Naming Pages in Trunk Notes

Unlike many note taking apps Trunk Notes forces you to give each page a name. That is because Trunk Notes, at it’s heart, is a personal wiki. The power of a personal wiki comes from the ability to link named pages together. Having good names for pages makes this easier and more natural.

Page names are also used to help find information quickly. The search bar in Trunk Notes works by matching what you type against existing page names. Start typing ‘blog’ and all pages which start with Blog will be listed with the most recently modified at the top.

Prefixing page names can be a helpful way to organise wiki entries. I am writing this blog post in Trunk Notes on my iPad. It’s name is ‘BlogNamingPages’. All my other blog posts also start with Blog. To find all my blog posts ordered by when they were written I just type Blog in the search bar. I don’t do this for all pages, just those where searching is quite common – this includes recipes.

One aspect of Trunk Notes which some new users find awkward is the “no spaces in page names” rule. This was an early design decision and it’s aim is to make it easier to refer to pages. You can still create links which contain spaces, for example [[Blog naming pages]] will show as written but still refer to the page BlogNamingPages. Trunk Notes makes this rule easy to follow by enforcing it. If you type “my new page name” Trunk Notes will correct it to “MyNewPageName”.

Most of the time you should give your page an explicit name when creating it. The exception is if you are using Trunk Notes for journalling or another activity where having the current date as the name is acceptable. If you tap the Action button and then use New… to create a page you will find that the name of the page is the current date. The format for this is taken from the timestamp settings.

In summary, names are very important in Trunk Notes. Think about page names carefully and you will be rewarded by information which is easy to link together and search.