zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:26 PM, tsr <tsr@xxxxxx> wrote:
> I never noticed this before (I guess I'm trying to use zim in a new
> way), but it seems that zim only reads files with the .txt extension.
> Has it always been like this?

Yes, it has been like this for a long time already. We discussed this
extensively in the past following a proposal to make this extension a
new zim specific extension instead of ".txt".

> I would like to be able to browse a filetree (and plain-text edit any
> file in that filetree) with different kinds of files and also I would
> hate for zim to append .txt on files after editing them.

We need to distinguish between files that are pages and files that are
attachments, so we need some mechanism to detect files that are pages.

Main argument in the past to match files by extension was that I did
not want to mimetype every file because of the performance impact.
This has now become a much cheaper option with the introduction of the
index database in the 0.4x series.

Another problem is what to do in case of conflicts. E.g. you have  a
file "foo" which is a text files, and you have a file "foo.txt". Now
which one maps to the page "foo" in zim ? I'm willing to extend zim to
use other text files as well when this problem can be solved in a
reliable and intuitive way.

Also I imagine there are some text files you would want to be able to
attach in zim, but you do not want to edit in zim (e.g. ascii art
etc.). For those cases you want to detect they are not zim pages. This
can be done by checking the properties at the start of a zim page.
Nice to have would be to actually display text files that are not zim
pages but without the formatting (so plain text editor view). This
could than be extended to a source view similar to what cherrytree can
do (see previous discussion on this list).

> Is there a setting somewhere to change this or am I way out of bounds
> for this to be able with zim?

No setting available for this, but could be done with a small hack.
Look for example at the hack that was posted a few months ago on this
list for changing the file extension.

Regards,

Jaap