Writing.Com General Discussion

Hi Graham,
I use Scrivener to write too, mainly for the versatility of the output, but it's clean and easy to use and non-distracting. It also allows me to work in a disjointed way - I don't, but I dislike programs that don't allow me to ... I'm weird like that.

You didn't mention your platform, so stand-by for helpful suggestions from folks who use an operating system that's quite alien to you.

I use Windows, and earlier this year I discovered an application called Zim-Wiki, available for Windows and various flavours of Linux. There is a small bug in the latest version, so I use a slightly older version (0.65 - still available on the site).

Installing a wiki is usually a painful and complex process even for knowledgable gurus, but Zim comes as a stand-alone application - there is even a portable version so you can run it from a USB stick.

Zim is absolutely fantastic for creating structured notes quickly and easily - notes that are searchable and can be embedded with hyperlinks to other pages (sub-pages, super-pages or sibling-pages). These hyperlinks update automatically if you move pages around. You can create a new page simply by adding a link to it. You can add a page by typing +page_name, using CamelCase, using back-references such as :new_tree/new_sibling etc. into your text - these are all automatically converted into hyperlinks. New pages don't actually exist until you type something into them.

You can create bullet lists by typing an asterisk+space as the first characters on a line, and numbered lists in a similar fashion using a number as the first character. You can also create checkboxes, and if these are dated, you can create todo items. Clicking the TaskList icon on the menu bar will collate all the todo items in the wiki and sort them by date or priority for you.

The ease with which you can create structured notes and, using the hyperlinks or the tree-view in the left pane (just like Scrivener), jump from one page to another, makes it ideal for making notes for projects. There is a video on the screen-shots page which quickly shows how easy it is to use.

Best of all, it keeps all its pages in simple text files rather than a database, so backing up (for me) is as simple as copying the folder with the data to a memory stick.

http://www.zim-wiki.org