Zim (Local notebook)

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1

Website

Short description

Zim is a graphical text editor and personal wiki that can be used as a personal knowledge base or notebook. Pages are stored locally in a folder structure in plaintext. Zim is available on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Why I think this tool should be added

Privacy Guides currently doesn’t recommend any local knowledge base tools except Org-mode for Emacs which isn’t really ideal for non-programmers or anyone who doesn’t use Emacs. Zim is fully graphical and user-friendly but is still lightweight and doesn’t use Electron (all of the recommended cloud-based notebooks with desktop apps do).

Zim is open source and supports exporting documents into HTML, Markdown, and other formats. The rest of the minimum criteria doesn’t apply since Zim doesn’t support cloud sync.

Although some of the cloud-based notebooks PG currently recommends may work offline, I still think offline-only notebooks should be recommended for those who prefer not to have cloud sync at all. As aformentioned, all of the cloud recommendations either use Electron or are web-only and there are plenty of reasons to avoid Electron like security issues and bloat issues.

Relevant issue: Local Knowledgebase Tools (Obsidian, Logseq, Trilium) - #24 by Ozzy

Section on Privacy Guides

Notebooks (Local notebooks)

2

Looks interesting. The fact that their website was made using Zim itself seems to be a good sign.

3

Although not explicity recommended, the PG site is available as a .zim asset. I interpret this as some level of endorsement :slight_smile:

I imagine lack of encryption compared to other options is why it is not recommended.

4

The criteria only list any cloud sync being E2EE on the minimum. Local encryption is listed under “best case.”

5

I think the zim file format is unrelated to this application.

1 Like
6

I don’t think lack of encryption is a concern here since Zim works entirely offline, and if needed, separate encryption tools could be used.

Looks like Org mode supports encryption.

7

There’s a third-party plugin that can encrypt a selection of text in Zim but other than that, from their FAQ:

Zim notebooks do not support encryption or password protection natively. However, you can use for example encfs to encrypt your notebooks.

Note that encfs isn’t maintained but there are other tools like the ones PG recommends.

8

I’m using Zim, syncing files via syncthing, so don’t care about E2EE. There is no Android app, but Markor can work with those a bit. I don’t write notes on my phone, only read, so I don’t care about missing features.

I’ve tried and used many different notebooks over the years (OneNote, Standard Notes, Joplin, Obsidian, Zettlr, CherryTree, QOwnNotes…) and have realized that Zim is the one that suits me best.

1 Like
9

The only downside I have with Zim other than no E2EE (which again isn’t a dealbreaker) is it uses it’s own obscure format for editing instead of using markdown which isn’t a dealbreaker but requires a bit of learning, and files can be exported to different formats.