Keeping Notes

[PaulTech]

Hello, I had my main laptop die a few weeks ago and for whatever reason I moved to using a Manjaro/Gnome Linux distro installing it on another machine. This has revealed a host of open-source software choices. I previously had all my notes on WIkidpad but it's not being maintained and the linux support is gone. I went searching for another solution and discovered https://www.zim-wiki.org/downloads.html

I like it for many reasons:
A. It's a Wiki (if you've never used a WIKI for notes I highly recommend it.)
B. Zim Wiki uses a base folder and then creates sub-folders and txt docs as it is used. Even without the software the documents can be accessed with a text/word processing program.
C. I sync my files between devices so I'm not ham strung for whatever reason. Because of how ZIM-wiki works I can access my notes via ZIM on Windows, Linux or Mac (haven't tested on a Mac yet). Or I can just open the appropriate text file directly, for example on a smart device.

It may seem awkward at first but once you have the Aha moment I think you'll love it. I do recommend creating a test notebook first before committing to a structure. For example, I like a tree structure so I tend to use WikiWords to create sub-links instead of many root subjects that begin with a colon.

 

[britechguy]

Just curious, but why not create the actual data repository in cloud storage? I'd think it could either be accessed directly or synced by whatever the equivalent of something like Google Drive for PC might be.

That would seem to me to simplify things quite a bit.

 

[NJW]

Just curious, but why not create the actual data repository in cloud storage? I'd think it could either be accessed directly or synced by whatever the equivalent of something like Google Drive for PC might be.

Zim uses plain-text flat-file data storage, so it's trivial to sync the Zim folder structure to anywhere else – cloud, NAS, sneakernet, whatever. You then have both offline access and an alternative/backup source.