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Zim – a Desktop Wiki

October 19th, 2007 by George Notaras

While browsing the archives of Linux Screw, I came across a very interesting post about Zim. Zim is a wiki-style note taking system for the desktop. Its text editor, being an 100% WYSIWYG wiki text edtor, does not require any knowledge of wiki syntax. One could say that Zim is a more advanced and feature-rich implementation of Tomboy. Notes can be organized in “repositories” pretty much like the “namespace” concept of web-based wikis, which results in better categorization of the notes than what is currently possible with Tomboy. Some other things I particularly liked are the fact that all the available formatting can be applied to the text by using keyboard shortcuts (unlike Tomboy) and the support for a custom USR1 signal which can be used to programmatically toggle the visibility of Zim by assigning a custom global keyboard shortcut that triggers the execution of a very simple BASH script (you can find it in the Zim FAQ). For Tomboy users who consider switching to Zim (count me in), there is a Tomboy-to-Zim converter available. It did not work out of the box, but it seems that it is easy to fix. Although I’ve been using it only for some minutes, Zim is definitely a keeper. If advanced note-taking is in the standard procedures of your everyday computing, I highly recommend trying Zim.

The Zim – a Desktop Wiki by George Notaras, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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3 Responses to “Zim – a Desktop Wiki”

  1. Artem Nosulchik Says :
    October 19th, 2007 at 8:45 am

    Wow! Thanks for the link to Tomboy-to-Zim converter =)

  2. Aggelos Orfanakos Says :
    October 19th, 2007 at 11:47 am

    I’ve tried Zim and didn’t like it. I didn’t like Tomboy either (I’m starting to believe that the idea of desktop wikis doesn’t fit me). I agree that Zim is better than Tomboy though.

  3. George Notaras Says :
    October 23rd, 2007 at 12:07 am

    After a couple of days of usage, I think Zim is indeed more advanced than Tomboy, but its level of maturity is lower than Tomboy’s. I’ve decided to keep both of them for some time.

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