Zim - A Desktop Wiki

Zim is a WYSIWYG text editor written in Gtk2-Perl. It aims to bring the concept of a wiki to your desktop. Every page is saved as a text file with wiki markup. Pages can contain links to other pages, and are saved automatically. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a non-existing page. Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as wiki text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature you can switch between pages and follow links while editing without worries. There is a saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words", so Zim screenshots can be viewed here. By the way, the Zim website itself is maintained using Zim.

Installing Zim
Zim can be downloaded and installed from source but if you happen to be using Ubuntu 9.04, Zim can be installed from the Ubuntu software repositories with the command:

$ sudo apt-get install zim

Getting Started
When you run Zim for the first time, the first thing you need to do is to add a notebook. This means that you need to tell Zim in which directory you want to store your pages.

When you open a newly created notebook you get an empty page titled "Home". You can just start typing on this page. Don't worry about saving because this is done automatically.

Now you can use the items in the Format menu or their corresponding keybindings to make text bold or italic. A special format type is "Link" which highlights a word as a hyperlink and you'll notice that this new page is generated on the fly.

Once you have several pages you can navigate them like you would in a web browser. There are buttons and keybindings for going Back, Forward or Home.

It is also possible to order your pages into namespaces. The namespace separator is the colon ":" character. So when you use this character as part of a page name, the name will be split at that point. The tree in the side pane will show a hierarchy of namespaces when you use this.

After you have edited some pages you might want to have a look at how they are saved. Use your file browser to open the notebook directory. As you will see there is a simple text file corresponding to each page. These text files are formatted with wiki format to preserve markup.

Zim Documentation
The Zim website includes the manual and a FAQ. The manual is neatly organized with sections for:

• Commandline options
• Notebooks
• Linking
• Autoformatting
• Exporting
• Searching
• Keybindings
• Wiki Syntax
• Version Control
• Application preferences
• Notebook and page properties
• Plugins
• Profiles
• Config files
• Color styles

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