Hi all, I recently rediscovered Zim and its new Python version. I'm excited by the rapid progress that's being made and I'm looking forward to using it more.
I've been using Evernote for quite a while, mainly as a web clipper, because with a few clicks and a few keystrokes I can capture a snippet of text, quickly tag it with several tags, and be done. The desktop client doesn't work in Linux, but the Web interface has been good enough, and the new version is much better. I also like being able to email notes and photos to it from my phone, and the mobile versions are nice. I haven't tried the Zim Firefox extension yet, but I will sometime. However, my thoughts are more general than the specific features between Evernote and Zim. Let me use as an example something I use Evernote for extensively: collecting quotes. I've always found quotes interesting, and over the years I've collected them on paper, in Newton, Basket, Zim, Evernote, etc. Aside from concerns about its being closed and proprietary, I find Evernote to be the best at doing this because it stores small snippets of text separately, with individual metadata. I can view a list of "notes" in a summary view which shows the title of the note and the first part of the note's text. I can select tags, like "funny" or "inspiring", and see a list of quotes that have those tags. Zim now supports tags, and I think it's handy how tags can be put anywhere in a note, right next to the text they apply to. However, in this scenario, I think it would be much less useful. Storing individual quotes as individual pages in Zim would result in separate files on-disk for each one. If, for example, I wanted to see all quotes tagged "funny", I could select the "quotes" and "funny" tags in the tag cloud, but then I'd see a list of pages in the small list view below the tag cloud, with no metadata, no sorting, no summary, etc. If I stored all quotes in one page in Zim, then if I searched for the "funny" tag, I'd just get the Quotes page as a result, and I'd have to Find through the page for "@funny", with no sorting, no metadata for individual quotes, etc. I'm not sure how to reconcile this other than simply saying that Zim doesn't seem to handle this use case very well. Perhaps some different UI widgets would be handy, like a page-list that could occupy the top half of the window, above the note-editing/viewing widget, next to the index pane. It would resemble a mail client in this configuration, but it could display some metadata and a summary for each page. But I still wonder if, after storing several thousand short snippets of text, if this would not be very efficient in memory and on disk, and if it would cause Zim to load slowly. I also wonder about some of the ways Emacs Org-mode works, how it parses text into individual items with separate metadata and presents different views of the items. It would be very interesting if Zim had some of this functionality, although I wonder if, in this use case again, parsing a long page of text into several thousand small items would be very inefficient. I wonder if a SQLite database would be more apt to this situation (not that I'm necessarily suggesting that Zim use SQLite instead of files). How does Zim's index handle this right now? I'd love it if Zim could do some of the things Evernote does, but it seems like it would require some fairly fundamental changes. Thanks for your thoughts. Keep up the good work, everyone! Zim has a bright future. Adam _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~zim-wiki Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~zim-wiki More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
