WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
ROUNDUP
Trilium 0.56 CherryTree 0.99 Zim 0.75 Joplin 2.8.8 QOwnNotes 22.10.3
Michael
Reed might look disorganised but he always has his mind mapped, his brain stormed and his plan outlined.
Note taking outliners
Michael Reed looks at five packages designed to organise the myriad of thoughts whizzing around his head.
HOW WE TESTED…
We imported notes into each application and added notes and edited them to make sure there weren’t any workflow snags during actual use of the application. When exporting Markdown or plain text format files, we examined the files manually to make sure that the output was neat and tidy. In the case of a publication format such as PDF, we made sure that the output was pleasant and consistent.
We also tested file import facilities. We started with a Markdown file exported from mind mapper Freeplane to make sure that the outliner in question could deduce the structure of the file when adding it to a note.
At all times, we tried to gauge the performance of each application in something close to actual usage patterns to make sure that we weren’t dealing with something that would be a speed hog in real situations. Smooth workflow is everything when you’re outlining and making notes.
CREDIT: Jeff Bergen/Getty Images
Want to organise all your notes and thoughts? You need an outliner W tool. Typically, a note is a text document with information that you want to remember. The two key components of an outliner are the note editor and a navigator that enables you to move between the different notes. The notes themselves are generally stored in a database or as files on the hard drive.
Why not just use a word processor? With outliners ,there’s no concept of a page and the text reflows as you resize the window. They’re also not the same as a text editor, because they do have a concept of document structure with headings of different levels, and you can usually add other elements, such as images, to the notes. Generally, you should be able to spit out a nicely formatted document when you want.
All of the programs we’ve looked at are open source and cross-platform. Trilium and Joplin are both Electron applications, but they offer good performance and they’re both heavyweights in terms of features. Zim is more of a classic Linux application that keeps things fairly lightweight. CherryTree and QOwnNotes are also native applications, and they sit somewhere between the others in terms of features.
The note editor
You spend a lot of time here, so it needs to be pleasant to use.
Trilium’s note editor is partially WYSIWYG, with a fairly plain layout. Rather than a formatting toolbar, a clickable T formatting icon appears at the start of the paragraph. This could seem inefficient, but standard Markdown can be used for input. So, hitting * at the start of a line makes that line an element in a bullet-point list and adding a = marks a line as a heading. The Markdown markup language is a common sight in the world of outlining and note-taking applications. It’s efficient and portable, and allows for the fast entry of notes, while its learning curve is fairly minimal. Trilium can show the underlying markup on screen or hide it from view. While it favours minimalism, it’s an efficient editor for note entry, and the section navigator and split-document view are the icing on the cake. The Cherry Tree editor is WYSIWYG with no markup on screen. The traditional formatting toolbar at the top makes it easy for beginners to use, but there’s some learning to be done if you want to go mouse-free as it’s not fully Markup compliant.