Duplicate Finder

Finds notes that are copies of each other and converts the extra copies into clones of whichever copy you choose to keep — so the note exists once, but still appears everywhere each copy used to.

Why clones

Deleting a duplicate loses its placement: whatever branch it sat in no longer shows anything. This addon never does that. For every copy you merge away, it first clones the keeper into each parent that copy occupied, and only then deletes the copy. The tree looks the same afterwards; there is just one real note behind those positions instead of several drifting ones.

Deletion is skipped entirely (and reported) if any clone fails, so a failure can never cost you a placement.

Usage

The addon installs two notes under its root:

• Duplicate Notes — the scan page. Click Scan for duplicates to get one card per duplicate group.
• duplicate-finder@beatlink — the settings page (also reachable from TAM's Settings button).

Each group card lists every copy with its creation/modification date and the parents it currently lives under. Pick which copy survives with the radio button — the oldest is selected by default — then click Convert N to clones. Clicking a copy's title opens that note, so you can look before choosing.

Merged groups drop off the list immediately; the rest stay actionable without rescanning.

Copies with children are never merged

A copy that has children is shown but excluded from the merge, because deleting it would take its whole subtree with it. Either keep that copy instead, or move its children elsewhere first and rescan.

What counts as a duplicate

By default, two notes are duplicates when their title, content and attributes all match. Every part is configurable in Settings:

Matching

Setting	Default	Effect
Match Title	on	Titles must be identical.
Match Content	on	Content must be identical.
Match Attributes	on	The notes' own labels and relations must be identical.
Ignore Formatting	on	Compare content with HTML tags stripped and whitespace collapsed, so a reformatted copy still matches.
Ignore Title Case	off	Compare titles case-insensitively.
Skip Empty Notes	on	Skip notes with no content — otherwise every empty note matches every other one.

At least one of Title / Content / Attributes must be on; the scan refuses to run otherwise, since with all three off every note would collide into a single group.

Two things are always compared regardless of settings:

• Note type and MIME — a code note and a text note holding the same text are not interchangeable and must never merge.
• Only a note's own attributes — inherited and templated attributes are ignored, since they say nothing about whether two notes are the same note. (#TAMFILEID is excluded too: it is addon bookkeeping, and it is inherited by every note templated from an addon-owned template.)

Scope

Setting	Default	Effect
Scan Under	whole tree	Limit the scan to one note's subtree.
Exclude Filters	see below	Notes matching any enabled filter's search query are skipped.

Two exclude filters ship enabled by default:

• Addon-owned notes (#TAMFILEID) — addon-installed notes are legitimately identical across addons that vendor the same library file, and are managed by TAM rather than by you.
• Templates (#template) — templates are meant to be copied from.

Both can be disabled, and you can add your own using ordinary Trilium search syntax (e.g. #archived, note.type = code). A filter with a malformed query is logged and skipped rather than aborting the scan.

Search notes and launchers are always skipped. The scan walks down from the tree root, so the hidden subtree is never visited.

What updates do to your settings

Anything shipped with the addon (the two exclude filters, and every default in the tables above) keeps tracking future versions for as long as you leave it alone: if a later version changes one, the change reaches your install on the next update without asking. Once you edit a filter or change a default it is yours, and is never overwritten. Should a later version change that same setting, TAM's Update Review asks which version you want rather than deciding for you. A filter you deleted stays deleted.

Notes

• The scan walks the subtree directly rather than issuing a search, so Scan Under is exact and a note cloned into several places is still examined once.
• Existing clones are not duplicates: a clone is one note with several parents, so it is visited once and can never match itself.