that there's a distinction between "pages" and "blocks" in logseq when it comes to linking & referencing.
At least it's consistent in that Trilium always holds metadata/tags at note-level. And using Inheritance⁵ and Templates⁶, you can guarantee that all your Reference notes are consistent in terms of type of metadata they hold (all Persons have a "born in" attribute, etc). At the moment I'm working on an extension of the "Book" note type to enable bulk metadata edition in an ag-grid control, effectively managing metadata like a database (not unlike what exists in Notion, but with composition/inheritance and proper sum types).
¹: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/day-notes.html ²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/attributes.html ³: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/workspace.html ⁴: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/cloning-notes.html ⁵: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/attribute-inheritanc... ⁶: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/template.html
Oh that all sounds super neat!
My current workflow is to drop almost everything into my daily notes, whether time-based, time independent, or reference. The non-time-based notes I'll #tag and logseq will create a new page for the tag or add the block to that page's references.
That way I have both my thoughts on a #topic, and when I thought about it. If I go back and look at the topic and notice a bunch of notes about it spread across time I know that it's a more consistent interest of mine, and can consolidate that info into the body of the topic page, and might start adding further thoughts there directly.
Generally my goal is to get a distraction out of my head ASAP in a way that I feel like I'll be able to find it again later or it'll otherwise be useful, so that I can keep focusing on whatever I'm currently trying to do. Sometimes that'll mean I have notes on two or three different topics on the same daily page that's easy for me to hop between and add to, but it also stays relatively organized.
The other thing I like are "unreferenced blocks" where if I don't think to tag a stray thought I have about, say, RAG, it'll still show up on my #rag page.
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