Amazing little app. I'm also very thankful to Zim for the fact that I still have the easily-searchable text files from my years of Zim use over a decade ago. It made it really easy to recover things that I wrote back then, because they were never really tucked away inside of a database somewhere.
How do you sync between devices? Dropbox or Syncthing?
I find myself favoring self-hosted webapps over local running apps. It eliminates the "no client for X platform" problem while also providing syncing across devices.
Thanks for mentioning markor, I was searching for something similar!
How do you sync your notebook between your phone and your computer, if you don't mind me asking?
Back when I was searching for a good note-taking system, each and everyone of them had one feature that I wanted that was missing. Zim Wiki was the first system I decided to stick with, and after 4+ years I never gravely missed anything. However, if you don't like organizing your stuff hierarchically, your experience might differ. Also, I kinda dig the desktop-centric approach. It feels more like a real tool than just some kind of "app".
Because it's written in python it is comparatively easy to extend and through its integrated web server you can serve up your notes with a custom design in no time.
Zim is awesome and did everything I used to use Evernote for but run on mobile. The notes are kept in plain text, so there’s no lock in. I am glad to know that the author is out there and released the code for us, because that will be usable so long as the necessary Python version is usable (lol).
This might be a little odd but I get a very “homey” vibe from the program, like, there are parts that aren’t as polished and improvements are slow and steady over the years, but there’s something of personal touch that makes it charming to use.
Seconding Obsidian. I started using it recently (admittedly for TTRPG notes) and I really like it! I haven't done a lot of cross-linking but it seems to work really well!
Even better, it stores everything in plain Markdown files in a folder hierarchy, so you can easily back everything up and/or interact with them outside the app if need be.
Even EVEN better, they have mobile apps that are perfectly happy to let you use your own file-syncing mechanism if you want to (although they do offer a sync service of their own as well.) Once I got it set up, everything Just Worked.
I second that... There are a lot of times when I want to make notes or find information that I want to add to my Wiki (hosted on my desktop) from my phone or just want to search for something and having an android app that lets me do that would be fantastic.
I “solve” this problem by storing my phone’s notes in IMAP, and dumping them periodically into my main notes.
That solves writing. I find it actually works because phone notes tend to be write only — little snippets of information that record something important and never get edited again once they are written, to be turned into a “real” note at a later date, once in a system that supports “real editing”.
For reading notes I dump everything onto a personal website.
Thanks. This is great and works pretty well.
I use SyncThing to sync the files between the Phone and my Desktop so all my changes get sync'd bidirectionally automatically.
I'm also using it for few years, the only complain I got so far is a lack of proper version for Mac OS and any mobile client. Obviously Python+GTK work on Mac OS, but few times either updates of Python, Mac OS or Zim itself, broke it for me. For mobile the only option is either to view files directly, or use built-in web server (though no editing is available in this case).
There are a lot of fancier note taking tools but I keep going back to Zim. Been using it for years for private offline note-taking for work. I use quick notes and journal shortcuts many times a day to quickly jot down a followup note/idea/question in meetings. It's also my GTD system with tasks plugin. Love that it's just text files so I can manually edit them, version control, sync in private cloud service, etc. Never worry about losing my data.
There are a few quirks I've gotten used to over the years though:
- Pasting code will be garbled or auto-create tags unless you use the source view plugin or paste verbatim.
- Takes a little configuration out of the box to get just right, system dependencies, links opening in right browser, plugins, shortcuts, fonts. But once you get streamlined it just works.
- The syntax feels a little strange to me but I rarely need to edit raw files. I could also export to Markdown if I ever wanted to migrate.
My last tip, templates are awesome. I have ones for all kinds of things, like interviewing, 1-1s, and architecture design outline.
I used it for years for writing a daily journal. I'd press a shortkey such as Alt+D and I'd get an entry for the day and write. Simple useful tool with an awesome author.
Hijacking this comment, I use Horst Schaeffer's MemPad[0] for this. Super lightweight, super simple, super fast. Also great for tracking freelance work with one file per client. Alas, Windows-only.
Logged in to say hi to a fellow MemPad user! I just emailed Horst the other day to request some features. It was interesting to learn about PureBasic as well which is what he uses for all of his programs.
> Pasting code will be garbled or auto-create tags unless you use the source view plugin or paste verbatim.
I had used Zim extensively in the past, I absolutely love it. The dev is responsive and terrific and terrific as well. But I've lost quite a lot of code snippets due to the auto-formatting and auto-linking. If you are interested, these are two of the bugs that I filed on the subject:
FYI you can create a key binding to "<Actions>/inserted_objects/insert_code" from Preferences. I've bound Ctrl-Shift-C and it's faster than hunting for it in the menus.
The syntax selection dropdown isn't great though. I wish I could type-to-search in it.
I was using TiddlyWiki, but I stopped about two years ago. I use OneNote for everything because I am primarily Windows based, but I do have an iMac and Linux machines too. I may give this a try. I still go back to pen and paper in bound books a lot, but for listing and sharing this looks good.
I used OneNote in school and really liked it but no native Linux support is a deal breaker. The web client is far too slow and frustrating to use on a daily basis.
I haven't tried the web app or client. I have Office 365 with the desktop apps. It's amazing how long OneNote has been around. It's like an endless notebook/media repository with tabs!
Do you know of any other app that is even close? I had Scrivener on my Mac for writing, but it didn't work well for project management/note taking.
Markdown solutions are there, but nothing as cohesive as OneNote as far as I have found.
I've been using Zim for at least 10 years for notes, todo's, etc.
Recently I updated my setup to use syncthing for syncing between my desktop, laptop, and my Android phone. On my phone I use Markor, an open source app that supports the Zim markup format (along with Markdown and some others). I've been pretty happy with this setup.
ha, that's interesting to know. Actually not being able to see or edit my notes on a phone was the dealbreaker for me and the biggest reason I stopped using ZIM and only using a bunch of markdown files nowadays.
How happy are you with Markor on the phone? Is it good enough to edit your Zim files on the go or are there any bigger down sites?
I used to edit the Zim markup directly in a very basic text editor, so Markor is a big improvement. It offers syntax highlighting, some menu items for things like formatting, and a preview mode. So not wysiwyg, but still pretty nice. It also allows you to easily create new notes from scratch, which is kindof a pain if you're just using a generic text editor.
I do have some issues making nested check box lists (maybe I need to review the Zim syntax) and it's not clear if you can add images. Mostly I review and update my todo items, read notes, and write small notes. For that I've been pretty happy with it.
Markor looks like a great way to view Zim files on android. Thanks for the tip! But it seems to access note files in the common filesystem space -- which for privacy reasons somewhat defeats why I prefer Zim over cloud-based solutions. Anyone know of a way to use something like Markor and syncthing in an isolated android sandbox? Currently I sftp notes into a termux environment and view/edit with vim, but Markor would be so much better.
Wow, I left Zim for a Markdown based setup because I wanted to have an Android client. Settled on Markor, and I never knew it actually supported the Zim syntax. I'll be converting back asap!
Markor is how I came to know of Zim. I read the changelog (for the app) at first as "Vim Wiki support" and got excited, then realised it actually said "Zim Wiki".
I've used Zim about 8 years ago, but lost interest after a month. If I remember correctly, there were no Windows builds for a time, just an instruction how to compile it.
I've been looking at Logseq and Obsidian recently.
Any thoughts on Obsidian vs Zim? I've had both of them downloaded for a long time now, but I've yet to really dive into them as my old habits of saving quick thoughts into .txt files are hard to shake off
Obsidian looked so much better than Zim that I was compelled to try it, but I'd been using Zim for well over 15 years beforehand.
So Occams razor might just be "I'm more used to it;" though there might be an argument for Obsidian growing too slick too quickly? It's got a LOT going on and looks like its flashier and has more features, perhaps too many for me. Also, if mobile is at all important, you probably want Obsidian.
Thanks for the feedback. Ugh I really wish there was a good enough common notes format standard that would make these decisions less difficult. I'd like to be able to easily take my data with me to whichever note taking app I wanna try out
The good news is you can work by just saving plain text and then viewing it in the GUI. Obsidian looks pretty but is slower and not as stable. I haven’t gone back to Zim yet but there’s nothing Obsidian really adds beyond GUI polish IMO. Obsidian has the advantage of mobile apps, but the story there isn’t superb — I have a better time piping text into it through Drafts. The iPad version of the Craft notes app is superior but it’s also much more locked down in every sense. I still use Craft though because I’m trying to simplify things these days, and I’m a sucker for OS integration.
These are the features I'd like in a wiki / personal knowledge engine:
- Not a service. This has to be durable and portable.
- Backed primarily by git and plaintext files, not a database. Explorable and manageable on the filesystem.
- Markdown
- Hyperlinks to articles that show up red if the page doesn't exist (yet). If a page is renamed, all hyperlinks to it must automatically update.
- Multiple tags / categories can be added to any page. Bonus if it supports hierarchical categories. These get indexed and can be bulk managed. When pages are updated and their tags change, the system automatically handles the bookkeeping.
- Indexed fuzzy search better than grep
- Server + browser interface (mobile friendly). It should also support editing from the browser and saving back to git.
- Native desktop app. Less important, but also enforces that git, files, and a simple set of indices are the core data model.
- Sync over git / github with easy diff fixing
- Publish to a public or private website. Bonus if statically rendered snapshots are supported.
- Despite all of the ancillary indices and support mechanisms, it must remain CLI/vim editing friendly. Indexes and links should update as a post commit hook or async job
- Images and media can be uploaded to a secondary service that handles indexing, hosting, backups, and thumbnail generation. This is a whole set of concerns all on its own.
tl;dr: git + markdown data model with a bunch of bookkeeping, indexing, and tooling on the side
I haven't found a good fit yet, but I haven't explored the entire space. I might just write it one of these days.
it's basically a clone of Roam Resarch as a vscode extension that uses Markdown.
It's markdown, has a desktop app (vscode), since it's just markdown you can put it all in git with easy diffs, vscode allows you to search the entire project for words, it has tags. It even has a window to see your notes as a star map where you see the links between the different markdown files, but they also recently added tags to that starmap.
You also get to use other extensions compatible with markdown like render inline plantuml and stuff like that, which is what is the nicest about it being markdown.
If you're serious about making your own, I would consider contributing to FOAM's project instead.
I mentioned this in another subthread, but have you checked out Obsidian [1]?
- It's a product, not a service (they do offer their own paid syncing service though)
- It is backed by plaintext: markdown files in folders. As for Git, I'm pretty sure you could use it easily- and I noticed there's also a community-supported Git integration plugin [2].
- Just tested link renaming, it's there.
- It does have a tagging system. I haven't used it extensively enough to see if the rest of your requirements are met, but it seems very thorough.
- The desktop and mobile clients do support full-text search. Not sure how it's indexed but it is quite fast.
- Server + browser interface: unfortunately, it doesn't look like this is the case out of the box, but since the files are Just Markdown On A Filesystem I feel like you could probably just have a completely unrelated server to make changes to them.
- Native desktop app: hate to break the news, but the desktop app is Electron. That being said, it's extremely snappy and doesn't seem like a complete memory hog. (A cursory check of Activity Monitor says it's got four processes running, using 127 MB, 73 MB, 55MB, and 11.8MB.)
- Sync over git/github- again, community supported, but the plugin [2] looks quite solid and offers plenty of the kind of features you might like. I would also note that because everything's just Markdown files, other syncing mechanisms like Dropbox or iCloud "just work". They have a mobile app as well, and seamless iCloud syncing has been the killer feature for me.
- Publishing is an interesting one. They do have a paid service which allows you to "publish" vaults, which basically means they do the static rendering and then host it for you. It looks like their static rendering gives the published version of a vault a "table of contents" pane and other stuff. I imagine it wouldn't be too tricky to do this oneself, and you could possibly even integrate it into the editor.
- So, CLI/Vim editing works like a dream. I just edited a file from Vim and immediately saw it updated in the desktop and mobile apps. Updating backlinks works in the app just fine, but simply moving files around in the filesystem doesn't update backlinks.
- Yeah, this kinda is a whole concern of its own, but for what it's worth: images and media are stored in the same directory structure as Markdown files, and can be embedded into a "note" via linking. (like ![[imagename.jpg]]). So I imagine you could keep them in a separate directory that's gitignored or something like that.
This is seriously awesome. I've tried it out and I love it. It gives me exactly what I want, and if I find anything missing it'll be easy to implement.
It has the hackability of emacs but can run anywhere a browser can ( both online and offline ). And of course, an active community and ecosystem built around it.
> It has the hackability of emacs but can run anywhere a browser can
Needing a browser is definitely not a positive. The website taking two seconds to load even when in cache while zim is absolutely instant even on potato PC neither.
I think being able to view your wiki from any browser is a positive. I don't need a separate app for my phone, I just access my wiki website and everything works the same.
Last time (a few weeks ago) I tried rclone with WebDAV. I do what the instructions say, I get a local web site where I can open the empty.hmtl, I do the basic setup, write a tiddler, it says "Saved" and the empty.html is still pristine and never gets written.
The times before that I tried several other ways documented on their web site, but failed with all of them. git? Only GitHub (and GitLab) seem to be supported, not my own git repo. Or SourceHut.
Cloud connectors? Which of the three? I've tried at least one of them, didn't work.
I wrote this[1] because I wanted something that didn't require any setup and I didn't want all kinds of features getting in my way. Just run the server and have it save the wiki to my hard drive. I guess you do have to install a D compiler in order to compile it, which might be classified as setup.
I had the some problem, and several months ago (8?) I put together a small python script that I run that handles saving for me seamlessly. It also keeps around a handful of backups for each wiki, and provides an index page so I can swap between different wikis as I need to. I'm now all-in on TiddlyWiki and I've never been happier. I manage about a dozen or so wikis this way.
I haven't yet gotten around to properly hosting the source code publicly, but it's just a single python file that I run locally. To actually replicate the wikis between my devices, I use Syncthing. I'll be happy to put the source code up if folks are interested...it'll probably take only an hour or so.
I hear you on this problem and it took a while to find a solution I like. Ultimately, I went with https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyDesktop and file syncing tool of my choice. It seems to work well, but you can have issues if you simultaneously edit.
Tiddlywiki is neat technology, but the fact that you have to choose a method of saving and are presented with ~13 different options just gives me decision fatigue.
I don't care to evaluate which plugin will actually _save_ my data. That's a pretty fundamental operation in my opinion, and the fact that I have to evaluate and choose from one of 13 options does not instill a lot of faith that my data will not be lost.
>> but the fact that you have to choose a method of saving
AFAIK there is a single default. Just use that. If you need more features you can go down that rabbit whole but I think tiddlywiki is very usable without any modifications like you're describing.
I've been using Tiddlywiki for my technical notes. Before I was using Evernote and Notion, both would format my code blocks and it was just easier to use Tiddlywiki with a desktop app for saving.
But my concern with Tiddlywiki is extracting the data if needed, there was a time when my wiki had some file issues and lucky that I was able to recover without sorting the files manually.
It's been a while since I've actively used tiddlywiki, so I don't have actual code snippets at hand - but extracting "tiddlers" should be the least of your concerns (at least, that was my experience when I used it).
Just open the tiddlywiki in your text editor. All your tiddlers are neatly filed away at the bottom. It's that simple.
In fact, I had a folding expression in vim which folded everything neatly, and allowed one to just navigate between tiddlers, all in vim.
If its that simple to interactively browse through the data without running the javascript "engine", then you can see how trivial it is to pull out any or all tiddlers, on demand, out of the tiddlywiki.
Thank you, I wasn't aware it's that easy. I have gotten around the saving issue with the desktop clients, they work decently well. I also love the tree view which many note apps seem to move away from.
I ended up switching to FOAM (the vscode extension) for personal notes because it's markdown and has much better support for inline planuml and showing node connections as a graph, but I haven't actually bothered changing my work notes away from ZIM because once stuff is in it, it kinda just works. If you don't care about visualizing links between different pages, it does a great job at making hierarchical notes searchable. My biggest gripe was that inserting plantuml code was really clunky because it doesn't update live (you have to submit your changes before seeing the result) but it's still very functional.
I can't speak to plantuml support, but Zim was--guessing here--one of the first to visualize links. Look at the plugin "Link Map." Been using it long before the current crop of markdown knowledge gardens came about.
I did install it, but it's much more clunky. It doesn't update live, it opens in the browser instead of zim and after a while i figured out it didn't show everything, but stopped a about 5 nodes from the main current one. The graph is also pretty ugly.
Maybe they improved it since, but the Zim graphing capabilities just didn't even compare to foam's last time I tried it.
I'm using Confluence for note taking and as a diary and it works pretty well (search functionality is beyond abysmal), compared to all the other options I've tried.
But this one is the first desktop application which is really interesting and could have become my solution for these tasks. I'll definitely keep it installed and try it out.
I used to love zim! I used it for a few years, but when i started travelling for work, it became tough to keep up with notes since i really needed a mobile client. Nowadays, it feels like 50% of my notes are captured while on the go, so a mobile client is now by far absolutely required for my workflow. I still give zim team lots of love, but just doesn't fill my needs as it used to.
I actually have my own little nextcloud instance running on a $5/month digital ocean virtual private server. My intent was for family (only 3 people) and i to use it...but honestly, most of the time it is only me. I draft conventional old text files (though i do use markdown)...and save the files in a nextcloud folder to enable sync anywhere. For actually synching and drafting of the text/note files, i have the nextcloud mobile app as well as the nextcloud notes app on my phone (https://github.com/stefan-niedermann/nextcloud-notes)...so now i can jot down notes anywhere that i carry my phone. I do lack some advanced features that zim wiki would bring, like linkages, some color formatting, styles...but for my workflow i found them not to be ultra necessary anyway. Side note: i use nextcloud for general file synching, rss/feed reading, and other functions...so it was not setup only/specifically for notes...the note taking just came along as an extra benefit. Any headaches in managing my own nextcloud instance (and just like managing any of your own infrastructure, there are always costs), are outweighed by all the features that i legitimately use/benefit from nextcloud.
If you use nextcloud, you could also use other text editors on mobile phone like joplin, qOwnNotes, etc. - so you are not stuck only with the nextcloud notes app. Also, if you are not an adherent to open source software, my workflow can also be used via dropbox, box.com, onedrive, etc. too i suppose (you're just drafting notes on the road and saving them up to someone e;lse's server/cloud). I hope that helps!
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadAmazing application. Comparable and better than everything I've seen on hacker news over the years.
My only complaint is no mobile client, though markor can generate a Zim-Wiki file.
I find myself favoring self-hosted webapps over local running apps. It eliminates the "no client for X platform" problem while also providing syncing across devices.
No third party apps, just my version of sneaker-net.
Because it's written in python it is comparatively easy to extend and through its integrated web server you can serve up your notes with a custom design in no time.
This might be a little odd but I get a very “homey” vibe from the program, like, there are parts that aren’t as polished and improvements are slow and steady over the years, but there’s something of personal touch that makes it charming to use.
Tables could just be HTML, but stuff like Gnuplot diagrams or GraphViz graphs need to store their input data aswell as the actual rendered image.
Even better, it stores everything in plain Markdown files in a folder hierarchy, so you can easily back everything up and/or interact with them outside the app if need be.
Even EVEN better, they have mobile apps that are perfectly happy to let you use your own file-syncing mechanism if you want to (although they do offer a sync service of their own as well.) Once I got it set up, everything Just Worked.
That solves writing. I find it actually works because phone notes tend to be write only — little snippets of information that record something important and never get edited again once they are written, to be turned into a “real” note at a later date, once in a system that supports “real editing”.
For reading notes I dump everything onto a personal website.
[0] https://github.com/zimfw/zimfw
[1] https://ohmyz.sh/
[0] https://wiki.openzim.org/wiki/OpenZIM
I wrote about it some years back on my ugly blog: https://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2013/12/tech-tool-tidbit-zim...
[edit. It said I turned many people into it which assumes that there are people out there who are Zims. Space invaders notwitstanding.]
There are a few quirks I've gotten used to over the years though:
- Pasting code will be garbled or auto-create tags unless you use the source view plugin or paste verbatim.
- Takes a little configuration out of the box to get just right, system dependencies, links opening in right browser, plugins, shortcuts, fonts. But once you get streamlined it just works.
- The syntax feels a little strange to me but I rarely need to edit raw files. I could also export to Markdown if I ever wanted to migrate.
My last tip, templates are awesome. I have ones for all kinds of things, like interviewing, 1-1s, and architecture design outline.
0. https://www.horstmuc.de/wmem.htm
"Do not parse input as wikicode" https://bugs.launchpad.net/zim/+bug/585300
"Option to disable all autolinking" https://bugs.launchpad.net/zim/+bug/585301
The syntax selection dropdown isn't great though. I wish I could type-to-search in it.
Do you know of any other app that is even close? I had Scrivener on my Mac for writing, but it didn't work well for project management/note taking.
Markdown solutions are there, but nothing as cohesive as OneNote as far as I have found.
https://www.voodoopad.com
Recently I updated my setup to use syncthing for syncing between my desktop, laptop, and my Android phone. On my phone I use Markor, an open source app that supports the Zim markup format (along with Markdown and some others). I've been pretty happy with this setup.
How happy are you with Markor on the phone? Is it good enough to edit your Zim files on the go or are there any bigger down sites?
I do have some issues making nested check box lists (maybe I need to review the Zim syntax) and it's not clear if you can add images. Mostly I review and update my todo items, read notes, and write small notes. For that I've been pretty happy with it.
And syncthing is great.
I've been looking at Logseq and Obsidian recently.
Keep coming back to my beloved Zim.
Super extensible without being overwhelming.
I do my personal notes, my blogging, my course website and even my Slides (instead of Powerpoint) with it.
Obsidian: faster rate of change, Markdown, closed source, aesthetics
Zim: stable, open source, aesthetics, not Markdown
[zim-github]: https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki
[proprietary]: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/4
So Occams razor might just be "I'm more used to it;" though there might be an argument for Obsidian growing too slick too quickly? It's got a LOT going on and looks like its flashier and has more features, perhaps too many for me. Also, if mobile is at all important, you probably want Obsidian.
- Not a service. This has to be durable and portable.
- Backed primarily by git and plaintext files, not a database. Explorable and manageable on the filesystem.
- Markdown
- Hyperlinks to articles that show up red if the page doesn't exist (yet). If a page is renamed, all hyperlinks to it must automatically update.
- Multiple tags / categories can be added to any page. Bonus if it supports hierarchical categories. These get indexed and can be bulk managed. When pages are updated and their tags change, the system automatically handles the bookkeeping.
- Indexed fuzzy search better than grep
- Server + browser interface (mobile friendly). It should also support editing from the browser and saving back to git.
- Native desktop app. Less important, but also enforces that git, files, and a simple set of indices are the core data model.
- Sync over git / github with easy diff fixing
- Publish to a public or private website. Bonus if statically rendered snapshots are supported.
- Despite all of the ancillary indices and support mechanisms, it must remain CLI/vim editing friendly. Indexes and links should update as a post commit hook or async job
- Images and media can be uploaded to a secondary service that handles indexing, hosting, backups, and thumbnail generation. This is a whole set of concerns all on its own.
tl;dr: git + markdown data model with a bunch of bookkeeping, indexing, and tooling on the side
I haven't found a good fit yet, but I haven't explored the entire space. I might just write it one of these days.
Definitely looking for recommendations!
Edit: thanks for the suggestions! :)
it's basically a clone of Roam Resarch as a vscode extension that uses Markdown.
It's markdown, has a desktop app (vscode), since it's just markdown you can put it all in git with easy diffs, vscode allows you to search the entire project for words, it has tags. It even has a window to see your notes as a star map where you see the links between the different markdown files, but they also recently added tags to that starmap.
You also get to use other extensions compatible with markdown like render inline plantuml and stuff like that, which is what is the nicest about it being markdown.
If you're serious about making your own, I would consider contributing to FOAM's project instead.
- It's a product, not a service (they do offer their own paid syncing service though)
- It is backed by plaintext: markdown files in folders. As for Git, I'm pretty sure you could use it easily- and I noticed there's also a community-supported Git integration plugin [2].
- Just tested link renaming, it's there.
- It does have a tagging system. I haven't used it extensively enough to see if the rest of your requirements are met, but it seems very thorough.
- The desktop and mobile clients do support full-text search. Not sure how it's indexed but it is quite fast.
- Server + browser interface: unfortunately, it doesn't look like this is the case out of the box, but since the files are Just Markdown On A Filesystem I feel like you could probably just have a completely unrelated server to make changes to them.
- Native desktop app: hate to break the news, but the desktop app is Electron. That being said, it's extremely snappy and doesn't seem like a complete memory hog. (A cursory check of Activity Monitor says it's got four processes running, using 127 MB, 73 MB, 55MB, and 11.8MB.)
- Sync over git/github- again, community supported, but the plugin [2] looks quite solid and offers plenty of the kind of features you might like. I would also note that because everything's just Markdown files, other syncing mechanisms like Dropbox or iCloud "just work". They have a mobile app as well, and seamless iCloud syncing has been the killer feature for me.
- Publishing is an interesting one. They do have a paid service which allows you to "publish" vaults, which basically means they do the static rendering and then host it for you. It looks like their static rendering gives the published version of a vault a "table of contents" pane and other stuff. I imagine it wouldn't be too tricky to do this oneself, and you could possibly even integrate it into the editor.
- So, CLI/Vim editing works like a dream. I just edited a file from Vim and immediately saw it updated in the desktop and mobile apps. Updating backlinks works in the app just fine, but simply moving files around in the filesystem doesn't update backlinks.
- Yeah, this kinda is a whole concern of its own, but for what it's worth: images and media are stored in the same directory structure as Markdown files, and can be embedded into a "note" via linking. (like ![[imagename.jpg]]). So I imagine you could keep them in a separate directory that's gitignored or something like that.
1: https://obsidian.md/
2: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git
Thank you for sharing!
It has the hackability of emacs but can run anywhere a browser can ( both online and offline ). And of course, an active community and ecosystem built around it.
[0] https://tiddlywiki.com/
Needing a browser is definitely not a positive. The website taking two seconds to load even when in cache while zim is absolutely instant even on potato PC neither.
Last time (a few weeks ago) I tried rclone with WebDAV. I do what the instructions say, I get a local web site where I can open the empty.hmtl, I do the basic setup, write a tiddler, it says "Saved" and the empty.html is still pristine and never gets written.
The times before that I tried several other ways documented on their web site, but failed with all of them. git? Only GitHub (and GitLab) seem to be supported, not my own git repo. Or SourceHut.
Cloud connectors? Which of the three? I've tried at least one of them, didn't work.
https://github.com/bachmeil/tiddlyd
[0] https://tiddlywiki.com/static/Installing%2520TiddlyWiki%2520...
Also see https://tiddlywiki.com/#WebServer and https://www.npmjs.com/package/tiddlywiki
I haven't yet gotten around to properly hosting the source code publicly, but it's just a single python file that I run locally. To actually replicate the wikis between my devices, I use Syncthing. I'll be happy to put the source code up if folks are interested...it'll probably take only an hour or so.
I don't care to evaluate which plugin will actually _save_ my data. That's a pretty fundamental operation in my opinion, and the fact that I have to evaluate and choose from one of 13 options does not instill a lot of faith that my data will not be lost.
AFAIK there is a single default. Just use that. If you need more features you can go down that rabbit whole but I think tiddlywiki is very usable without any modifications like you're describing.
> The next step is to choose a method for saving changes. There's a wide variety of methods available, with different features and limitations.
But my concern with Tiddlywiki is extracting the data if needed, there was a time when my wiki had some file issues and lucky that I was able to recover without sorting the files manually.
Just open the tiddlywiki in your text editor. All your tiddlers are neatly filed away at the bottom. It's that simple.
In fact, I had a folding expression in vim which folded everything neatly, and allowed one to just navigate between tiddlers, all in vim.
If its that simple to interactively browse through the data without running the javascript "engine", then you can see how trivial it is to pull out any or all tiddlers, on demand, out of the tiddlywiki.
Hope that helps
Maybe they improved it since, but the Zim graphing capabilities just didn't even compare to foam's last time I tried it.
But this one is the first desktop application which is really interesting and could have become my solution for these tasks. I'll definitely keep it installed and try it out.
If you use nextcloud, you could also use other text editors on mobile phone like joplin, qOwnNotes, etc. - so you are not stuck only with the nextcloud notes app. Also, if you are not an adherent to open source software, my workflow can also be used via dropbox, box.com, onedrive, etc. too i suppose (you're just drafting notes on the road and saving them up to someone e;lse's server/cloud). I hope that helps!