If you know me you probably know I have been using Zim for years to organize notes. It is billed as a “Desktop Wiki”. In the Zim group someone mentioned OutWiker as another interesting program. It is billed as “the tree notes organizer”. And, yes, it is interesting.
OutWiker is, certainly, a tool for organizing notes in a tree structure and even allows attachments. It looks pretty cool. And, like Zim, it is written in Python. And, like most interesting software these days, it was not done in the U.S.
Am I about to abandon Zim for OutWiker? Not a chance. But, you might. OutWiker is full of features. It does way more than Zim. For me, that is exactly what I wrong with it. Much like using the vi editor, you can do virtually everything using key sequences. Unlike vi, they are easy to learn — things such as control-B for bold, control-I for italic and control-L to add a link. Some things are even easier such at starting a line with an asterisk followed by a space to start a bulleted list.
The reason this works for me is that when I am entering stuff I don’t want to take my hands off the keyboard and I don’t want to have to think about a lot of commands. I want to just type. With minimal learning I can do just that. You can then go back and fix things and even export in HTML. It’s just easy.
I do know some people who want more than Zim offers. I am suggesting OutWiker may be the tool they want.