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Comment by JasonSage | Hacker News Reader

Only looking at this page, I have no clue what this does.

It says...

    organize notes and ideas
    manage todo-lists
    write documentation
    write a diary

I can already do these in vim, with text files or markdown files. What is this actually doing, then?

Projects like this really deserve some high-level explanation like "Do you want to do X, but don't like having to do Y? This addresses that."

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Creating links: when your cursor is over a word, hit enter. To follow, hit enter. To go back, hit backspace.

Todo Lists: Hitting C-Space marks the item as done or not done. It also creates a progress indicator on parent TODO items.

    - [.] Do something
        - [X] Something 1
        - [ ] Something 2
        - [ ] Something 3

Diary - Hit leader-w leader-w, you automatically get a new page created with today's date to write in. leader-w i will get you to a diary index page. leader-w leader-i will auto-populate that index page.

Tables are auto-formatted to match the text you put into them.

All of this is entirely possible with plain text files, vimwiki just makes it easier to do. It's even compatible with markdown formatted files.

So it's basically a suite of tools for writing a wiki?

Does it have its own build/rendering engine, or can I use one I already know (Pandoc)?

It has a few built-in syntaxes (including Markdown), and can render those out to HTML (including some generic templating for having static CSS/JavaScript).

And frankly, I simply consider it to be a wiki. I rarely if ever find the need to export it out. Makes for a great personal wiki if you're already in Vim.

I have successfully used the export feature to hand off project documentation I was keeping in vimwiki. This way they got a set of HTML files that anyone could view. Some of them did not use vim at all so while this meant the documentation would not be as easy to edit at least it was accessible.

It looks like it supports editing Media Wiki files, so you could go from there.

I agree, my personal wiki is just a folder with a bunch of markdown files.

I "link" them by path ( with gf you go to the file under path ), and every change is commited using https://github.com/nevik/gitwatch

I use grep ( or git grep ) for searching in my notes.

I think I have started doing this 3 or 4 times but then stop because I can't get to my stuff all the time. todo.txt was my last try I think I just need to extend what todo.txt does for my needs..

See my response to another comment on this page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13171982

Vimwiki maintainer here. I made a few changes just now. If you have a suggestion how to describe it better, let me know.

This basically allows you to create links between files like in a wiki, and to use some form of markup in them.

It also allows quick access to it and some form of file management (eg. When renaming a file)

I think it is also able to export to a real wiki platform.

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