Zim
A desktop personal wiki with inline preview as-you-type and lots of plugins
- Free • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- BSD
...
What is Zim?
Zim brings the concept of a wiki to your desktop. Store information, link pages and edit with WYSISYG markup or directly typing some lightweight markup syntax and see it previewed as-you-type. Creating a new page is easy by either clicking on the "Create new note" button, by linking to a non-existing page or by writing a CamelCase name in any note. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, in plain text format with lightweight markup, and can have attachments (stored along the notes).
This tool can be used to keep track of TODO lists or ideas, to take notes during a meeting, to draft any other kind of text (blog entries, important mails, etc.) or to write long texts like lab research notebooks thank's to the headers structure and the table of content navigation.
Zim handles several types of formatting markup, like headings, bullet lists, checkbox, tables and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as a hybrid wiki/markdown text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature you can switch between pages and follow links or even close the software anytime while editing without worries. The interface also provides multi-document tabs, and it remembers the cursor position in all notes for quick resuming in your note taking endeavors.
This tool can be used to keep track of TODO lists or ideas, to take notes during a meeting, to draft any other kind of text (blog entries, important mails, etc.) or to write long texts like lab research notebooks thank's to the headers structure and the table of content navigation.
Zim handles several types of formatting markup, like headings, bullet lists, checkbox, tables and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as a hybrid wiki/markdown text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature you can switch between pages and follow links or even close the software anytime while editing without worries. The interface also provides multi-document tabs, and it remembers the cursor position in all notes for quick resuming in your note taking endeavors.
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Categories
Education & Reference • Office & ProductivityPlatform details
Mac: Require Terminal-based, system-wide changes.
Windows: Spell check and UI have some issues still
Tags
- hierarchy
- hierarchy-notes
- xfce
- getting-things-done
- latex-equation-editor
- convert-notes-to-html
- markdown-export
Lists containing Zim
My Windows Setup • Productivity - Note Taking and Notepad • ubuntu18.04GUI • Interesting Apps 2018Zim videos
Zim
Summary
Our users have written 30 comments and reviews about Zim, and it has gotten 441 likes
- Developed by Jaap G Karssenberg
- Open Source and Free product.
- Average rating of 3.9
- 273 alternatives listed
Popular alternatives
View allZim was added to AlternativeTo by Bharadhwaj on Apr 30, 2009 and this page was last updated Apr 27, 2021.
If you would like to sync your Zim wiki database between computers, but don't want to have the plain text version synced (e.g. because of Dropbox/GoogleDrive/OneDrive/Box privacy concerns), you can always save your Zim database file in an encrypted Vault using the excellent open source and cross-platform app Cryptomator.
Otherwise, you can sync using Spideroak, Tresorit, or pCloud's encrypted folder. All of these are end-to-end encrypted.
An additional benefit of using Cryptomator is that you can close Zim, lock the vault in Cryptomator and other users on the same computer won't be able to open or access your Zim database contents.
This solution should be included on the Zim FAQ page, which says that you can't have encryption. This is an easy and convenient solution.
Please send a mail to the devs, this is indeed a very good idea! Thank you for the report!
Reply written almost 5 years ago
Speaking of more or less notable feature differences. So, Wikidpad has got anchors, and can also make insertions (you insert content of one page into other, and it updates dynamically when you make changes to the page you inserted content from).
Zim hasn't got this; anchors are planned, but the works for them haven't even started yet.
On the other hand, Zim doesn't have HTML and preview modes, you work in one unified mode; no distorting of downscaled images; somewhat easier and faster work as you don't have to write code.
My personal verdict: if you don't yet have your wikis\notes, then Zim will be easier and faster start. But if you use WikidPad for a long time already and have lots of experience with it - no sense in switching to Zim, as WikidPad has slighly more capabilities.
Windows 10 Defender tags the installer as unsafe and won't allow it to be run.
Native interface in Gnome (rather than, for example, an electron app). The application provides the most useful personal knowledge management features and is much more mature than many similar applications (which shows in a good way). It's free and open source, which gives it an advantage.
I used markdown format and build wiki for my projects with MkDocs before, but Zim is much simpler solution (if you no need exactly online-wiki).
[Edited by luarocks, April 22]
Doesn't have Windows anymore unless you are able to build it from scratch. Yes, there is a good tutorial how to build the Windows-Version. However, it didn't work for me, never found out why.
I am now considering Joplin as a replacement albeit it lacks some feature I'd wish for but it is in very active development.
There is a note that the maintainer abandoned the Windows builds and offering to let someone else take over but it doesn't appear anyone did.
Reply written over 1 year ago
Just downloaded the windows version. It is the latest one, 0.73.2. Same version as the Linux version.
Reply written about 1 year ago
Excellent tool for note taking - the journaling features are also extremely good.
Data being stored as plain text makes life easy - I know that I'll be able to access my data in the future if I needed it. Cross compatibility between Windows and Linux is nice, though I struggle with macOS compatibility - though, as plain text, I can edit and view the files on this OS if really needed.