Do you want online or offline? Both? Need online for somethings but not all? The answers however, will only unlock more quests… Oops, I mean they will lead to more questions. Do you want to self host everything or do you need to use cloud storage? Would cloud storage be for sync and back up data for yourself, or will other people need access?
What I’m asking, to put it a different way, is what are you world building for? a novel you are writing? a campaign setting for a tabletop role playing game? Are you making a MMORPG, with its own in-game wikipedia with a group of friends or alone? Trick question, you can’t do the last one alone. it would have to be called a ORPG)
Offline, with just you making the world, Zim. The interface is fairly customizable, although might seen tricky at first if you are unfamiliar with GTK and Gnome or programming in general. However, I have no usable programming skills. I can’t even program the clock on my microwave. Okay, I can but I’m too lazy.
For me, a severely ADHD person, it makes it easy to organize… everything. A picture might show it better than I can describe:
I know, a screenshot of a wall of text. Not cool of me. I hope it works and the image shows or this wont make much sense from here on.
To break it down, I have the preferences dialogue open, it’s on the plugins menu, you can see many are self explanatory. if you know how, you can write your own plugins. i do not know how.
However, i do know how to write simple bash commands, which can be added as custom tools and set to hotkeys. I can timestamp in EST or UTC for logging purposes with a push of a button. Your imagination is the limit! Well, plus the limitations of bash and your computer/tablet/cellphone/etc and probably like a dozen other things.
That preferences menu is open on top of a page in my notebook. The silly magician stuff. It can be ignored (and might not make sense) it is sample text. To the left, you can see my notebook, sorted by subject in my own arbitrary way. The current page is selected, the ‘magic’ page in the ‘written’ chapter.
Also I’ve not had problems with Joplin (which I’ve read is not FOSS, it does not save as .txt files) which has an Android specific App (Zim does not) but I haven’t played with it enough to give a valid opinion.
Zim and Joplin both work on Windows and Linux, both can be cloud synced, like with google drive or dropbox, if you use those (I do not, I use Zim offline, except for backups). If security is a concern, Zim does not encrypt, it’s .txt files. Joplin I believe does. If you backup to cloud, Joplin would be safer from theft I think. I could be wrong. theft meaning your intellectual property, i.e. possibly being intercepted and viewed online by evil hackers, possibly even copied and published under their name. I do not worry about this. I would be honored if someone tried to publish my crap without permission.
My use case is personal organizer and mind map and many other things, including a ‘almost D&D’ campaign setting for a TTRPG, a novel I’ll never publish, pictures of things I know I’ll forget… oh yeah, that reminds me, in my linked image, on the right, there’s a table of contents (ToC), which gets automatically generated if you use the Header tag, for easier in-page navigation of long pages. Next to the ToC tab there’s ‘Attachments’, this page has none. You can attach files to pages, like pdf’s, images, graphs, etc and link to them from other pages in the notebook.
The only problems I’ve had, are likely my own fault for messing with the theme and config files a bunch. This got long. Hope it helps.
I haven’t done it much personally but it’s easy, prepend the page name with a colon.