Strolling on the Internet I’ve came across a very interesting program called Zim. It’s a very simple WYSIWYG desktop wiki, writen in GTK2-Perl.
Now, I’ve been using the apache/php/mysql/mediawiki combination in my desktop machine for a while, and I’ve found it to be a kinda of an overkill for what I wanted to achieve, which was a way to keep my documents organized in a simple fashion. Zim fitted like a glove.
It features a simple text area where you enter your text and a side panel on the left which shows the hierarchy of the pages you created (the pages can be organized by the use of name spaces). It uses wiki syntax to format the text in a very spartan like maner (links, images, bold, italics, underline, strike through, lists and 5 types of headings), so far you are not able to select custom fonts, change the font size and use different font colors. The data is automatically saved, similar to to Gnome’s Tomboy note taking application. It’s appearance allows you to navigate like a browser, going forward and backward, back to your “home” page, etc…. It has a spellcheck plugin which uses gtkspell, it’s good, but doesn’t allows you to choose which language you want to use the spellchecker with.
There are some ready made binary packages for zim, in it’s download area, but building it is rather trivial, instructions can be found on site (I really recommend installing all optional requirements to build stuff like it’s spellchecker and tray icon support). It supports Linux, BSD and Windows.
Here is Zim’s home page address: http://www.pardus.nl/projects/zim/. The only available version at the time of this writing is 0.5, even thou it considers itself a beta software, I have found it fitting and very stable, so far nothing has happened.
Cheers,
S.
