zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Evgeny Kurbatov <EvgenyKurbatov@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone!

I use Zim for a two years for short notes only.  Although I'd like
to exist the common way for storing any kind of documents, contacts,
e-mails, notes, associating it with each other, Zim is not the proper
way to do this (yet, but I hope some day).  There are some methods to
organize data oriented to one particular task: Eviolution is good for
e-mail, contacts, and calendar; Nautilus is good for files; Referencer
is good for articles and for notes but with restrictions (as Nautilus
btw); a lot of CMS like Drupal and Joomla with using plugins like
DOCman are good but are heavyweight.  Only Google moves to the side of
the total data integration.  However the Google way is the web way and
it is not the proper way sometimes, moreover even Google is too far from
that.  

Unlike CMS where data storage structure is hidden from the user in
binary database, Zim uses the file system as the database.  In such a db
the text notes have favor position over the data stored in other
formats.  This is consistent with the idea of Zim, but complicates an
integration of other data formats to Zim, the latest threads in this
mailing list have faced the issue.  I propose to slightly shift accents
to hold different data in more uniform way.  In future this can differ
the concept Zim stands on but rise it to a new level.

The idea is simply the integration of Zim's database into a user's
directory tree.  Every directory in the tree will hold a file named e.g.
'.zimlocal' containing associations of files and directories with some
data type.  In a simplest case a data type is the mark "notes page" or
"folder" in terms of Zim.  As it is hard to distinguish the notes and
ordinary files, the direct marking of them is the good case.  The
non-marked files just places where they are, they can be attached to
notes or not.  Every note page has familiar Zim's format so we don't
need to change the engine much.  In a more general case '.zimlocal'
files can hold the links between files bypassing or alternating the
links in notes pages.  In addition there may be received a new way to
browse data in Zim: in the left panel where the folders' tree is shown,
can be the file and directory tree.  We can look further and see
additional plugins allowing to deal with vCards, vCalendars, maildirs
etc.  With this way we'll can associate contacts, e-mails, comments,
documents, calendar milestones etc.  It may result a kinda OS :)

As for me, right now I strongly need a way to store comments with links
for a big collection of an articles and books, and I don't need to
separate this collection from the rest of files in my projects.  The
Referencer which is used for now is not good for this.  I hope my
suggestion will not seem useless to you, or too complicated.  Jaap,
you're doing a great job.  Let's make a brainstorm and figure out
something good.


Regards,
Evgeny Kurbatov