Zim Desktop Wiki -- observations and comparisons

Posted by marcus
Aug 5, 2014 at 12:30 AM

Dr Andus wrote:
>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.

Interesting word; Wikipedia defined it for me. Lately I appreciate skeumorphism in this context: computer notebooks imitating the appearance and organization of paper notebooks. I often find physical things (printed books and printed notes, especially if bound in a journal) easier to remember than things managed on-screen (or on loose papers). This is one of the reasons I find CT’s change of mode (view/edit) so hard to work with: one moment the text I’m focused on is under the second smaller heading, starting near the right side of the page, and spanning four lines; (switch to edit mode) the next moment it’s under the third equi-sized heading, starting near the left side of the page, and spanning two lines. I know there are things one can do to make this transition easier (like selecting the text you’re focused on, or customizing the syntax highlighting, or setting both modes to use the same font—but a monospace font good for editing, or a more readable font less suited to editing?), but all of them are just incomplete steps toward WYSIWYG.

Anyway, if I had a Mac I would definitely try Circus Ponies Notebook, which seems to imitate the feel of paper notebook even more thoroughly than OneNote. (In the end, I don’t know if I would like it. Certainly there are things I like in Zim, like backlinks, which go beyond physical skeuomorphism.)

>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.

Thanks for reminding me of this. Perhaps it’s easier to work with dated entries than I remember. I know I had done some customization in the past to set up a journal in ConnectedText which behaved the way I liked, but perhaps such work isn’t necessary for the purposes of achieving basic journal functions, such as I’ve found in Zim.

>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.

I can see how the things you mention could be advantages, and how the features you list could be useful for all sorts of things. However, for my present purposes (and in much of my past experience), they are almost purely distractions and impediments.