My ideal journalling app

  • WYSIWYG front-end editor
  • Data stored as light-weight markup (Markdown, etc) 1
  • Data stored as plain text files in a directory structure 2
  • Historical versions saved
  • Cross platform, including at least Linux and Android
  • Able to publish in various formats to various destinations
  • Scriptable, to allow automatic indexing, export, etc

Actually, Zim seems to do all of this. I have used Zim in the past, and published a website <public.irons.nz> onto IPFS . But the IPFS node was a CPU and memory hog, so I stopped that experiment in 2022.

I had been wondering how to get the articles in Zim onto my blog. Perhaps I should turn that around:

  • Zim becomes the main thing
  • Save to a local version control system; it does this automatically
  • Backup to a remote version control server
  • Publish to blogs, etc
  • Publish as a website

And yet, somehow, it seems more of an effort to open a new program, rather than a new tab in a browser. Strange.

  1. This introduces compatibility issues, as there are many partly-compatible versions of almost every markup language ↩︎

  2. Easy to back up, version control, publish, edit externally ↩︎