We plan to remove the old layout. What keeps you on it?

[eliandoran]

Hi,

At Christmas 2025 we released the new layout as the default and kept the old one available as a fallback. Reviews were mixed at first. Many of you liked that it was less cluttered, and some felt the inline title took up too much vertical room. Since then the new layout has gone through 11 releases of fixes and improvements, and the old layout has been marked as deprecated in the documentation.

We plan to remove the old layout in an upcoming version, but we'd like your feedback first.

Why remove it?

• The old layout is missing a lot of what the new one offers. That includes most of the sidebar: the PDF outline and highlights, the attributes panel, the Connections tab (backlinks, note paths, note map) and the AI chat. It also lacks the breadcrumb and the save indicator. New features are built for the new layout only, so the gap keeps growing.
• Maintaining both slows things down. Much of the interface is split into two paths, one per layout, with widgets that exist in only one of them. Every change has to be built and tested twice, and bugs in the old layout take time away from improving the new one.

What changes for you

• If you're already on the new layout, nothing changes.
• If you're on the old layout, Trilium switches you to the new one when you update to [v0.108] or later. Your notes and settings are not affected.
• Custom widgets keep working, including legacy (jQuery) ones and those placed in the right pane.

Still using the old layout? Tell us why

Before we remove it, we'd like to know what's keeping you on it. Please reply with the specific things the new layout does worse for your workflow, with a screenshot if you can. Some we already know about:

• The sidebar no longer opens automatically on notes with many headings.
• The status bar and breadcrumb are at the bottom of the window.
• The spacing around the note title.

If one of these is your reason, a short note on how it affects you still helps. If you still use the old layout and have nothing specific to add, a 👍 on this post is enough. It helps us gauge how many people this affects

[alghostzx]

IMO you can drop it.

[contributor]

I don't use old layout anymore.
But I miss old layout's lightweight floating persistent Backlinks panel.

New layout does it much worse:

• backlinks from the status bar are only visible till first click
• backlinks from the right panel - too many clicks to open, cluttered between note map and other sections, displayed only for one part of the split, not possible to view both TOC and backlinks.

[qlassiqa]

As a beginner user of Trilium I had a hard time learning to use it via the documentation because it kept referencing old layout parts like the ribbon, and I kept getting confused or having difficulties finding things - I don't use the old layout and tried my best to adapt what I learned to the new layout, so it would be awesome (for anyone new to Trilium) if you'd also update the documentation once the old layout gets removed 🙂

[eliandoran]

That's a really good point, once we remove the old layout we will also fix the documentation.

[qlassiqa]

Speaking of documentation, as I was going through the scripting docs and being new to Preact, I saw that not all the docs contain Preact-version of the code, which makes it difficult for us to adapt the jQuery code to Preact (I have to learn Preact and the React-style of coding to be able to adapt the legacy code without examples in the docs):

• the Widget Basics has no Preact-style code
• the Right Pane Widget has only partial Preact code
• the Word count widget and Analog Watch don't have it either

There seem to be various coding hacks/specifics to both legacy and preact style of coding, and having one without the other makes it difficult to find those differences 😕 or is this on purpose as there is no preact-support on those examples?

[eliandoran]

@qlassiqa , not intentional. I'll take note of your remarks.

[openapphub]

I am a long-time user and have made some minor adjustments to the layout and styles based on the older version. After using it for several years, I am accustomed to the current workflow. Although I have tried the new layout, I still find it uncomfortable—for instance, the class="inline-title" layout, the default icon size being too large, and the title bar remain unfamiliar to me.

[openapphub]

If the old layout is to be removed, should it be retained as a custom theme for users to configure themselves, or is the plan to remove it entirely?

[SESummers3]

The new layout wastes far too much space. The huge expanse of vertical area above the title wastes 20% of my screen real-estate! The (non-optional at the time?) new layout was the reason I stayed on .100 until my server died today and I decided to upgrade because I had to reinstall anyway. If you force this on me I'll be looking for another note app and cancelling my $10/mo sponsorship.

[openapphub]

Or you could just add a configuration option that says "waste 20% of the vertical space for aesthetics reasons" and let me turn it off?

It seems we share the same aesthetic taste. The space occupied by the titles in the new layout is too uncoordinated, which is hard to accept.

[SESummers3]

I have to admit this is less of a problem than I anticipated. The limited search capability of the .100 version I've been using since last November often required me to click on a bunch of notes to find the one that was relevant, and on my 7" android tablet in landscape, that extra space forced me to scroll just about every note to see what was in it. But the improved search might be solving the problem from the other direction - less visual searching needed - to make it less of an issue.

It would still be nice to make the "notes edited on this day" part optional, and optionally start with the heading collapsed like it is when it's scrolled off the screen, but I can live with it.

[BeatLink]

But with the title, doesn't it shrink once you start scrolling?

[SESummers3]

It does, but if I'm looking for a particular note, and click on them one at a time in the note tree, depending on the number of "notes edited" I may see the first line of my actual text more than half-way down the screen. On my tablet in landscape, that leaves me with maybe 5 lines of text? That sucks compared to the old way, and the "notes edited" section and its 3-4 lines of space after it is the major problem, especially if I looked at a bunch of other notes (which it thinks are "edited"). But the wasted space above and around the title to make it "pretty" is useless and detrimental to the interface. In this area, the old way was better.

If there were an option to make the note edited toggleable, and an option to default to the shrunk title, that would be 10 times better. I'd even be willing to spend $100 to sponsor the change.

[eliandoran]

@SESummers3 , "notes edited" being expanded by default is already adjustable: Options -> Appearance -> uncheck Expand "Notes edited on this day".

[BeatLink]

I think the real thing we should be looking at, is how can we make Trilium's visual layout more customizable? At the end of the day, the visual layout of an application will always be one of if not the most subjective aspect of an application. Everyone has different workflows, tastes and ideas of what is aesthetically pleasing or intuitive. I believe that instead of trying to find a design that suits the most common denominator, we should be looking to make the front end more configurable, so that individual users can layout the UI as they want. As for how to implement that extended configuration, I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but there must be a way out there.

[eliandoran]

Conceptually, sure. But in practice only a small amount of people would really need that kind of customization.

We do plan to allow more customization in the form of custom menu items, but our app CSS + custom widget support already provides quite a bit of customization.

If you have any ideas, let me know.

[BeatLink]

Fair enough. The app CSS would allow for customizing the layout of components no? maybe not its hierarchy but say sizing, flexboxes and so on

[eliandoran]

Yeah, that's already the case. Especially since you can use CSS properties like order to reorder things around.

[SESummers3]

My installation has no such option. I'm running 0.106 as of just a few days ago. Is there anything that would hide this? I'm using the same custom theme I created for 0.100. Could that be suppressing it? Fixing just that would boost my satisfaction level considerably.

…

On Tue, Oct 20, 2026 at 9:44 AM Elian Doran ***@***.***> wrote: @SESummers3 <https://github.com/SESummers3> , "notes edited" being expanded by default is already adjustable: Options -> Appearance -> uncheck Expand "Notes edited on this day". — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#11891?email_source=notifications&email_token=AMRSBOE42AYWVXRX26B7HJD5U5T2RA5CNFSNUABIM5UWIORPF5TWS5BNNB2WEL2ENFZWG5LTONUW63SDN5WW2ZLOOQXTCOJQG4ZTINRYUZZGKYLTN5XKO3LFNZ2GS33OUVSXMZLOOSWGM33PORSXEX3DNRUWG2Y#discussioncomment-19073468>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AMRSBOFFFWOC2V54UOZDO5L5U5T2RAVCNFSNUABHKJSXA33TNF2G64TZHM4TEMJRGE2TAOJ3IRUXGY3VONZWS33OHMYTAOJVGIZDMNNBOYBA> . Triage notifications, keep track of coding agent tasks and review pull requests on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS <https://github.com/notifications/mobile/ios/AMRSBODDSTRTCIEUZ6PT2DT5U5T2RA5CNFSNUABIM5UWIORPF5TWS5BNNB2WEL2ENFZWG5LTONUW63SDN5WW2ZLOOQXTCOJQG4ZTINRYUZZGKYLTN5XKO3LFNZ2GS33OUVSXMZLOOSVGM33PORSXEX3JN5ZQ> and Android <https://github.com/notifications/mobile/android/AMRSBOGGKICGID2VNXQISFL5U5T2RA5CNFSNUABIM5UWIORPF5TWS5BNNB2WEL2ENFZWG5LTONUW63SDN5WW2ZLOOQXTCOJQG4ZTINRYUZZGKYLTN5XKO3LFNZ2GS33OUVSXMZLOOSXGM33PORSXEX3BNZSHE33JMQ>. Download it today! You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[eliandoran]

Hi, @SESummers3 .

Is this a reply to https://github.com/orgs/TriliumNext/discussions/11891#discussioncomment-19073468?

If so, the option to not expand notes edited is right here in settings: