Trilium Capture

Trilium capture

Trilium holds what a human reads. Ogham holds what an agent recalls. Every capture starts by deciding which, and most sessions produce some of each.

This skill is conventions only. It calls the tools Trilium's own MCP server already exposes — search_notes, create_note, set_attribute, append_to_note, edit_note_content — and adds the judgment those tools have no opinion about: where a note goes, what it is called, how it is labelled, and when not to write one at all.

Requirements

The Trilium MCP server must be connected. It is built into Trilium (v0.93.0+, mounted at /mcp) — do not install or build a third-party one. If the tools are unavailable, say so and put the content in the reply. A capture skill that silently drops what it was given is worse than no capture skill.

Step 1 — Trilium or Ogham?

When a finding is too long to be an Ogham memory, it is a Trilium note — and Ogham gets a short memory naming the note. Set #ogham=yes on the note so the pairing is visible from both ends. That is the only case where the same material lands in both.

A three-sentence gotcha is an Ogham memory even when the user is talking about Trilium. Say so rather than filing it here — once.

If the user asks again, or says to file it anyway, file it. They asked for Trilium; the routing rule is advice about shape, not a veto over an explicit instruction. Raise it in a sentence, then do what was asked. An agent that keeps re-arguing a decision the user has already made is worse than a slightly misfiled note.

Step 2 — Never write without searching first

search_notes('#capture #project = "<name>" <distinctive keywords>', ancestorNoteId=<project note>)

ALWAYS QUOTE THE LABEL VALUE. Measured against a live instance 2026-08-28:

An unquoted value containing a hyphen matches nothing, with no error — the hyphen is lexed as an operator. Project names are exactly the hyphenated kind: claude-skills, travel-florence-2026. Unquoted, every one of them returns zero results, the next step reads that as "does not exist", and a duplicate is created every session. Quoting is not style.

Skipping this step is the single most common failure. Two runs of the same session then leave two near-identical notes and neither is authoritative.

Step 3 — Locate or create the project note

search_notes('#project = "<name>"')     ← quoted, always
  0 hits → create under Projects, set #project=<name>
  1 hit  → use it
  2+     → STOP and report

Two notes carrying the same #project value is a split project. Report it; do not pick one.

Projects/                        #projectRoot
  claude-skills                  #project=claude-skills
    Terragrunt v1.1.4 findings   #capture #type=research
  travel-florence-2026           #project=travel-florence-2026
    Florence + Bologna plan      #capture #type=document
Inbox/                           #captureInbox
  A clipped article              #capture #type=clip

Projects and Inbox are created once if absent, marked #projectRoot and #captureInbox.

#captureInbox, not #inbox. inbox is one of Trilium's ~58 predefined system labels — it designates the note that new notes are filed into, so setting it would silently change the behaviour of the user's own quick-capture. If they want that, it is theirs to add; a skill does not repurpose a system attribute on their behalf. The same caution applies before adding any label: check it against Trilium's predefined list first.

Never write to root, Calendar or _hidden. Something with no project goes to Inbox — an unfiled capture beats a wrongly filed one, and the label locator means nothing breaks when the user moves it later.

Step 4 — The label vocabulary is closed

Do not invent labels. These are all of them:

A topic word belongs in the title and the content, where full-text search already finds it. It does not belong in a new label. #golang, #bug, #http, #trip, #status, #travelDate are all invented — every one of them came from an agent that had no vocabulary to follow, and no two agents invent the same one.

If a project genuinely needs a label outside this list, ask the user before adding it.

Step 5 — Pick the note type

A text note does not render a mermaid fence. A document containing diagrams becomes a text note plus one mermaid child per diagram, with the fenced block replaced by a pointer to the child. This is the one place where a Trilium note is not simply the Markdown file.

create_note returns the stored content. That is your read-back — do not call get_note_content afterwards to verify.

Markdown is normalised, not stored verbatim. A text note is HTML underneath (mime: text/html); Markdown is converted on the way in and regenerated on the way out. Measured on a live 0.105.0 instance:

The content survives; the exact bytes do not. Do not repeat the title as an H1 in the body — Trilium strips it, because the title already is the H1. Set the title, start the body under it.

Two consequences. Do not diff what comes back against your source file and conclude the write failed. And edit_note_content matches exact text, so an edit targeting - item will not find it — read the note first and match what is actually stored, or use set_note_content.

Documents are revised, not re-created

A capture is written once. A document — a plan, a draft, a report — is the same living thing across sessions, and Trilium keeps its history automatically, which replaces keeping .bak copies by hand.

You cannot read that history over MCP. There is no revisions tool: get_note_revisions does not exist and returns MCP error -32602: Tool not found, and get_note carries no revision count. Verified against a live 0.105.0 instance 2026-08-28. Revisions are real and they are for the user, viewed in Trilium's own UI. Never offer to show or diff them, and never call a tool to check one landed.

Revisions are what makes this better than a file, and two system labels can switch them off. #disableVersioning stops revisions being created for a note; #versioningLimit caps how many are kept. Neither should be set on a document. If a document's history looks shorter than expected, check for an inherited one of these before assuming Trilium lost it.

A document is ONE note, however long. Do not split a plan or a report into a note per section. The revision history is per note, so splitting a 450-line document into six gives you six unrelated histories and no record of the document changing as a whole — which is the entire reason it is here rather than in a file. The only thing that ever leaves the note is a diagram, because a text note cannot render one (see Step 5).

The trap is that a later session does not remember the noteId. Intending to update in place is not enough; without a way to find the note again, the next session creates a second one. So a document is always found the same way it was filed:

search_notes('#capture #type = "document" #project = "<name>"')

Set #type=document at creation precisely so this query works later.

Never capture a credential

This skill writes session content into a store, which makes it an exfiltration path by construction. Capture the name of a secret and where it lives; never its value.

✅  "the key is OPENROUTER_API_KEY, set in ~/.config/dotfiles/env.sh"
❌  "OPENROUTER_API_KEY=sk-or-v1-..."

The same goes for connection strings, tokens, and anything pasted from an env file or a credentials file. If a value has already reached the draft, remove it before writing the note.

What this skill does NOT do

• It does not retrieve or answer questions from the notes. It writes.
• It does not maintain the tree — no cleanup, no dedup sweeps, no re-filing.
• It never touches a note without #capture. The user's own notes are out of reach: no edit, no move, no delete.
• It does not delete anything, including its own notes. Ask the user.
• It does not write to Calendar or _hidden, and never to root.
• It does not decide what a project is called. Take the name from the repo, from CLAUDE.md, or from Ogham's existing project: tag — matching Ogham matters more than being tidy.

Common mistakes

Provenance

Trilium Notes (AGPL-3.0) and its built-in MCP server, which exposes the same tool definitions Trilium's own LLM chat uses. This skill wraps nothing and reimplements nothing — it supplies conventions for tools Trilium already ships.