Alongside its content, the title is one of the two main attributes of a note. It's the short, human-readable name shown in the editable field at the top of every note, and it's what identifies the note throughout the interface (in the Note Tree, in tabs, in the Breadcrumb and win Internal (reference) links.

Internally, notes are identified by a unique Note ID rather than by their title, so the title is purely for your benefit. This has a few consequences:

- Titles don't have to be unique. You can have any number of notes that share the same title without conflict.
- Renaming a note never breaks links to it. Links between notes point at the underlying note, so changing a title leaves existing links intact (they'll simply display the new title).
- The title can be left empty. Notes with no title display a placeholder (type note's title here…) but are otherwise perfectly valid.

In addition:

- There is no limitation on the length of the title, however in exports the title might get trimmed.
- There are no forbidden symbols, unsupported characters will get trimmed when exporting.
- When exporting to a ZIP file, a meta file will contain the full title which will be recognized by Trilium when importing again.

### Editing the title

To rename a note, simply click into the title field and type. Changes are saved automatically as you type.

You can also begin editing the title directly from the Note Tree by selecting a note and pressing `Enter` (see Edit note title in Keyboard Shortcuts), which focuses the title field for the active note.

Titles may contain any characters, including Unicode and emoji. For security, any HTML in the title is stripped automatically, so the title is always treated as plain text.

### Easily navigating between the title and the content

When the cursor is in the title field, pressing `Enter` moves focus into the note's content. For Text notes this also inserts a fresh empty paragraph at the very top of the document, so you can start writing immediately — much like other note-taking apps.

This makes it possible to create a note, type its title, press `Enter`, and continue straight into the body without reaching for the mouse.

### Working with new notes

When you create a new note it's given a default title (new note) which is pre-selected, so you can type a name right away to replace it. The default title for new notes can be customized per-section — see Default Note Title.

If you decide you don't want the note after all, pressing `Escape` while the title of a freshly created note is still focused will discard it.

### Automatically generated titles

Some notes get their titles assigned automatically rather than typed:

- Day, week, month and year notes in the Day Notes are named from a configurable date pattern.
- Saved Search notes are named after the search they perform.
- When a note is duplicated, a suffix is appended to the copy's title to tell it apart from the original.

### Protected notes

For Protected Notes, the title is not encrypted — only the content is. The title therefore remains visible in the tree and tabs even when no protected session is active. While locked, however, the title field is read-only and cannot be edited until you enter your password.

## Protected notes

The titles of Protected Notes are encrypted along with their content. Before entering your password, Trilium cannot decrypt the title, so it is shown as `[protected]` in instead and the title cannot be modified.

Once you enter your password and a protected session is active, the real title is decrypted and displayed, and becomes editable again.