Trilium Presenter Plugin

Turn any Trilium note into a fullscreen presentation -- directly from Trilium, with one click.

Features

• One-click presentations from any note with children
• Markdown slides with Pandoc-compatible syntax (columns, speaker notes, code blocks)
• Depth-first traversal -- organize slides in sub-topics, they unfold automatically
• Presenter mode with speaker notes and slide list, synced via BroadcastChannel
• Theme system -- CSS + SVG backgrounds as Trilium notes, selectable per presentation
• Slide templates -- 11 ready-made layouts for quick slide creation
• Keyboard & mouse navigation with progress bar
• Configurable language via #presenterLang label
• AI slide authoring -- an MCP server lets an AI assistant create & manage presentations directly in Trilium

Installation

1. Download trilium-presenter-plugin.zip from the latest release
2. In Trilium, right-click any note in the tree and select Import into note
3. Select the downloaded .zip file
4. Trilium disables imported widgets by default -- open the Widget note inside the imported "Trilium Presenter" tree, find the #disabled:widget attribute and rename it to #widget
5. Reload Trilium (Ctrl+R) -- widgets are only read at startup
6. Show the widget panel: open the right pane with the toggle right pane button in the top right corner, then pick the Widgets tab -- the puzzle-piece icon

The reload loads the widget; it does not necessarily show it. Trilium Presenter lives in the right pane, which may be collapsed or showing a different tab -- nothing is wrong, it is just not on screen:

The section is collapsible: if the heading shows a > arrow, click it to fold the widget open.

Upgrading from 1.x

Version 2 removes the Handout (PDF) button. Printing moved to the sibling plugin trilium-notecast-render, which prints any Notecast type by one code path: install it alongside this one, open the presentation note, tick Include subtree and print. You get one page per slide in tree order -- in landscape, which the presenter's portrait handout never was.

Three things worth knowing before you upgrade:

• #slideIgnore does not reach the renderer. It is a presenter label, and the renderer deliberately reads none of ours -- the folder it usually marks is kept off screen because it belongs on paper. A "Handouts" or "Notes" folder you kept off screen with #slideIgnore=subtree will appear in the printout. If a branch has to stay out of both, add the renderer's own #notecastIgnore (same shape) alongside it.
• Themes installed before v2 may still carry a "Handout" note. Delete it. Nothing reads it -- printing is the renderer's job -- and the widget no longer treats the title specially, so a leftover simply registers as a slide type called handout that nothing ever emits.
• Presenting itself is unchanged. Decks, themes, templates, presenter mode and every label except the handout path work exactly as before.

Quick Start

Fastest way: Navigate to the imported Example Presentation note and click Present -- it walks you through all features including Markdown syntax, columns, images, and the Master/Clone workflow.

From scratch:

1. Create a note and add child notes -- each child becomes a slide
2. Set child note type to Code with language Markdown (text/x-markdown)
3. Navigate to your presentation note and click Present in the right panel

MCP Server (AI slide authoring)

Let an AI assistant build your decks. A companion Model Context Protocol server, trilium-notecast-mcp, creates and manages notes directly in Trilium via the ETAPI -- ask Claude something like "Create a 5-slide intro to our Q3 roadmap" and the slides appear in your note tree, ready to present. It is installed separately from this plugin; the two meet inside Trilium.

The server is a generic authoring engine: it ships no formats of its own, but writes notes of whatever type your Trilium defines. This plugin supplies the slide type, so the server can author slides out of the box.

The slide format the AI follows is loaded live from the Slide Format documentation note (label #notecastType=slide) -- so that one note is the single source of truth for slide-creation rules, shared by both humans and the AI (it used to be hardcoded in the server). See the server's README for setup.

The Notecast family

This plugin is the presentation specialist of three repositories that read and write the same Trilium notes, each doing one job:

Repo	Role
trilium-presenter-plugin (this repo)	presents a subtree on screen
trilium-notecast-mcp	authors typed notes (#notecastType) via the ETAPI
trilium-notecast-render	renders a note to print/PDF in a chosen theme

They are coupled only through Trilium, by a handful of labels. That coupling is the shared label contract, which lives in the MCP repo and is binding on all three -- including the labels this plugin owns, #notecastType=slide and #presenterTheme.

Each is installed separately: this plugin and the renderer as Trilium note imports, the MCP server alongside your AI assistant. Printing a deck as a handout is the renderer's job -- this plugin presents, it does not print.

Slide Organization

Slides are collected via depth-first pre-order traversal:

My Presentation
  Title Slide              -> Slide 1
  Introduction             -> Slide 2
  Deep Dive                -> Slide 3 (section break)
    Details A              -> Slide 4
    Details B              -> Slide 5
  Conclusion               -> Slide 6

Container notes (text/html type) are skipped but their children are included. This lets you use folders to organize slides without creating empty slides.

Modes

Button	Description
Present	Fullscreen presentation in a new window
Presenter Mode	Speaker view with notes, slide list, and BroadcastChannel sync
Show Slide	Preview a single Markdown slide with theme (visible on individual slide notes)

Themes

Select a theme from the dropdown before presenting. Themes are Trilium notes with the #presenterTheme label containing CSS sub-notes (Base, Title Slide, Content Slide, Chapter Slide) and optional SVG background attachments.

Included themes: Default (light) and Dark.

Slide Types

The first slide defaults to title layout, others to content. Override with #slideType label:

• #slideType=title -- Title slide styling
• #slideType=content -- Content slide styling
• #slideType=chapter -- Section divider, shipped with both themes
• Custom types by adding matching CSS notes to your theme

Configuration

Label	Description	Default
#presenterLang	HTML lang attribute	en
#slideType	Slide layout type	auto
#presenterTheme	Mark a note as theme	--
#slideIgnore	Skip this note (children still become slides)	--
#slideIgnore=subtree	Skip this note and its whole branch	--

Notes whose content is empty or whitespace only are skipped automatically, so pure grouping notes need no label at all.

Development

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt   # pinned; the widget tests need nothing
ruff check .                # lint, same versions CI uses
pytest                      # the import zip matches the note tree it declares
node --test                 # the widget's escaping and rendering helpers
python3 build-zip.py        # build the archive locally

Both suites run in CI on every push. Neither needs a Trilium instance:

• tests/test_build_zip.py builds the real archive and checks it against its own manifest — every declared file present, every declared label emitted. That second check exists because the opposite once shipped: while meta.json was exported from a live Trilium and the files copied beside it, the two drifted for months.
• tests/widget.test.js loads src/widget.js in node behind a two-method Trilium stub (tests/stub-trilium.js) and exercises the helpers that build the generated document. The window that document opens in is same-origin with Trilium, so the escaping there is a security boundary, not cosmetics.

This does not replace the repo rule that widget code is verified by running it in Trilium — the tests cover the string-producing helpers, not the UI.

Documentation

See the docs/ folder:

• Getting Started
• Slide Content -- full Markdown & Pandoc syntax reference
• Slide Format -- compact format reference (also drives the MCP server)
• Themes -- creating custom themes
• Content Organization -- clone-based slide library workflow
• MCP Server -- AI slide authoring overview (setup)
• About -- author, license, and links

Author

Stefan Schmidbauer -- GitHub

Built with Claude Code as co-author.

License

MIT -- see LICENSE