Comment by Jarwain
15 hours ago
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.
Yep, you can totally do that with Trilium. Instead of #topic, you would type @topic in the body of your note, Trilium will autocomplete trying to find matching references (containing "topic" in either their name or attributes or path or prefix), and if none exists, a new "topic" note will be proposed to be created on the fly. You will also be asked whether the new note should derive from a Template or not, and that's where maintaining a collection of Templates and reference notes makes a ton of sense.
For instance, if you type "I went to @ThatOldPub with @Alfred", @ThatOldPub can be created on the fly as a [Place], and just like every other [Place], it will have an attribute ~location=@London (@London being itself a note of type [City] itself having as attribute ~country=@UK, …) ready for you to fill now or later. Same goes for @Alfred being a Person.
That way you are not just building a graph of "related things" with their name as a weak link, you are creating a semantic graph of typed entities, where notes can be approached not just from edge-to-edge but as clusters, and manipulated in bulk.
> 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.
I never trusted that mode, that puts too strong a constraint on how you would name your tags, with essentially typos flying under the radar and leaving an impression that there might be more "strays" than meets the eye. That said, Trilium has a vivid ecosystem of tools, scripts and extensions surrounding it¹, and if hunting for missed references sounds fun, there you go²!
¹: https://github.com/Nriver/awesome-trilium ²: https://github.com/Nriver/trilium-py?tab=readme-ov-file#adva...
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