I'm testing out using
vimwiki, yes, a
Vim script, as a notes program to keep some information synced between my netbook and my desktop. Keeping some notes in
Dropbox so they can be accessed from two different machines shouldn't be an exercise in rocket science, yet this been an annoyance for a while. I've looked at some other programs to do this:
- Tomboy, which is a pretty good program. It relies on Mono. I don't have many philosophical problems with Mono. (Hey, if Microsoft want to support open source .NET, cool.) It's just that a huge pile of Mono needs to be installed for Tomboy to work, and I want to try to keep my netbook free of big, big, big programs. Especially big, big, big programs that use Microsoft-type technology.
- Gnote is a reimplementation of Tomboy using C++ instead of mono. It's as great as Tomboy, only less filling. The problems that I had with it was that Gnote (and Tomboy) want to put the note files in a fixed location. A fixed location that is not in my Dropbox directory. I want that location to be somewhere in the ~/Dropbox directory, so that both of my machines can work with the files. I tried to use a symbolic link to relocate the files to the Dropbox, and it seemed to work, at least for a while, before it screwed up. Data was lost. No fun. Definitely my bad. Possibly this will work in a future version. It may even work now, for all I know. Cleaning up the mess was a pain and I don't want to do it again, so I'm avoiding these programs.
- Zim is yet another note program, this time implemented in Python. I like Python. It seems pretty good, and I can easily put the notes into my Dropbox folder. The problem that I have is the netbook version is older than the desktop version and can't easily find and read all the files created by the desktop version. The newer version on the desktop machine keeps wanting to uprev the files created on the netbook. They just can't get along. I tried to install the newer version on my netbook but that's a NOP. I get this error message:
Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: python-support (>= 0.90.0)
Since the system uses Python for, well, I dunno, probably something important, I'm not messing with it.
- Viki/Deplate is another vim script that provides wiki capabilities. I did not have a happy experience with it. I installed it, and a few other scripts that it depends on my machine. Let's just say that I had troubles with it. As the author so helpfully points out:
See :help vimball for details. Also, make sure to read |viki-customization|. If you have difficulties to install this plugin or if you use vim 7.0, please make sure to use the current version of vimball (vimscript #1502).
I did RTFM. It was like beating my head against the Great Wall of Vim. Guys, I just want to use a script, not study Vim scripting. This thing should just work out of the box.
- vimwiki is the current contender. So far, so good. It allows you to choose where it will save the notefiles, and selecting my Dropbox directory was not a problem. I can look in the directory and see and open the files. The files are plain text files, readable by darn near anything. I like this. I'm going to play with this for a while. We'll see how it goes.
