Hacker News Reader

Comment by hd4 | Hacker News Reader

I want to put in a good word for zim-wiki here. Its a shame the Windows port seems to be on indefinite hiatus for now. Its by far the easiest GUI-based wiki to deal with, easily handles just dropping in files into a hierarchy and simply working with them after a refresh. Sorry but being able to use a mouse to navigate a wiki beats out a keyboard-based wiki any time.

https://zim-wiki.org/

View on HN

Have you tried one that's controlled by keyboard? I haven't used Vim since I think rich text formats provide more value, but I like to control as much as possible by keyboard if possible. There are certain applications where you really need a mouse (like image editing), but I feel like the keyboard is under appreciated.

I've been working on the new user interface for Emvi [1] for the past three months or so and once you have build the muscle memory, you can use it blindly. You can read about it here [2] if you like and find current screenshots/gifs on Twitter [3].

One thing that might have turned people away from learning keyboard controls is that they get overwhelmed by a ton of different shortcuts. We (hopefully) solved this issue by using commands (words) you can type out instead of remembering two or more keys.

[1] https://emvi.com/

[2] https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-user-interface-QMZg...

[3] https://twitter.com/emvi

I just started a project to get 0.70 running for windows on my own machine. If I’m successful, I will share with the community.

I'd love to help out but my programming experience is limited. Use zim-wiki all the time on both Linux and Windows. It's one of the best note taking programs out there.

I used Zim-wiki for years, and loved it. However, there is a fatal flaw in Zim that people using it for notes about code should know about. Zim parses all text as "wiki text" and some computer code snippets get parsed and interpreted as formatting. See this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/zim/+bug/585300

Other than that issue, Zim is brilliant. The developer is very responsive to most issues and feature requests. Sadly, Zim wasn't for me as many of my notes involve code.

You can format code as "Verbatim" (Ctrl+T), and it will not be interpreted as wiki text.

Want to clarify for the OP that there is still a Windows port available and it is feature complete. The new 0.7 line is the one where more work is required to build an installer.

I used WikidPad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikidPad) for a while and quite liked. It looks somewhat similar to zim-wiki. Unfortunately it does not look like it is under active development. Whats good about: 1) cross platform 2) entries are plain text files 3) scriptable/extendable with python

Zim has its good points, but the biggest problem I have with it is the inability to wrap lines shorter than the full monitor width. On a 13" laptop, it's usable; on a widescreen desktop monitor it just doesn't work. Other wikis like tiddlywiki, pmwiki, and dokuwiki are able to avoid this.

Sorry if I misunderstood, but does changing the window size solves the problem? I never maximize it, so I was not aware.

I could shrink the window, but that's definitely not an optimal solution. It also means that I lose much of my screen width. That creates its own problems.

Here's a bug someone filed that hasn't even so much as gotten a response after nearly eight months:

https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/...

Certainly not had that problem myself but one of the reasons I use zim-wiki is because it supports displaying embedded pictures which for certain things is very useful.

Used zim as well really liked the simplicity of it, but later on, discovered org-mode and switched to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com