Text

The default note type in Trilium, text notes allow for rich formatting, tables, images, admonitions and a handful of other features.

Formatting bars#

Most of the interaction with text notes is done via the built-in toolbars. Depending on preference, there are two different layouts:

The Floating toolbar is hidden by default and only appears when needed. In this mode there are actually two different toolbars:
A toolbar that appears when text is selected. This provides text-level formatting such as bold, italic, text colors, inline code, etc.

Fore more information see Formatting toolbar.

Features and formatting#

Here's a list of various features supported by text notes:

Dedicated article	Feature
General formatting	Headings (section titles, paragraph) Font size Bold, italic, underline, strike-through Superscript, subscript Font color & background color Remove formatting
Lists	Bulleted lists Numbered lists To-do lists
Block quotes & admonitions	Block quotes Admonitions
Tables	Basic tables Merging cells Styling tables and cells. Table captions
Developer-specific formatting	Inline code Code blocks Keyboard shortcuts
Footnotes	Footnotes
Images	Images
Links	External links Internal Trilium links
Include Note	Include note
Insert buttons	Symbols Math Equations Mermaid diagrams Horizontal ruler Page break
Other features	Indentation Markdown import Cut to subnote
Premium features	Slash Commands Templates

Read-Only vs. Editing Mode#

Text notes are usually opened in edit mode. However, they may open in read-only mode if the note is too big or the note is explicitly marked as read-only. For more information, see Read-Only Notes.

Keyboard shortcuts#

There are numerous keyboard shortcuts to format the text without having to use the mouse. For a reference of all the key combinations, see Keyboard Shortcuts. In addition, see Markdown-like formatting as an alternative to the keyboard shortcuts.

Technical details#

For the text editing functionality, Trilium uses a commercial product (with an open-source base) called CKEditor. This brings the benefit of having a powerful WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor.