silverbullet/website/Client Modes.md

SilverBullet currently supports two modes for its client:

1. Online mode (the default): keeps all content on the server and only loads content to the client on-demand.
2. Synced mode (offline capable): syncs all content to the client.

You can toggle between these two modes by toggling the 🔄 button in the top bar.

You can switch modes any time and use different modes on different devices.

Note: It is possible to switch off online mode (and allow synced mode only) by running the SilverBullet server with the --sync-only flag, see Install/Configuration.

Online mode

$online In online mode, all content in your space is kept on the server, and a lot of the heavy lifting (such as indexing of pages) happens on the server as well. Content will only be loaded to the client on-demand.

Advantages:

• Keeps content on the server: this mode does not synchronize all your content to your client (browser), making this a better fit for large spaces or for cases where you only need to quickly login to SilverBullet to check something, e.g. on a device you don’t usually use. This use case is the reason why this is the default mode.
• Lighter weight in terms of memory and CPU use of the client.

Disadvantages:

• Requires a working network connection to the server. You can not load pages nor successfully persist changes without it.
• Higher latency since more interactions require calls to the server, this may be notable e.g., when completing page names.

Synced mode

$sync In this mode, all content is synchronized to the client, and all processing happens there. The server effectively acts as a “dumb data store.” All SilverBullet functionality is available even when there is no network connection available.

Advantages:

• 100% offline capable: disconnect your client from the network, shutdown the server, and everything still works. Changes synchronize automatically once a network connection is re-established.
• Lower latency: all actions are performed locally in the client, which in most cases will be faster

Disadvantages:

• Synchronizes all content onto your client: using disk space and an initially large bulk of network traffic to download everything.