https://dustinmontgomery.com/blog/trilium-tui/

trilium-tui: my Trilium notes, in the terminal
==============================================

Dustin Montgomery · October 14, 2026

[image: trilium-tui demo: browsing the note tree, editing a note in
place, searching, and the command palette]

I keep all my writing and notes in Trilium Next [1], and since moving to
Omarchy, I like to spend most of my time in a terminal. After sometime I
thought why not fix it myself, so after a bunch of prompting I had built
trilium-tui.

## What it is

A terminal app, written in Rust, that keeps a local copy of your notes
and syncs with your Trilium server in the background, using the same
protocol as the official desktop app. It feels instant, and it of course
keeps working even when the server is unreachable.

## What I like about it

- Edit like a document. Press `e` and edit formatted text in place:
  bold, lists, tables, note links, even pictures inline. Only the
  paragraph you touch is rewritten, so the rest of the note is saved
  byte for byte.

- Trilium's own search. `#label`, `~relation.title`, `orderBy`: the full
  query syntax.

- Safe with real data. It was checked against a real Trilium v0.106.0
  server, makes a daily local backup, and keeps unsaved text if a save
  ever fails.

- Scriptable. A companion `trilium-cli` searches, reads, appends and
  exports from a shell, with `--json` output.

- Bring your notes along. Import from Obsidian, Notion, Anytype, Google
  Keep and Evernote.

## Try it

Grab a prebuilt Linux binary from the releases page [2] and install it
(into `~/.local/bin`, no root needed):

    tar -xzf trilium-tui-*-linux.tar.gz
    cd trilium-tui-*-linux
    ./install.sh

Then start an empty local notebook, no server needed:

    trilium-tui --new

or point it at your server:

    TRILIUM_PASSWORD='...' trilium-cli sync http://your-server:8080
    trilium-tui

It is version 0.1.0, Linux only for now, and open source under AGPL-3.0.
It writes to your server, so take a Trilium backup before your first
sync. Bug reports and ideas are welcome on GitHub [3].

Links
-----
[1] https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium
[2] https://github.com/en3r0/trilium-tui/releases/tag/v0.1.0
[3] https://github.com/en3r0/trilium-tui