Zim – A Desktop Wiki

Re:Zim – A Desktop Wiki by brocket on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:25PM (#30089544)

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. Never worry about losing my data.

There are a few quirks I've gotten used to over the years though:

- Pasting code will be garbled or auto-create tags unless you use the source view plugin or paste verbatim.

- Takes a little configuration out of the box to get just right, system dependencies, links opening in right browser, plugins, shortcuts, fonts. But once you get streamlined it just works.

- The syntax feels a little strange to me but I rarely need to edit raw files. I could also export to Markdown if I ever wanted to migrate.

My last tip, templates are awesome. I have ones for all kinds of things, like interviewing, 1-1s, and architecture design outline.

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Re:Zim – A Desktop Wiki by mehdix on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @04:16PM (#30092003)

I used it for years for writing a daily journal. I'd press a shortkey such as Alt+D and I'd get an entry for the day and write. Simple useful tool with an awesome author.

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Re:Zim – A Desktop Wiki by ComodoHacker on Thursday January 27, 2022 @02:19AM (#30097290)

Hijacking this comment, I use Horst Schaeffer's MemPad[0] for this. Super lightweight, super simple, super fast. Also great for tracking freelance work with one file per client. Alas, Windows-only.

0. https://www.horstmuc.de/wmem.htm

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Re:Zim – A Desktop Wiki by mlsmith on Thursday January 27, 2022 @03:04PM (#30105628)

Logged in to say hi to a fellow MemPad user! I just emailed Horst the other day to request some features. It was interesting to learn about PureBasic as well which is what he uses for all of his programs.

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Re:Zim – A Desktop Wiki by dotancohen on Thursday January 27, 2022 @02:38AM (#30097448)

  > 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 wikicode" https://bugs.launchpad.net/zim/+bug/585300

"Option to disable all autolinking" https://bugs.launchpad.net/zim/+bug/585301

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Re:Zim – A Desktop Wiki by janto on Thursday January 27, 2022 @06:44AM (#30099287)

FYI you can create a key binding to "<Actions>/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.

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Re:Zim – A Desktop Wiki by account-5 on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @03:54PM (#30091673)

I've never touched the templates, I don't understand derstand their documentation. You have any pointers to something less obscure?

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