Zim – A Desktop Wiki

What an awesome app

I mentioned this in another subthread, but have you checked out Obsidian [1]?

- It's a product, not a service (they do offer their own paid syncing service though)

- It is backed by plaintext: markdown files in folders. As for Git, I'm pretty sure you could use it easily- and I noticed there's also a community-supported Git integration plugin [2].

- Just tested link renaming, it's there.

- It does have a tagging system. I haven't used it extensively enough to see if the rest of your requirements are met, but it seems very thorough.

- The desktop and mobile clients do support full-text search. Not sure how it's indexed but it is quite fast.

- Server + browser interface: unfortunately, it doesn't look like this is the case out of the box, but since the files are Just Markdown On A Filesystem I feel like you could probably just have a completely unrelated server to make changes to them.

- Native desktop app: hate to break the news, but the desktop app is Electron. That being said, it's extremely snappy and doesn't seem like a complete memory hog. (A cursory check of Activity Monitor says it's got four processes running, using 127 MB, 73 MB, 55MB, and 11.8MB.)

- Sync over git/github- again, community supported, but the plugin [2] looks quite solid and offers plenty of the kind of features you might like. I would also note that because everything's just Markdown files, other syncing mechanisms like Dropbox or iCloud "just work". They have a mobile app as well, and seamless iCloud syncing has been the killer feature for me.

- Publishing is an interesting one. They do have a paid service which allows you to "publish" vaults, which basically means they do the static rendering and then host it for you. It looks like their static rendering gives the published version of a vault a "table of contents" pane and other stuff. I imagine it wouldn't be too tricky to do this oneself, and you could possibly even integrate it into the editor.

- So, CLI/Vim editing works like a dream. I just edited a file from Vim and immediately saw it updated in the desktop and mobile apps. Updating backlinks works in the app just fine, but simply moving files around in the filesystem doesn't update backlinks.

- Yeah, this kinda is a whole concern of its own, but for what it's worth: images and media are stored in the same directory structure as Markdown files, and can be embedded into a "note" via linking. (like ![[imagename.jpg]]). So I imagine you could keep them in a separate directory that's gitignored or something like that.

1: https://obsidian.md/

2: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git

Notable has most of what you want except for the git integration. Though the author maintains that you can just save your notebooks to a git repo.

ha, that's interesting to know. Actually not being able to see or edit my notes on a phone was the dealbreaker for me and the biggest reason I stopped using ZIM and only using a bunch of markdown files nowadays.

How happy are you with Markor on the phone? Is it good enough to edit your Zim files on the go or are there any bigger down sites?

Ah, that's too bad. The Android one is OK.