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Zim – A Desktop Wiki

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Re: Zim – A Desktop Wiki

#151

Post by janto »

dotancohen wrote: post #144
brocket wrote: post #17

There are a lot of fancier note taking tools but I keep going back to Zim. Been using it for years for private offline note-taking for work. I use quick notes and journal shortcuts many times a day to quickly jot down a followup note/idea/question in meetings. It's also my GTD system with tasks plugin. Love that it's just text files so I can manually edit them, version control, sync in private cloud service, etc. Nev…

> Pasting code will be garbled or auto-create tags unless you use the source view plugin or paste verbatim. I had used Zim extensively in the past, I absolutely love it. The dev is responsive and terrific and terrific as well. But I've lost quite a lot of code snippets due to the auto-formatting and auto-linking. If you are interested, these are two of the bugs that I filed on the subject: "Do not parse input as wiki…

FYI you can create a key binding to "/inserted_objects/insert_code" from Preferences. I've bound Ctrl-Shift-C and it's faster than hunting for it in the menus.

The syntax selection dropdown isn't great though. I wish I could type-to-search in it.

Re: Zim – A Desktop Wiki

#154

Post by maximus-decimus »

notdiaphone wrote: post #111
maximus-decimus wrote: post #39

I ended up switching to FOAM (the vscode extension) for personal notes because it's markdown and has much better support for inline planuml and showing node connections as a graph, but I haven't actually bothered changing my work notes away from ZIM because once stuff is in it, it kinda just works. If you don't care about visualizing links between different pages, it does a great job at making hierarchical notes sear…

I can't speak to plantuml support, but Zim was--guessing here--one of the first to visualize links. Look at the plugin "Link Map." Been using it long before the current crop of markdown knowledge gardens came about.

I did install it, but it's much more clunky. It doesn't update live, it opens in the browser instead of zim and after a while i figured out it didn't show everything, but stopped a about 5 nodes from the main current one. The graph is also pretty ugly.

Maybe they improved it since, but the Zim graphing capabilities just didn't even compare to foam's last time I tried it.

Re: Zim – A Desktop Wiki

#155

Post by mediaman »

mxuribe wrote: post #52

I used to love zim! I used it for a few years, but when i started travelling for work, it became tough to keep up with notes since i really needed a mobile client. Nowadays, it feels like 50% of my notes are captured while on the go, so a mobile client is now by far absolutely required for my workflow. I still give zim team lots of love, but just doesn't fill my needs as it used to.

What do you prefer to use now?

Re: Zim – A Desktop Wiki

#157

Post by sodality2 »

ibnishak wrote: post #78

It is time to give a shout out to my favorite note taking app: Trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium Pros: 1. Data is saved in SQlite. I am at 33k notes and it springs open instantaneously. 2. Notes can be arranged into arbitrarily deep tree. Single note can be placed into multiple places in the tree. (Think soft-links) 3. WYSIWYG support (CKEditor) 4. Tags, advanced scripting features 5. Other ususal wiki stuff l…

I love trilium, in fact I think I'm going to start a hosting service for it (built-in syncing mechanism). For a few reasons: 1. Sync to allow the sharing of notes publicly, which allows you to create simple websites very quickly. 2. Instant access as long as you have a browser. 3. As a backup. It's an incredible application and I'm proud to have contributed to it in the past no matter how little.

Re: Zim – A Desktop Wiki

#158

Post by I_complete_me »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #99
culi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any thoughts on Obsidian vs Zim? I've had both of them downloaded for a long time now, but I've yet to really dive into them as my old habits of saving quick thoughts into .txt files are hard to shake off

The good news is you can work by just saving plain text and then viewing it in the GUI. Obsidian looks pretty but is slower and not as stable. I haven’t gone back to Zim yet but there’s nothing Obsidian really adds beyond GUI polish IMO. Obsidian has the advantage of mobile apps, but the story there isn’t superb — I have a better time piping text into it through Drafts. The iPad version of the Craft notes app is supe…

One thing that Obsidian has that zim does not is the ability to invoke vim keybindings.

Re: Zim – A Desktop Wiki

#159

Post by mxuribe »

mediaman wrote: post #155
mxuribe wrote: post #52

I used to love zim! I used it for a few years, but when i started travelling for work, it became tough to keep up with notes since i really needed a mobile client. Nowadays, it feels like 50% of my notes are captured while on the go, so a mobile client is now by far absolutely required for my workflow. I still give zim team lots of love, but just doesn't fill my needs as it used to.

What do you prefer to use now?

I actually have my own little nextcloud instance running on a $5/month digital ocean virtual private server. My intent was for family (only 3 people) and i to use it...but honestly, most of the time it is only me. I draft conventional old text files (though i do use markdown)...and save the files in a nextcloud folder to enable sync anywhere. For actually synching and drafting of the text/note files, i have the nextcloud mobile app as well as the nextcloud notes app on my phone (https://github.com/stefan-niedermann/nextcloud-notes)...so now i can jot down notes anywhere that i carry my phone. I do lack some advanced features that zim wiki would bring, like linkages, some color formatting, styles...but for my workflow i found them not to be ultra necessary anyway. Side note: i use nextcloud for general file synching, rss/feed reading, and other functions...so it was not setup only/specifically for notes...the note taking just came along as an extra benefit. Any headaches in managing my own nextcloud instance (and just like managing any of your own infrastructure, there are always costs), are outweighed by all the features that i legitimately use/benefit from nextcloud.

If you use nextcloud, you could also use other text editors on mobile phone like joplin, qOwnNotes, etc. - so you are not stuck only with the nextcloud notes app. Also, if you are not an adherent to open source software, my workflow can also be used via dropbox, box.com, onedrive, etc. too i suppose (you're just drafting notes on the road and saving them up to someone e;lse's server/cloud). I hope that helps!

Re: Zim – A Desktop Wiki

#160

Post by admax88qqq »

Naac wrote: post #134
admax88qqq wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiddlywiki is neat technology, but the fact that you have to choose a method of saving and are presented with ~13 different options just gives me decision fatigue. I don't care to evaluate which plugin will actually _save_ my data. That's a pretty fundamental operation in my opinion, and the fact that I have to evaluate and choose from one of 13 options does not instill a lot of faith that my data will not be lost.

>> but the fact that you have to choose a method of saving AFAIK there is a single default. Just use that. If you need more features you can go down that rabbit whole but I think tiddlywiki is very usable without any modifications like you're describing.

There is? The very second step in their Getting Started is

> The next step is to choose a method for saving changes. There's a wide variety of methods available, with different features and limitations.

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