Zim Desktop Wiki -- observations and comparisons

Posted by marcus
Aug 4, 2014 at 08:52 PM

After a recent bout of CRIMPing (which for me usually involves more trying than buying) I’ve been relieved to discover a wonderful (for my purposes) set of features and design in Zim (http://zim-wiki.org/). It seems to have received only brief and passing mention on this forum, so let me share some of my observations and comparisons.

First, I had encountered it at least once before but didn’t give it much of a chance, I forget why. This time (yesterday) I almost dismissed it, too, because it crashed, and after sending a bug report it wouldn’t open—then I found by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Esc that the process was still open, so I killed it. I was not patient enough at the time to open it again and explore it further, but after failing to find my ideal combination of features in any of the other programs I was exploring (the most promising of which were Ecco Pro, OneNote, SilverNote, ConnectedText, ZuluPad, and WikidPad), I decided to give it yet another chance.

Although it crashed on me once more, and a few times gave a non-critical error message when I tried to do something non-essential, the strength of its features and design are right now more than enough to compensate for the occasional crash (especially since both crashes caused no loss of data).

Here are the essential features I was hoping for, but hadn’t yet found in a single program, listed in approximate order of importance:

1. Wiki-like automatic organization of pages, having unique names (not limited to CamelCase, like some wikis), primarily navigated through links (which are easy to create, partly because of the unique page names), but optionally browsable in an alphabetical list, and with support of namespaces (so that subpages can be created with names that are only locally unique)
2. Automatic or easy organization also of dated journal pages (and inter-linking between these and named pages)
3. WYSIWYG editing with basic text formatting: bold, italics, lists, indentation
4. Support for structured longer pages, navigable by a table-of-contents based on headings
5. Support for tags or categories to help group pages
6. Uncluttered design, relatively easy to learn, keyboard shortcuts for most common operations

Many of these things were obvious from the start of using Zim. Some of the features, like the Tags and ToC plug-ins which significantly enhance #4 and #5, took some poking around or reading the manual to figure out. Some features I didn’t dare hope for turned up: for example, I can rename a page, and all links are automatically updated.

There are still some things I like better about the other programs I mentioned. For example, Ecco Pro and OneNote (among other programs) are better at editing outlines (for example re-arranging lines, collapsing levels). But at the moment Zim’s particular combination of features is outshining all of the rest, to my eyes. I’ll probably continue to use EccoPro for many things — as a light, user-friendly database and quick outlining program I believe it’s unmatched. And although I like OneNote in many respects, I don’t want to split my notes between more programs than necessary, so I’ll probably stop using it in favor of Zim.

To summarize the other programs I mentioned, with respect to the above list of features:
* Ecco Pro is great at 2 thru 6 but not 1.
* OneNote is great at 3 and 6, OK at 5. Also good at parts of 1 and 2: links, subpages, dating of entries. But in OneNote I have to think about both what to call a page and where to put it. In Zim all I need to do is give it a good name (or if it’s a journal entry, the correct date), link to it where desired, and forget about the rest.
* SilverNote, which I tried only briefly, seems similar to OneNote in many respects, except that, within each organizational tab, it’s a one-pane outliner whereas OneNote is a weak two-pane outliner (weak because the side pane supports only three levels and can only be collapsed at the top level).
* ConnectedText is great at 1, 4, and 5. With some work, 2 is possible. But 3 is missing and 6 is weak in the sense of being complex and not so easy to learn (for non-programmers like me), partly because of lack of 3.
* ZuluPad is great for 1 (except namespaces) and 6, and partly 3 (WYSIWYG but no formatting). The paid version if you can get it offers formatting but apparently the program is no longer developed or supported.
* WikidPad like ConnectedText doesn’t support 3 (although its edit mode is has some built-in syntax highlighting, so it’s on its way to WYSIWYG). I imagine it’s probably good with at least 1, 4, and 6, perhaps others. If I hadn’t found Zim I might have given it a more thorough trial.