There is different reasons to want a personal wiki on your machine:
- privacy
- having it everywhere
I've tested a few wikis engines, like
[[http://tiddlywiki.com/][tiddlywiki]], but I've found nothing that was
really what I wanted. The main inconveniance is the need to use a
webbrowser. A browser is not a text processor, so it's really painfull
to use them for writing.
I've started to try to use vim as wiki. Why would I want to use
something like vim for this ? well, it's plain text (easy to grep, or to
write script for manipulating data), application independent, it's a
real text processor, you can customize it, and most importantly, I know
how to use it, ...
I've got a *wiki* directory in my home directory, with all my files in
it. I use git to track versions of it (you can use svn if you prefer,
there is no difference for this usage). In my .vimrc, i've added this
instruction: =set exrc=.
In my wiki directory, i've got another .vimrc with some specific
mapping:
#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
map ,I <esc>:e index.mkd <cr>
map ,T <esc>:e todo.mkd <cr>
map ,S <esc>:e someday.mkd <cr>
map ,c <esc>:s/^ /c/<cr>
map ,w <esc>:s/^ /w/<cr>
map ,x <esc>:s/^ /x/<cr>
map gf :e <cfile>.mkd<cr> " open page
map <backspace> :bp<cr>
imap \date <c-R>=strftime("%Y-%m-%d")<cr>
set tabstop=2 " Number of spaces <tab> counts for.
set shiftwidth=2 " Unify
set softtabstop=2 " Unify
#+END_EXAMPLE
I organize my files in directory. I've got a *work*, *lists*, *recipes*,
*misc*, ... and I put my files in this directory.
I've got an index page, with links to main section. I don't have
wikiword in camelcase or things like that, so if i want to put a link to
a page, I just wrote the link this way *dir\_name/page\_name*, then, i
juste have to hit =gf= on this link to open the page. I also use this
place as a todo list manager. I've got one paragrah per day, like this :
#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
2008-06-14
- [@context] task 1
- [@context] task 2
...
#+END_EXAMPLE
and a bunch of vim mapping for marking complete (=,c=), work in progress
(=,w=) or canceled (=,x=).
If i don't have a deadline for a particular task, I use a 'someday'
file, where the task is put with a context.
The good things with markdown, is that the syntax is easy to use, and
it's easy to convert to HTML.
