Three good NotePads

Recently I've been looking about for a good programme for keeping notes in of various things, and I've narrowed my list down to three, which are 'zim', 'KeepNote' and 'WikidPad'.

Zim

Zim can be found at http://www.zim-wiki.org and is in the Debian repos, but, do bear in mind that I'm running Debian testing and also use source files so your version number may not be the same as mine. Having said that, zim is at version 0.60 and is a very useful programme. Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and inline images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.

Zim can be used to -

• Keep an archive of notes
• Take notes during meetings or lectures
• Organize task lists
• Draft blog entries and emails
• Do brainstorming

Here is what it looks like -

I've found that its very good at basic note-keeping, but I haven't tried out its wiki-like capabilities yet.

KeepNote

KeepNote can be found at http://keepnote.org and is again in the repos, at version 0.7.8. It is described as "cross-platform note-taking and organization application."

With KeepNote, you can store your class notes, TODO lists, research notes, journal entries, paper outlines, etc in a simple notebook hierarchy with rich-text formatting, images, and more. Using full-text search, you can retrieve any note for later reference. KeepNote is designed to be cross-platform (implemented in Python and PyGTK) and stores your notes in simple and easy to manipulate file formats (HTML and XML). Archiving and transferring your notes is as easy as zipping or copying a folder." Again, here is a screenshot -

WikidPad

This one is not in the repos, but should I think be there. You can find it at http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ and its at version 2.2rc10. It describes itself as "wikidPad is a wiki-like notebook for storing your thoughts, ideas, todo lists, contacts or anything else you can think of that's important. What makes wikidPad different from other notepad or outliner applications is the ease with which you can cross-link your information. Links in a wiki are created by typing in WikiWords. A wiki word is any mixed case word typed into the editor. TodoList or JohnDoe are example WikiWords. The term wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian, and wikis are all about quickly linking your information together." This is the screenshot of it -

WikiPad doesn't need any compiling, its just a straight python script which can be run from a command line prompt as python WikidPad.py.

All three are good programmes, with zim being perhaps, the easiest to use. But KeepNote has a novel way of archiving things, it saves a backup of its contents as a tar.gz file, like this one 'sharon-2013-08-23.1.tar.gz'. KeepNote doesn't seem to be in active development, the debian version is dated 2011, whereas WikidPad version as mentioned here is dated July 2013, and zim is also dated 2013.