 Hello everybody, welcome back to the channel Today I'm going to be taking a look at an application for note-taking called Zim or more accurate It's gonna be one of those days where I can't talk accurately called Zim wiki So I think everyone who takes notes Is always on the search for the best note-taking app ever or for whatever platform they're on and I'm like that too for a lot of my applications and Zim is the one that I've settled on as being the best one for me now Later on I'm gonna talk a little bit about Why it may not be the best for everybody, but let's first jump into what Zim wiki is So this is the github page bit and this is the web page here It says Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages each page contains links to other pages simple formatting and images Basically what Zim is is a graphical a GUI version of Vim wiki now if you're familiar with them wiki Vim wiki is basically well Let's just show you this is what then what wiki looks like it's a Application or plug-in within Vim that allows you to create a Structure Let's see if I can find what the structure actually looks like basically you create links and it creates wiki files From an index into child links like this one here Oops as you can tell I don't use nerd treat all that often and wiki it's down here So you can see here It just creates that wiki documents or whatever and And you can go in and press enter or whatever and use markdown to Format your notes. It's very simple And it's a it's it's a good option if you're stuck in them all the time and I do use them quite often but there are some Advantages that a GUI has over it for note-taking specifically images and actual formatting so if you look at this this is just mark down, right and Really you can see that it's marked on if you want to see it look like if you want this to actually look like a headline you'd have to have a Markdown preview or you'd have to publish it into HTML and You know that's an extra step. So That's what's basically what then wiki is but then wiki looks like is this here and this is just that you know your standard in In the main window here, you just have a standard text editor Nothing really special and I'm gonna show you some how to some of the Ways you go through and edit, you know and use markdown in order to create format and stuff I get in here in a second, but your biggest draw here is going to be your file structure over here as you can see you can Have me when you first start out the program you only have home and then you create Links and that shows up either as a main or a top level Style page, I guess is what you'd call it or if you use a plus like let's see this plus It becomes a child so it's very simple and Now let's go ahead and go home here and I'll just show you how to create a link So you can do it two ways if you want it to be a top level page you use colon the link Very simple and then just enter and then if you click on that You'll see now we have a link here at the top level and we can do whatever we want to it Or we can Delete this here go back home and you can see it by deleting it actually removed the link Which is very nice if you want to do a multi word link? You have to use brackets kind of like you do in FIM only there's a keyboard shortcut for so so plus this is a child link and Then control R and that creates a file that is a child to home and And basically the rest of it is just marked down. So if you want to use you want to create a H1 heading 2 equals this is a H1 heading and 3 equals this is H2 4 equals this is H3 and so on lists are just asterisks Words are hard. There's nothing I can do about that. Anyways, you know and then list item and list item and You can do numbered same, you know, just as number Yeah, you know just like that you can also do Like if you wanted to use Zim as your Like to do lists just two brackets and list item And so on and then you can actually go through and you can you check this off market is not done I think that marks it as important and then just back to the normal you can do that So that's basically the basic idea behind markdown and as you can see unlike in then wiki Once you've done the markdown and hit you know enter or space Depending on what you're doing it goes through and actually formats those the thing that you're on So instead of having to deal with just basically plain text you have the actual format now You can also add images you can do it two ways you can go through and you can You can copy and paste or you excuse me. You can just drag and drop and You can do that or you can go through and create a link using the attachment file like this and And and then that just puts a link in there instead of putting the actual thing now one of the things I wish that really wish that it would Be better at is when you have an actual image in your your notes being able to like say I wanted to resize this the only way you can resize it is Right-clicking edit properties and then type in the pixels with the height. That's very efficient I just want to be able to drag, you know a handle or whatever And I understand it's not meant for Image manipulation or anything, but being able to resize something would be very nice So my notes here some of the things that this has so one of the great things is you can you can go through and edit You know your page or whatever and then just leave it you don't have to worry about saving it a lot of the times It'll remember your position. It doesn't always remember your position, which is great. I'm by position I mean where you've scrolled on the page I think you have to be on there for a certain amount of time in order for it to save it. Let's see No, I don't know I've already exhibited the linking mark down in several different flavors. This does have spell checking my spell checking doesn't work That's something wrong with my computer. I'm not sure what's going on there as an equation editor if you're doing math of some kind I'm not I've never I haven't explored that at all you can use calendar pages like this This is basically where I keep you know a daily journal This is a plug-in. So if you want to um, I believe it's through clothes, maybe not It's must be in the preferences Plugins, yeah right here. So it has a whole bunch of plugins. You can just you know activate what however you want and I haven't checked through all these but you Creates table of contents that you can use different tags task lists tray icons Especially if you're using it on Mac that tree that track I'm probably probably be really cool Insert screen shot I do that quite a bit so I can just you know hit the C insert screen shot and it will actually go through and let you can capture and then it'll embed it into your notes Which is really cool basically, I believe that uses That might be that might be just a Goofy of scrawl. I'm not sure We talked about the task list dialogue and you can one of the things another things I haven't looked at is how to use this as a Website server or web server if you go up here you can go through and Where is it I just don't get right here start web server I'm not sure exactly sure how to go about do that. There's a there is documentation What's one of the things that's great about this is that if you go here and go to You know just key bindings it actually opens a Like its own notebook of documentation and it's this is all local so you don't have to worry about you know losing the website or whatever Shows you everything you need to know about how to create links and Importing exporting files and stuff. So one of the things is we looked a little bit when we're in VimWiki about how Then wiki stores files. They're all that wiki files. They're pretty much only readable by them wiki Course there's an update. There's always an update. All right. Anyways, so if we go into our notebook section And do an LS you just see this is basically the notebook that I was in and You know each of those top level pages is a directory and each low The lowest level is always at just a dot txt file. So if I go into say Journal and CD 20 20 10 You can just see the days of the month there and they're just dot txt files And so theoretically if you want it if you had a whole bunch of say you've been keeping a journal for a long time You could just take those from your other file put them in here as dot txt files and make sure they have that same Folder structure and it should show right up in in Vim. I haven't tested that to make sure it works that way But I'm pretty sure it does What so one of the things that I really probably my biggest gripe with this is that you can't have multiple Notebooks open at the same time. So if I now that I'm here in the the Documentation I actually have to go up here open another notebook Notes, okay, and to get back to where I was and that's That's a little annoying I really wish because it if you were able to have multiple notebooks open at the same time It would allow you to have say I could have all this stuff in one notebook and then I could you know Collapse it when I want not using that notebook and Still have it open there for easy use But I wouldn't have it because when this stuff's all open, you know, it can be You know, it just takes up a lot of room, right? So that's one thing I really wish that it would do and it doesn't do that which is disappointing Let's see here. So I Had a script here, but I decided not to follow it Following script is it scripts is for losers Anyway, so I've kind of explained why not then wiki basically For the the reason why I like prefer Zim over then wiki is because of images and because of the formatting allows it The markdown to be automatically translated into actual formatting, which is good I've gone about things that we can improve so the only thing left to do is to talk a little bit about how I It's kind of changed my workflow I'm not a big outliner, but as you can tell I write fan fiction. I also write original fiction And I've never been a big outliner. This has changed that because not only is it I'd go so far as to call it fun, but it's also Something that I can just keep open on one of my monitors all the time and it allows me to put in You know ideas. I got you know a note section here that I don't actually I just actually started because I've been actually going through and Creating specific places for specific kind of notes like you know Linux cast scripts and video scripts and things like things like that It makes it so much easier and just the organization of it just has completely changed the way I take notes now Finally the last thing why this isn't Great for everyone is that This is basically siloed onto your computer There's no real way of getting your notes from here to your like your phone or and you know You know your tablet or whatever now because they are text files You could theoretically take that your notebook folder and put it on your phone or whatever and Have it like a regular text editor and it would work. It's not gonna unless it's also a markdown editor It's not gonna translate the formatting, but it might But it's not gonna be This it's not gonna be Zim. There's no way to transfer from Zim to Zim Unless it's just between computer So if you have two computers and they both have them on you could theoretically share the notebooks folder and it worked fairly well I think So that's so if you're somebody who use takes a lot of notes and you need them to be synced across devices Ever know or simple noted job that are probably the best solutions this one here. I think works best because of Organizational leave being able to create links be able to create tags by you know tag and You know That allows you to search easily for different things. It does have a fairly mediocre search There's not a lot of advanced search here, which is disappointing Other than that, I really like Zim so I will leave the links in the description so you can check it out yourself Yeah, if you tolerated this video this long give me a Hit the subscribe button and the little bell icon. I don't expect anybody to actually do that giving this my first video And I'm just Just starting out So thanks for listening and we'll see you next time