Saturday, November 6, 2010

Started keeping notes with Zim

I have been having a lot of problems keeping track of the things I have learnt. My todo lists are always a mess and without them my days feel like a mess. So, I have decided to look for a simple note making tool which has some good wiki capabilities. My first search for 'wiki notes' was in the Ubuntu Software Repository (I did not like Tomboy which came with Meerkat). Zim was good enough. The manual is beautiful too. There is a GTD article and a plugin to handle ToDos (need to check these out).

The markup language was easy to learn. The feature I liked the most is clickable checkboxes which can be nested. Creating a todo list with checkboxes was simple. Notebooks, subpages can be created. Links can be added to pages within the wiki. There is an option to start a server which serves the whole wiki. Pages can be exported to html or latex. I wish to work with LaTeX sometime.

Some good alternatives are Basket, Tiddlywiki, Tiddly Backpack. The first impression is that Zim is minimal and sufficient. I will check that Basket out if my needs demand so. I have also started experiments with the post-it notebook that has been in the shelf for a while.

Pen and Paper still work for me for small notes. But, for keeping learn logs, todo lists- Zim for now. The first day with self-created todo in Zim was successful, I should say, because 'writing a blog' was one of the tasks.

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