Zim Desktop Wiki -- observations and comparisons

Posted by Dr Andus
Aug 5, 2014 at 12:01 AM

marcus, great review, thanks for the detailed comparisons. I agree that Zim looks good, especially if one is looking for a WYSIWYG wiki. It was a long time ago when I actually tried it, but I watched the video recently, and I was intrigued.

Here are just a couple of comments re your comparison with CT, which I use. I don’t know much about the others, except OneNote, which I can see that it is very powerful, but I’m turned off by its skeuomorphism.

marcus wrote:
>* ConnectedText is great at 1, 4, and 5. With some work, 2 is possible.

The so-called “date topics” (or “date and time topics”) in CT are fully integrated with the wiki and have quite a few dedicated features. E.g. you can link them like regular pages, and they can be listed as regular pages and/or in a calendar pane.

>But 3 is missing

It’s true that CT is not WYSIWYG. However, it’s worth pointing out that the edit/view dualism does offer some unique advantages as well. E.g. you can’t accidentally delete or alter a page when it’s in a view mode. Since v. 6 there are also the so-called “floating windows”, which allow you to see several pages in view mode at the same time.

Or it is possible to have two distinct types of searches: one for the view mode (Full text search to search only textual content) and one for the edit mode (Global search, also to be able to search/replace wiki markup code, such as linked file names and paths).

Or one can swap between multiple CSS files (which one can manually adapt) to alter the look of every page at an instant (and the look of the edit mode also can be customised).

Or there is the ability to use inclusions (transclusions), which allows for quick cloning of pages/passages.

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.

OK, it’s true it does take some effort to get started with it. But I’m not a programmer either. I know a bit of HTML (which did help) and that’s about it.

>* 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).

It is also possible to switch on (and customise) syntax highlighting in CT (in Options).